A Soil and Water Resource Coordinator with the Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority says the testing they're currently doing at the Huronview Demonstration Farm will eventually help farmers identify which parts of a field are profitable and which parts aren't.
Ross Wilson says most farmers are able to compare revenue against cost of the different fields on their farm and determine the profitability of each field. And Wilson says that profitability tends to be relatively consistent in a flat field, but not as much in the kinds of rolling fields that are more commonly found in north and central Huron County.
But Willson says they're taking it a step further by using profit mapping to identify which parts of a field are more profitable than other parts of the same field.
“So we want to identify those areas in the field that are more profitable than other areas. The goal is to do this over several years so you can start to get an understanding of those areas which are consistently unprofitable or very low profit.”
Wilson adds, there are a number of reasons for an area not to be profitable.
“So it might be super-wet and they might be super-eroded, they may be adjacent to a wood lot and they're under the drip line, there may be wild life damage there and so there's various possible reasons why they're not profitable.”
But he says until a farmer has done that exercise over a period of years, they won't know whether an area is profitable or not and he adds, it should be done over a minimum of three years because that's the standard corn, wheat, beans crop rotation.