Precision agriculture has been primarily focused on the management of inputs but recently developed technologies that monitor grain quality at harvest create the opportunity to manage outputs spatially.  Provided specific product qualities achieve higher prices, monitoring, separation and blending may be economically justified. This paper analyzes the potential economic effects of blending different grain qualities at the farm level.

We estimated sub-field specific crop yield and quality response to nitrogen fertilizer based on field experiments with winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in Germany and then used these responses to simulated yield and quality for a hypothetical field. We analyzed the economically optimal fertilization and blending strategy for different price scenarios.  Quality specific fertilizer and blending strategies are subject to the premiums paid for higher qualities.  For most price scenarios, the highest net returns were generated with fertilizer rates that resulted in premium quality for all harvested wheat.  However, if fertilizer rates were too low to achieve premium quality for all wheat, separation and blending of different qualities provided an economic advantage of up to € 100 per ha.  The potential benefit is subject to the level of premium paid for higher quality and the level of fertilizer applied.