Jain announced that its Water Management Services, where Jain consultants deliver weekly irrigation schedules to growers based on satellite imagery, hyperlocal weather, and machine learning analysis of soil moisture content and water infiltration properties, has won the Irrigation Association 2021 New Product Contest Award in the Specialty Agriculture Irrigation category.

This year’s contest was a hybrid event combining virtual and live elements. Products were evaluated based on innovation, design quality, increased water/resource-use efficiency, ease of use, and product life expectancy. Contest judges are experienced professionals with technical knowledge and industry expertise. Official judging was conducted via Zoom Nov. 17-18, with winners announced live on the Irrigation Show floor on December 9.

Winning in the Specialty Agriculture Irrigation category, JAIN Water Management Services was honored for its highly integrated offering of agtech software, hardware, and consulting services that generate intelligent irrigation schedules; featuring the first-of-its-kind utilization of high-resolution satellite imaging for ETc (crop water consumption), real-time local weather and soil moisture sensing in the field, bundled together with Machine Learning toward providing unprecedented precision in the management of when and how long each crop irrigation event needs to last.

Accepting the award, Jeff Tuel, Executive Vice President of Jain Irrigation and head of Water Management Services, said,

“Growers today are facing environmental challenges the likes we’ve never seen before, in addition to incredible labor shortages. We developed JAIN Water Management Services to remove the hesitancy in deploying new technologies that can meet these problems head-on. While the tools may be complex, the process is quite simple and relies on tried-and-true soil, plant, and water relationships. The growers get this, and it’s remarkable to see how quickly over the course of the program they’re able to pick up the technology and start producing their own irrigation schedules.”

“The New Product Contest award is a great validation by the Irrigation Association and the members of our industry of the importance JAIN Water Management Services is having. Modern technology makes it easier to manage water than any time before in history, but agtech companies need to meet an even higher bar before farmers are willing to change how they operate and we have to be able to adapt along with them, too. Our ability to train and support customers to become power users of JAIN Logic software, to understand their problems, provides a low cost, the low-risk trial of the leading technology available today,”

said Aric Olson, President of Jain Irrigation.

The post Jain Wins New Product Contest Award at the 2021 Irrigation Show appeared first on North America FarmQuip Magazine.

In the chart up here we have plotted average corn (maize) yields in the United States from 1866-2014, based on data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and UN FAO. As we see, average corn yields in the United States remained relatively flat throughout the 1800s until the 1930s. In the period since 1940, yields have increased more than five-fold.

There are a number of factors which are likely to have contributed to sustained yield gains and caused this significant drive in yeld improvements: fertilizer application, irrigation, increased soil tillage, and improved farming practices. A key driver in the initial rise in yield is considered to be the adoption of improved corn varieties from plant breeding developments. The initial period of yield gains in the late 1930s-early 1940s coincides with the transition period of farmers from open-pollinated varieties to hybrids. This process of cross-breeding between open-pollinated varieties, combined with improved breed selection practices is thought to define the key turning point in US corn yields.

Source: Our World in Data

The post A study shows how crop yelds changed over the long-term appeared first on North America FarmQuip Magazine.