Introducing Custom Critical Levels – A New Way to Elevate Your Potato Fertilizer Strategy

Picketa Systems has introduced a significant new feature for company's LENS platform: Custom Critical Levels. This innovation provides agronomists unprecedented control over nutrient management, making it easier than ever to optimize crop health and maximize yields. The digitalization of this next level of precision nutrient management will provide more detailed insights that can help manage farm profitability and sustainability. 

Understanding Critical Levels in Agriculture

Critical levels are used to assess whether plants have the right amount of nutrients or if they are experiencing deficiencies or toxicity. Traditionally, these charts, which measure nutrient percentages or parts per million, have been static and often fail to account for the unique conditions of each field, a specific varietal, or stage in the growth cycle.

While default critical levels provide a general reference for agronomists to gauge nutrient adequacy, they tend to be broad and generalized, created from academic trials conducted decades ago. Our new feature addresses this limitation by offering a more dynamic approach tailored to the specific conditions of each region, variety, field, or section.

Customization for Optimal Crop Health

Custom Critical Levels empower agronomists to fine-tune nutrient management throughout each growth stage. This feature allows them to create and adjust templates specific to each field, addressing the fact that crops often deviate from standard growth timelines. For example, if corn emerges earlier than expected, agronomists can modify the critical levels to align with the actual growth stage, ensuring accurate nutrient management.

The aim is to develop tailored nutrient profiles based on region, soil conditions, crop varieties, and weather patterns. Agronomists using the platform can start with legacy critical levels but are encouraged to customize them based on their expertise. Additionally, this feature assists growers in confidently monitoring and adjusting their nutrient plans to keep crops on track throughout the season.

A detailed view of the Custom Critical Levels feature on Picketa Systems' LENS platform, showcasing real-time nutrient data analysis for optimizing crop health and yield.

Trusting Your Agronomist: Adjusting Levels

This powerful tool requires trust in your agronomist’s expertise. While Custom Critical Levels offer the flexibility to create new templates, it’s often more practical to adjust existing ones based on field conditions and growth stages. Experienced agronomists can leverage their knowledge and the insights from LENS real-time tissue analysis to make informed adjustments rather than starting from scratch.

This approach ensures that the nutrient management plan is not only customized but also rooted in practical experience and data. By collaborating closely with your agronomist and making informed adjustments, you can achieve the best results for your crops and make the most of this innovative feature. 

Feature Benefits

• Tailored Nutrient Plans: Develop precise nutrient plans tailored to your crop’s specific needs and growth stages.
• Real-time Adjustments: Adjust your strategies instantly using real-time, location-based precision data, ensuring optimal fertilizer application.
• Enhanced Evaluation: Accurately monitor crop health and refine your approach for new varieties with confidence.
• Ongoing Optimization: Leverage data from high-performing fields to continuously refine and improve nutrient targets over time.

Who Can Leverage This Feature

Custom Critical Levels can be accessed through our Fieldbook platform and exported as spreadsheets or PDF reports. This feature offers valuable benefits for:

Farmers: Access precise, up-to-date data to manage crops effectively with real-time insights. Tailor foliar applications based on these results to ensure optimal nutrient mixes for current crop conditions.

Agronomists: Develop and customize nutrition programs to align with specific regional, soil, and crop conditions, enhancing the effectiveness of nutrient management.

Input Companies: Assess the efficacy of products through research and verify their impact with growers on a large scale.

Seed Breeding Experts: Leverage detailed data to advance research and development of new hybrids and crop varieties.

Bridging Research and Practice

This feature is especially valuable for professionals involved in developing nutrition programs, creating agricultural inputs, and breeding seeds. It accelerates the application of research insights to commercial fields, allowing agronomists to quickly implement and benefit from new knowledge.

By automatically tracking performance, the process of refining nutrient targets is expedited. Organizations can now leverage the best-performing fields to continuously enhance nutrient strategies, focusing on successful trends and using these high-performing profiles as benchmarks for fields with similar characteristics.

Enhancing Agronomy Through Communication

At Picketa Systems, we understand that agronomy is as much about effective communication as it is about scientific expertise. A unified, current, and transparent platform is crucial for delivering outstanding service to growers. With Custom Critical Levels, agronomists can keep their clients aligned and informed throughout the season, offering a superior crop management strategy.