After presenting you our work on the radial menu last week, we’d like to add some insight into a different part of CNC’s development: fruit growth in relation to fertilizing.
It is mainly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) that’ll drive fruit growth, and they’ll have to be provided optimally over the different growth stages. But there’ll also be a few additional parameters that’ll influence fruit development, such as weather, seed bed quality, soil compaction and more.
The following image shows a possible development progress of silage maize. We’ve built a tool for the internal development which enables us to simulate the fruit growth with adjustable parameters. This example only considers the fertilizing element, which consists of three fertilization points (“fertilizing events”). The first application (“1”) provides a large amount of potassium (200 kg K/ha / 178 lbs K/ac) via under-root fertilizing during the sowing. The second one (“2N”/“2P”), which happened a little too late, provided the much needed nitrogen and phosphorus (170 kg N/ha, 20 kg P/ha / 152 lbs N/ac, 18 lbs P/ac) to really induce the growth. In order to ensure proper fructification, we had to re-apply phosphorus (“3”) shortly before fruit formation (40 kg P/ha / 36 lbs P/ac). The maize reached BBCH level 89 (EC) after a total of 175 days and was ready for harvesting.
We’ll provide you with more details concerning fruit growth and according parameters in the near future.
Last but not least, a couple of quick answers to questions concerning our previous status update. The quick slot system will stay, of course, and extended with a few functions. In addition we’re working on implementing key combinations for different functions (both for keyboard and for controller usage).
Embrace the weekend.
Authors:
cattle and crops