TECH CORNER
A grower’s perspective on technology
Interview with Roric Paulman
Roric Paulman of Paulman Farms is a third-generation farmer in western Nebraska, and his youngest son recently joined the operation. They currently farm around 6,000 acres in Lincoln, Keith and Perkins counties. Paulman’s top revenue crop is popcorn, but he also grows corn and soybeans and has grown numerous other crops from potatoes to kidney beans to chia. Paulman’s fields are 80% groundwater irrigated by center pivot and 20% rain fed. They utilize nearly every technology imaginable and have been a test bed and validation site for emerging technologies, not only in water, but also in nutrient management. Irrigation Today caught up with Paulman for a Q&A about technology use on his farms and what he foresees for ag tech in the future.
What irrigation technologies do you utilize on your farm?
Today, it’s [center pivot] gone beyond being a delivery tool — it’s a machine- learning AI platform.
Today, all of our fields are electromagnetically mapped. This allows us to understand the different soil makeup that affects the water holding capacity and infiltration rates. That information dictates a lot of our sprinkler packages and also blends well with understanding what our well capacities are. We no longer see our pivots as just a water delivery tool; we use it as an application asset too. We have multispectral cameras that look at the crop in real time and give us a footprint of the biomass. We utilize soil moisture probes and also use managed irrigation scheduling. Those are the cornerstones, and then we overlay it with drone technology and satellite imagery that give us different images at different times of the year. This real-time data is a big decision tool that we look at every day. Gathering that data is the important part, and then we work to turn that into better decision-making about our stewardship of natural resources, such as irrigation.
What irrigation technology has had the biggest impact on your operation of water?
There are two tools, and they’re used in conjunction — field-level weather stations — for accurate evapotranspiration data, timely reporting of rain data and managing load control — and soil moisture probes. These tools
28 Irrigation TODAY | Spring 2021
Roric Paulman makes adjustments to a pivot telemetry and weather station device used for irrigation decision management.
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