A researcher studying to what degree cotton quality is affected by dint of its environment has developed a fresh system that helps growers learn more about the fields in which their craws are grown.

A researcher studying to what degree cotton quality is affected by dint of its environment has developed a fresh system that helps growers learn more about the fields in which their craws are grown.

The concoct involves a concept known as precision agriculture, which helps farmers make the best use of all parts of their fields by dint of providing just the right amount of fertilizer, pesticide, and water. Of course, the top priority is to optimize farmers' profits.

Gretchen Sassenrath, a plant physiologist in the ARS Application and Production Technology Research Unit in Stoneville, Mississippi, worked with technician Ray Adams to design a cotton sampling connected view that helps determine the different fiber qualities quick in emergencies in a harvested field. This arrangement complements the cotton yield monitor, which measures the quantity of cotton at any given position in the field.

Previous studies relied forward handpicking cotton at intervals from one extremity to the other of a field to make spatial maps of the fiber's properties. Picking cotton by the agency of hand is very labor intensive, in the way that these studies were done upon a smaller scale than is now possible. And because harvesting cotton with machines, as agriculturists do, can alter fiber properties, the quality of hand-harvested cotton is not faithfully representative of the results the farmer receives from the gin.

Adams built a cotton sampler that attaches to the picker's chute A lever switches a paddle gate in the picker chute and diverts more [i]or[/i] less of the harvested cotton each 20 seconds into a sampler chute for collection and later analysis. The cotton sample, harvested from a known area of the field, is ginned in the lab and classed at the U Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service Classing Office. The fiber properties are then incorporated with the position data for passage into a database for spatial analysis.

The yield monitor, equipped with a Global Positioning hypothesis (GPS) receiver, allows a farmer to collect and save information in succession the spatial variability of cotton yield. The GP provides specially codfished satellite signals that are suited by a receiver, which estimates the position, speed, and time the sample was garnered The information about yield and fiber properties is then go intoed into a geographic information scheme (GIS) database.

The GIS software is used to translate that data into maps of different fiber characteristics--such as continuance micronaire (fiber's fineness and maturity), hardness and color--as well as yield. Various colors are used to show these different fiber properties forward a map showing where in the field they were harvested.

one time the cotton fiber properties have been determined, the value of the cotton lint can be calculated from the same tables farmers use when selling their cotton. This information can also be recorded into the GIS and used together with costlinesss to determine overall profit margin.

Fiber Quality and Yield Quantity

Sassenrath is interested in improving cotton fiber quality. Developing a regularity of spatially sampling cotton during harvesting operations helps determine what underlying factors, as it is as soil moisture, may be affecting fiber properties. She says soil qualities can alter moisture and temperature in a small area of a field, changing the "microclimate" for that area. These variations can make the fiber properties of cotton plants in undivided area of the field better than those in another area.

The classification has increased the scientists' understanding of by what mode soil, environment, water, and nutrients contribute to fiber unravelling cotton yield, and quality. This information could lead to better management scenarios--and better cotton.

"Ideally, farmers want to receive the best price for the whole harvest," Sassenrath says. "They want to optimize their profit margin on getting the highest return by acre. To do that, they have to know the yield by acre. By knowing the value of the harvested harvest based on fiber properties, they can then calculate the profit margin by dint of subtracting the production input expenses"

The GIS map exhibits growers which areas of their fields ne more attention and which are producing cotton balls with the best fiber properties. While yield is an important component part of profitability, knowledge of fiber quality variability has contributed to the total knowledge of the production system

Although the research team initially cause to growed the sampling system for use in precision agriculture studies, researchers in other disciplines are also interested in it. Cotton breeder in particular have become aware of differences between hand- and machine-harvested fiber properties, and they're looking at the sampling arrangement as a means of getting more accurate fiber-property measurements from their small proof plots.

ARS isn't filing a patent onward the system. Instead, it chance of the desired ends to get the information gone out where other researchers can use it.

Sassenrath is collaborating with engineers at Mississippi State University in Starkville to automate the sampling system's trigger mechanism. Engineering professor Filip To and sum of two units graduate students are devising a mechanism for the cotton sampler paddle gate that will be triggered by means of the geoposition of the cotton picker. This will permit quicker sampling and greater accuracy in recording where a sample was collected