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Abstract
Nitrogen fertilizer cost represents about 10%–15% of total farm costs for corn, cotton, and wheat in the Southeastern United States. The efficiency of nitrogen use can be highly variable for producers, so a sensor-based, variable-rate nitrogen application (SVNA) system has been developed for irrigated and dryland row crops to reduce production costs. Using sensor-based N application, there is a minimum 20% reduction in N usage. If that rate reduction were applied to all the cotton, corn, and wheat grown in the United States, CO2 emissions from N fertilizer production would be decreased by 2.7 million tons. This 4-page fact sheet was written by Wesley Porter, Ahmad Khalilian, Daniel Dourte, and Clyde Fraisse, and published by the UF Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, July 2012.
References
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Porter, W.M. 2010. "Sensor Based Nitrogen Management for Cotton Production in Coastal Plain Soils." Master's Thesis, Clemson University.
Porter, W.M., A. Khalilian, W. Henderson, and Y. Han. 2010. "Sensor-Based Site-Specific Nitrogen Management in Cotton." Proceedings of the Beltwide Cotton Conferences, National Cotton Council of America, Memphis, TN.
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