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By Jennifer Cannon
“Peanut-yield monitoring is basically a revolution in recordkeeping,” says George Vellidis.
“As the scale of agricultural machinery grew in the 20th century, our farmers lost the ability to address the specific needs of areas within fields,” he explains. “This system gives it back.”
 Vellidis, an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering with the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, says the system combines high-tech engineering with basic ingenuity.
Peanut-yield monitors use off-the-shelf hardware--small computers and load cells that measure the weight of the picking basket--along with global-positioning system (GPS) receivers and specially developed software to show farmers the results of their management practices.
The yield monitor relies on GPS to fix a precise starting position. Every second the harvester moves across the field, load cells under each corner of the picker basket send weight data to a small computer that “attaches” it to the position data from the GPS and records the two pieces of data together.
So, for example, the computer knows there were 2,000 pounds of peanuts in the combine basket at some exact latitude and longitude and 2,500 pounds ten feet later.
Armed with that data, farmers can use spreadsheet software on a personal computer to map yields, diseases, profits and fertility, depending on what information the farmer needs.
In the fall of 1994, an engineering team at the college’s Coastal Plain Experiment Station first tried to measure the weight of peanuts as they were picked by the mechanical combine. Team members--including Calvin Perry, Dan Thomas and Jeffrey Durrence, all scientists at the experiment station--tried, unsuccessfully, to adapt similar equipment already in use in Midwest grain fields.
“That was really a concept year,” Vellidis says. “We put together some load cells and data-recording equipment just a week or two before harvest started. We were looking, at that point, to see if the idea was even worth pursuing for peanuts.”
And it has been.
Six years later--a relatively short time--the idea has been improved upon, tweaked, re-done entirely, engineered backwards (sort of) and tweaked some more, and the interface between the equipment and the farmer has been made considerably smaller.
The biggest challenge the engineers faced and overcame during development was recording accurate weight data from a 17,000-pound mechanical combine being pulled by a tractor over rough fields. They solved that difficulty by developing software that takes raw data from the load cells and filters out the machine vibration, electronic noise and travel roughness to record only the usable, and accurate, weight data.
“This system is accurate to within 1 percent over an entire field,” Vellidis says. “That rivals or surpasses the most accurate systems available for other crops.”
Some farmers rely on the system’s precision to learn where their fields are profitable and where they may be better off not planting. Others use it to compare management practices and are less concerned with accuracy.
Either way, the mapping system provides the information farmers need to manage land for maximum profitability--which means using pesticides or fertilizers only where needed, rather than blanketing the field. The plan helps protect the environment, too.
Even as the project was just beginning, many people saw the management potential for Georgia and Southeast peanut farmers. With financial support from the Georgia Peanut Commission and the Georgia Research Alliance, and equipment and technical support from Kelley Manufacturing Co. of Tifton and the Albany Scale Company, the engineering team took the project from concept to a field-tested unit in just four years.
In the following two years, eight Georgia farmers and researchers at Auburn and Texas A&M universities used the yield monitors and offered suggestions for refinement, particularly in how they interfaced with the system. They mapped more than 1,800 acres of peanut fields.
The UGA scientists who developed and refined the peanut-yield monitor applied for a U.S. patent in 1998 and expect it to be granted in early 2000.
The yield-monitoring system and its accuracy attracted the WAG Corporation of Tupelo, Miss. In 1999, UGA signed a licensing agreement with the company which plans to have the system on the market during the summer of 2000--just in time for the harvest season.
“This is a success story, not because we made an engineering breakthrough, but because we fulfilled our mission,” says Vellidis. “We saw a need that industry may, or may not, have fulfilled, because of the relative smallness of the market. We partnered with growers and the industry to develop the product and expect it to be commercially available very soon. We’ve met the need of our constituents.”
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