179 breeding opportunities. The seed mixes developed through this partnership are now used across solar energy farms for revegetation. The work on developing the right seed mix for solar farms made Ernst Seeds an ideal partner for the Virginia Solar Pollinator Program. Originally, Ernst Seeds was employed on the project by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation to guide a mix of native seeds for Virginia, but that work expanded. Ernst Seeds experts then worked alongside the Clifton Institute to gather seeds across Virginia, from the Coastal Plain to beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. They recorded the location and conditions of their findings using a GIS-powered mobile app on their phones. This knowledge will help in planting along corridor projects, such as land beneath the electric transmission lines that will deliver energy from solar farms in rural areas to businesses and households in urban centers. From its start with solar projects, the program evolved into the Virginia Native Seed Pilot Project to launch a native seed industry in Virginia. The program identifies local growers who can produce native seeds at commercial scale and shows them how data from GIS helps guide best practices. “Creating a GIS-centric culture at Ernst has changed how managers and operators work the fields,” Flaherty said. “We aren’t only looking at maps and numbers, we’re utilizing and making the data work for us every day.” A data-driven approach to farming can be tough to instill in farmers who have been working the same fields with the same approach for decades. “Early on, we had pushback about the need to collect different information,” Ernst said. “Then in one meeting, we had a big lights-come-on moment when the answers we needed came from the data they’d been collecting. The guys were saying, ‘I know what we did there,’ but when we looked at the records their memory wasn’t as good as they thought it was.” Operating Farms and Timberlands More Efficiently In ArcGIS Pro, administrators and agronomists view short term plans and historical information. The map view allows them to analyze field passes, coverage of treatments, quantities of materials, water drainage, and other variables to inform treatment decisions. (Image courtesy of Ernst Seeds) Tractor operators record their observations and have access to historical data as they work the fields. (Image courtesy of Ernst Seeds)
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