Gabriel Czerniecki manages 6000 hectares of livestock and grain over four farms in Argentina. His biggest challenge is keeping track of all the information from multiple teams as his farms are over 100km apart. He is a big fan of precision agriculture. He has weather stations installed on his farms and regularly uses his drone to photograph his fields.
Using fieldmargin’s Field Health imagery has allowed him to get regularly updated satellite imagery of his farm with vegetation analysis. This has given him an overview of what is happening across all of his farms and identify issues for investigation.
“Getting the NDVI imagery every week means we can spot threats and damage as they happen.”
Argentina is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and extreme weather because of its large surface area and unique geography. The direct impact of climate change has been observed across the country in recent years and flooding is becoming a regular occurrence in many parts of the country. In 2017 long term flooding in the northwest region of Buenos Aires province, forced the local government to declare an agricultural emergency.
Gabriel’s farm in Rio Colorado has experienced extreme rainfall this year, in particular on March 20th when his farm had more than 200mm rainfall in 35 hours.
“After the rainfall using the NDVI imagery I could clearly see the damage of the water and calculate the affected area. On the maps later in the month we could see where the water was going in the fields.”
Gabriel has used the data from Field Health to see which fields had been affected and calculate crop damage from the rain.
Understanding how the land responds to heavy rainfall after dry periods is very important for managing water resources. Having identified the areas worst affected by flooding after heavy rain Gabriel will use this information to plan how to manage his land to be more resilient to extreme weather in the future. For example building a reservoir which will allow him to reduce crop damage by draining waterlogged land and have that water available for use in dry periods, making the most of his rainfall in the long term.
“I really think that fieldmargin will be useful for Argentinian farms, I love the data that precision farming can provide. This satellite data has been very valuable to my farm.”
Field Health is available as part of fieldmargin Pro. See how it could help on your farm with a free 14-day trial. No credit card required.