More and more farmers prefer niche growing every year. After all, a profitable cultivation of traditional crops requires rather large land area. Owners of small fields are looking for an alternative, such as beans, mustard, peas.

Furthermore, according to forecasts of the Ministry of Agriculture of USA, during the next 10 years, prices for grains and oilseeds will not grow, but even there will be lower than in previous periods. However, a beans has become the profitability leader among niche crops, according to the experts.

To discuss the perspectives and challenges of legumes growing in Ukraine, farmers are gathered these days at the conference “Innovative technologies of production of niche crops (beans and mustard) – ways of implementation.” The organizers of the event were a group of companies “Fruit World”, “Agrolider” and “Svarog West Group”. The city for the event was chosen Khmelnitsky. This is not surprising, because Khmelnitsky region is one of the leaders in niche crops growing.

During the conference, participants found out about ways to minimize risks at beans growing, exchanged opinions on the production technologies, heard about the preconditions for successful niche crops growing. In this context, interesting and useful information was voiced by Volodymyr Mahota, agrochemist of AhriLab. He told about modern technologies of comprehensive expertise and analysis of soils. Because the work of agricultural enterprise, which strives to achieve high productivity and profitability, should begin from determining of natural potential of the field.

«For credible analysis we should carefully select the samples. AgriLab us the automated sampler with GPS. It completely excludes the human factor in analysis and ensures a clear adherence to a certain depths of selection. The productivity of our samplers is 500 samples or 5000 ha/day, taking into account adaptive grid 10 ha. The selection is made by the various schemes such as net and homogeneous areas. Each sample is tied to GPS coordinates. All samples are recorded in on-line and are tracked on AgriLab’s portal. Agrochemical soil analysis conducted at the internationally recognized laboratory Ward Laboratories inc, USA. “

Also Volodymyr Mahota told about the development of agrochemical cartograms, identification of critical factors and potential of the field and the planned yield.  “For determining of land potential, we take into account climatic and weather conditions of the area, agrochemical characteristics of the soil, the efficiency of fertilizer usage and the risks of weather influence on the formation of yield. Reliable information about the quality of the field can increase resource efficiency by 30%. However, using precision farming technology can reach higher results. For example, differential fertilizer technology saves about 40% of resources and increase productivity by 30%. Thus it usually paid off in 1 marketing year“.

Volodymyr Mahota also spoke about the technology of differentiated and locally-tape fertilizing, crops monitoring using drones, diagnosis of nutrition during vegetation, modernization of equipment to precision farming implementation and about remote information sharing Slingshot, which allows you to control and adjust all manufacturing operations from any point of the world.

Summing up the subject of his report, Volodymyr Mahota said: “The complex of field expertise is an important component for effective management of agribusiness. The experience of our customers shows that resources saving  is about 20% and using a certain precision farming technology can increase performance up to 50% or even more“.