Spotlight on: Dr. Jason Haegele

This time we asked Dr. Jason Haegele, ICL’s Agronomy Lead for North America

What was the most significant agricultural challenge that you helped solve?

In 2012 and 2013, I helped initiate and lead an important initiative called “The Six Secrets of Soybean Success”. This initiative focused on bringing awareness to strategies for improving soybean productivity in the central United States. The United States is a leading producer of soybeans, but advances in yield for soybean had been more limited compared to other major crops like corn. The hypothesis for this more limited progress was that important crop management practices like plant nutrition had been largely overlooked by farmers due to the recognition that soybeans are not dependent on nitrogen fertilizer and are often perceived to “scavenge” fertilizer remaining in the soil from other crops. Through the research that I initiated as well as increasing interest in soybean agronomic management across the industry, soybean farmers are more intensively managing their crop through more targeted applications of soil nutrients, in-season foliar applications, and other supporting practices like disease management using fungicides.

What significant changes are you seeing in the agricultural sector?

Economic forces continue to shape agriculture in the US and globally. High productive industrialized agricultural countries like the United States and Brazil continue to set records for new levels of yield, which often leads to low commodity prices for crops like corn and soybean. Coupled with high input costs (land, seeds, fertilizer, fuel, equipment, etc) farmers are continually pushed to optimize the economic return from the farms. This comes about through consolidation (fewer but bigger farms), diversification (farmers focusing on a range of crop production and livestock opportunities), or specialization (a farmer becomes hyper focused on being the best and most efficient on a single high value crop). As a specialty fertilizer company and leader in innovation, we should adapt to the current agricultural economy of low crop prices and high input prices by continually focusing on efficiency and demonstrating how our products and recommendations can result in the lowest input cost per unit of crop output. That doesn’t necessarily mean that our products will be the lowest price on a per ton, kg, or liter basis, but by designing products that maintain or increase productivity without significantly increasing cost on a per hectare basis, we can achieve this.

Dr. Haegele (left) with his ICL colleagues

Which research or technological innovation do you think will significantly impact farmers?

I believe that the current focus on development of AI and autonomous equipment will enable a significantly different future for agriculture. The concept of precision agriculture is not new, but the combination of machine learning and robotic seeding, application, and harvest equipment will truly enable precision agriculture without requiring substantial oversight from the human element. Farmers, in North America, at least are increasingly challenged by a lack of human labor to complete routine and repetitive farming tasks. Coupled with a high cost of labor, high costs for inputs like crop protection chemicals and fertilizers, and the need to optimize return-on-investment, these technological advances will, in my opinion, be rapidly adopted.