It’s not so difficult to do seeding rate trials with today’s planting equipment and yield monitors, and it’s even possible to do several of these within a field in order to get an idea of how much responses vary within the field. The difficulty is that responses within parts of a field are not consistent across years: they are often more dependent on weather conditions than on soil zone or soil type.

Variable-rate seeding, or VRS, is the practice of dynamically adjusting the amount of seeds planted in areas of fields based on location-specific information on fertility and other factors that affect yield.

Variable rate seeding (VRS) can help maximize overall profits by selecting the best planting rates for each area of the field.

If you haven’t already ordered your seed for 2013, you’re probably getting ready to do that.

The expansion of conservation tillage has come entirely from the adoption of no-till, which increased from 14 million acres in 1989 to nearly 63 million acres in 2004, the USDA says.