Simulating the influence of crop spatial pattern on canola yield
- Publication Type
- Contribution to conference
- Authors
- Griepentrog H.W., Nielsen J., Olsen J.M. and Weiner J.
- Year of publication
- 2011
- Published in
- Proceedings 8th European Conference on Precision Agriculture
- Editor
- J. Stafford
- Page (from - to)
- 180-190
- Conference location
- Prague
- Conference date
- July
The current non-uniform crop spatial distributions of individual cereal plants and widerspaced row crops like maize and sugar beet can limit crop performance because of nonoptimal resource utilization. The aim of the present study was to investigate the potential influence of two-dimensional crop plant uniformity on the yield of oil seed rape. Voronoi polygons (tessellations) which define the area closer to an individual than to any other individual were used as a measure of the area available to each plant, and we include corrections for extreme polygon shape and eccentricity of the plant location within the polygon. These adjusted polygon areas are used to investigate the potential influence of two of the most important determinants of crop sowing spatial uniformity: row width and longitudinal spacing accuracy, on yield per unit area, and to ask how changes in seeding technology would influence crop performance. We show the potential for increased yield with improved seeding technology. Our results suggest that precision seeding can increase yield by 10 %.