20 Aug 2014

Precision Nutrient Management

IPNI Working Group #6


Goals
The primary goals of this working group are to develop materials that communicate the importance of managing nutrients at the appropriate scale and to promote information-driven and site-specific nutrient management strategies and systems that consider spatial and temporal variability in the decision making process.

Background
While “precision agriculture” is commonly thought of as more relevant in larger, higher profit farming operations, the need to incorporate site-specific information into the decision making process is as—if not more—important in small-holder systems. Our activities are designed with both high-tech and low-tech systems in mind.

Current Projects
1. Article Publication: A variety of publications are slated for 2015 including (a) an executive summary from a 2014 workshop series conducted in India (b) revision of the IPNI site-specific management guidelines for North America, (c) an article on precision ag for small-holder systems, and (d) a cross-regional publication on Nutrient Expert®.

2. Conferences and Workshops: Organization and hosting of the 2015 InfoAg Conference, participation in the European and Asian conferences on precision agriculture.

3. Continued Nutrient Expert® Activity: Focusing on training the trainers for effective dissemination of the software tool.

Notable Accomplishments

1. Annual InfoAg Conferences: The conference is considered by much of the industry to be the premier precision agriculture event in the world and features a smorgasbord of technical presentations and a sold out exhibit hall. http://www.infoag.org/

2. Regional presentations and publications: A web portal for collating presentations and publications of IPNI staff related to precision agriculture activities. http://www.ipni.net/topic/precision-agriculture

3. Suite of Nutrient Expert® tools and supporting documents: A web portal dedicated to Nutrient Expert® decision support tool where, among other things, different versions of this tool can be downloaded. http://software.ipni.net/

Members
    • Steve Phillips (co-chair), Director, North America Program, Owens Cross Roads, AL, USA
    • Kaushik Majumdar (co-chair), Director, South Asia Program, Gurgaon, India
    • Hakim Boulal, Deputy Director, North Africa Program, Settat, Morocco
    • Raul Jaramillo, Director, Northern Latin America, Quito, Ecuador
    • Tom Jensen, Director, North America Program, Calgary, Canada
    • Thomas Oberthür, Director, Southeast Asia Program, Penang, Malaysia
    • Mirasol Pampolino, Agronomist & Office Manager, Southeast Asia Program, Metro Manila, Philippines
    • Shamie Zingore, Director, Sub-Saharan Africa Program, Nairobi, Kenya