The second half of the Spring Webinar Series kicks off with a look into an agronomic offering to all EarthScout users: Mid-Season and End of Season Reports. Anna is an expert on this topic in her role as Technical Agronomist/Grow Coach for EarthScout.
These reports were offered for the first time during the 2021 growing season. Each report is handmade by our agronomy team and the idea is for growers to learn more about the large trends in seasonal data, important moments to note during the growing season, and ways to improve resource management in the future.
These reports are sure to be evolving over the next few years. They are personalized and informative and we will be working hard to ensure these reports will be useful to growers in the years to come.
The webinars always include more detailed information than we provide in the blog, so please check out the video at the end of this blog or on YouTube.
Let’s jump right in…
Let’s Talk About The Reports!
Mid-Season Reports summarize data from installation to the mid-season (typically around July). End of season reports will encompass the entire growing season: install to harvest.
Graphs are created for different data sets, depending on what the grower is interested in learning more about. Once the graphs are created (this will be automated in the future!) the agronomy team goes through each graph to write personalized notes about the data for the grower to reference. When the notes are complete, the reports are sent to the grower.
These reports create opportunities for our Grow Coaches to connect with customers, however this is not mandatory. We do recommend taking advantage of these meetings to learn more about your data trends and how you can utilize your EarthScout data.
There is some information that we like to gather before creating these reports, so you may hear from a member of our agronomy team at the beginning of a season to learn about:
- Crop Type
- Planting Date
- Row Spacing
- Seeding Depth
- Depth of soil sensors
- Overall Goals
GDUs
One focus of these reports are Growing Degree Unit graphs. We can create graphs that show calculated GDUs if we know the following information:
- Crop Type
- Planting Date
If this information can not be collected by our agronomy team before the mid-season, we will attempt to learn this information before the end-of-season so we can relate data to growth stages throughout the season, etc.
Mid-Season Reports
What dictates what is in the mid-season report is what sensors are on the specific unit being targeted. A mid-season report is created in the middle of a growing season so that growers can use the summarized data to make management decisions now or in the near future before the season ends. Pretty straight forward.
The big three data sets we currently including in all reports are temperature, soil moisture, and GDU (if we have planting date and crop type information!).
To see an example of a mid-season report and end of season report, please reference the video at the end of the blog.
End of Season Reports
The end of season reports are a more reflective summary of what happened during the growing season, and go quite a bit more in-depth. This information also serves as a resource for making decisions next season.
The end of season will take GDU from the field and compare it to GDU from nearest weather station to show the differences between your hyper local data and general public information.
End of season reports contain key life stages of the crop in your field over data sets so you can relate your data to life stages of the plant and when they might have been most affected by stress. We are working towards a way to collect growth stages from you through the EarthScout app to help adjust the flags we place in the graphs to be more accurate. We think this feature will go a long way to making yearly comparisons a breeze for you!
Soil moisture data is used to generate field capacity estimations. We consider this an estimate because your data becomes more accurate year after year. Therefore, the more data you collect season after season, the more accurate your field capacity data will become.
Also, the lowest soil moisture reading of the season will show in the report so growers can make a direct comparison to what the plant experiences in relation to the soil wilting point.
Fully Customizable Reporting
These reports are fully customizable for each individual growers’ needs. If you are regularly interacting with your Grow Coach and make a special request, it’s most likely that you will see more detailed information in your report.
We appreciate everyone hopping on the webinar this week. Anna has worked very hard on creating the graphs for these reports, so it is fitting for her to be here to explain what these reports are all about.
The final 2 weeks of the webinar series focus on various EarthScout Case Studies. If you would like to register, you can do so by clicking this link.
The remaining webinar schedule is as follows:
Week 5 (April 15th) – EarthScout Irrigation Case Studies. How our irrigation studies have helped growers see significant savings on irrigation costs.
Week 6 (April 22nd) – Crazy About Cover Crops. We will discuss soil health and the benefits of sustainable farming practices and case studies we have around this topic.
If you missed the last 3 weeks of our webinar series, you can check out our YouTube Channel for access to all the recordings from this series, as well as our other educational content.
- Week 1 served as an Introduction to EarthScout, the history of the company, and the products we offer farmers and growers.
- Week 2 was a deep dive into the available sensors EarthScout offers.
- Week 3 covered soil moisture and soil moisture management.
Thank you once again to everyone who has joined us for our Spring Webinar Series up to this point. Next week we dive into irrigation case studies. We look forward to seeing you all then!
If you have any questions about our products and services, please reach out to us via phone at 877-443-7632 or through our website at earthscout.com/contact!