By Kevin Hursh

Soil moisture map with a human touch

Feb 17, 2011 | 5:45 AM

for paNOW

In an era when a computer called Watson can defeat mere mortals at Jeopardy, it’s good to know that some things still work better with a human touch.

In the latest edition of Grainews, long-time soil scientist Les Henry has come out with a stubble soil moisture map that’s superior to anything being generated by computer programs.

Les uses precipitation information and common sense, plus he gets some soil probing done in areas where the data doesn’t seem to make sense.

The Agriculture Ministries in Manitoba and Saskatchewan didn’t come out with their own soil moisture maps this year, because everything is pretty wet.

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However, Les thought there was still something to map that would be useful to the industry.

He created a new category called super wet which refers to land where the crop rooting zone has moisture in excess of the normal field capacity and the water table is dangerously close to the soil surface.

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