Our vision of precision farming is going to start with mastering the soil sampling side of things first.
As Jason alluded to, I invested in a very expensive machine from southern Illinois, and it covers 100 acres in less than an hour. I can pull 4,200 soil plugs. The problem with grid sampling is it's so labour-intensive and it totally relies on the human, and there could be human error. If you're talking about soil science, you're talking about depth inconsistencies and so on and so forth, so that's why I looked for this machine.
We're going to start with soil sampling and move into nutrient management.
I just got back from a trip to a fertilizer company in Great Britain three days ago, and they were emphasizing different kinds of nitrogens. Some work differently under different temperatures. There's no better fit with what we're talking about now: we have to pay attention to our soil temperatures more.
We're starting to apply fertilizers throughout the season, not just giving one bang in the row in May or June and hoping for the best. I think we have to look at that more. I think we have to learn our nutrients and the characteristics of them with climate change and temperatures and so on.
Then we're going to take this grid sampling and nutrient management and introduce drone imagery to potato production in Prince Edward Island. To take it a step further, we are investing in yield maps on our harvesters. Basically, you can imagine taking all the guesswork out of your yield and where it came from. You can zero in on the exact location in that field and why it overproduced or underproduced.