Soil sampling is an important part of field care. One of the best moments for soil sampling is precisely after harvest. Then every farmer can find out more about the amount of nutrients in the soil and can plan a pre-sowing fertilization in order to prepare the field for the next crop.
Farmers subscribed for the AgroBalance service offered by NIK Agro Service already benefit from soil sampling of the fields that the team performs immediately after harvesting.
Accurate soil sampling
The soil sampling is conducted with a specialized soil sampling equipment. The fully automatic Wintex soil samplers are efficient and strong and can be used in all kinds of soil. The depth of the samples can be adjusted according to the farmer’s needs.The use of automatic hydraulic soil samplers ensures that the needed depth will be reached and the probe will takes a complete and homogeneous sample.
The sampling equipment also has a Trimble GPS device – industrial tablet MMX-070.
Depending on what is the purpose of the soil sample, the process can be executed in different ways:
- standard cell size and standard Z-sample sampling scheme – to make fertilization recommendations for crop feeding in the form of a Fertilization Plan;
- smaller cells and a specialized sampling method – for VRA (Variable Application Rate) technology.
Complete information about the sampling process
The sampling route and the coordinates of the sampling points are recorded in a specially developed mobile application AgroBalance installed on the Trimble MMX-070 tablet. In this way, the agronomists preparing the fertilization recommendations have a full information about the sampling process and a good basis for assessing the condition of the soil according to the whole area, thus also producing precision VRA maps.
Soil analysis and recommendations
The collected soil samples are analyzed in the specialized laboratory of NIK Agro Service in Sofia and based on the results, the NIK agronomists can prepare fertilization recommendations or digital maps for VRA.For variable rate application of fertilizer, the VRA map can be loaded into a Trimble GPS device that manages the application rate in real-time, ensuring high precision and efficiency.
Track the results in GeoSCAN
The data from the soil sampling as well as the soil maps for each block are also available in the GeoSCAN platform, allowing each farmer to locate problem areas in his field and plan the necessary actions to improve the soil condition for the next crops.
