Using Skippy Scout for Nitrogen guidance

Skippy Scout can provide fast accurate GAI measurements on OSR and Cereals. These GAI measurements can be captured fast and automatically regardless of cloud cover, and delivered within minutes, allowing applications to be done immediately.

For OSR, our True GAI also provides crop-only measurements by separating out weeds.

N savings: up to £60/ha. View the case study

If you farm more than 75 ha of OSR, it is most likely Skippy Scout will save you money with this use case alone (and there are many more). Plus save time field walking and cover more ground!

Potentially claim £27/ha under SFI also!

How to:

First, get a drone and sign up to Skippy Scout
Once you have a drone, setup will take about 20 minutes, we’ll setup a call to guide you through!

1. Add your field in Skippy Scout

Takes about 5 minutes. See our basic how to, or contact us.
This will also tell you the basics of adding Scout Points, making a Flight and viewing the results.

2. Add scout points to your field

We’ll assume you know how to add scout points in general. You have a few specific options that will help with getting a good overview of crop GAI:

Automatic Grid

Use an automatic Grid scout point group - just choose the Grid group option.
This is fast and simple and will give you even coverage across the field.

Coming Soon

Fieldmaps

Import a map to guide point placement - add a fieldmap in the app.
Satellite maps from another app? Soil maps? Yield maps? Use them to add scout points in areas of the field that are different (zones).

Using Fieldmaps

Scout Sphere

Capture a Scout Sphere first and use the Spheres interface to place scout points.
Get a whole field overview fast, and within minutes use it to add scout points (internet connection required)

https://vimeo.com/842793537/2f6e0e9f01

3. Go to the field and FLY!

We’ll assume you know how to start a flight, it's automated and if you have internet in the field, you’ll get results within minutes of the flight.

How to use Skippy Scout

4. Decide on a flat rate or variable rate application

Decide if you’re going to apply a flat rate to the whole field, or apply variable rates to areas of the field
Even if you don't have automatic VRA machinery, we can still guide more than one rate manually!

View your scouting report, or your Scout Sphere
You can do this via the link emailed to you, or from the reports portal
Pay attention to the Crop Uniformity stat - this tells you how variable the crop is - a high % means the crop is very uniform, a lower % means the crop is more variable.
Uniform? Say above 85%? Consider a flat rate application
Variable? Below 80%? A variable rate might be a better idea
Not sure what Crop Uniformity value to decide at? Look through your report at the individual scout images to get an idea of the variability.

If you decide on a flat rate application, use the whole field average crop GAI to decide on the N rate you need to apply. This is TrueGAI for OSR - we discount weeds
Remember to take into account soil N content, previous applications and nutrient availability!
This is what Andrew Lowe did in this case study, saving £60/ha on OSR N

5. Going for a variable rate? You have two options:

Manually vary the rate

The heatmap in your report provides an overview of the crop variance
Each scout point will have its own GAI measurement
Use these to divide the field into 2 or more areas where you would like to vary the rate
For each area, look at the average GAI for all the scout points within and use that to decide your rate for that area
Give the operator the map and off you go!

Automatically vary the rate

Login to your account portal
Click the “application maps” option
Choose the farm and field
Enter the required details
Get a VR ISOXML emailed to you
Import to your machine - need help converting? Let us know what machine and we’ll sort it for you.

Getting VRA Maps

You can also use Skippy Scout as a ground-truthing tool for the VRA application you already use…

As shown in step 2 above, import a zoned fieldmap image from the software you use for variable rates
Contour, iSoyl, Gatekeeper etc.
Use that zoned map to allocate scout points to each zone
Scout the field, get the results
Average the GAI for each zone based on the scout points, remember Skippy Scout provides TrueGAI for OSR, discounting the weeds and measuring the crop only.
Use that GAI to calculate required N for each zone - we bet it will be different from purely satellite-based data!