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Technology makes a good plan even better
| Trevor Smith, TFC Agronomist |
12/3/2019 |
For farmers, winter is the planning season. Granted, it’s not as exciting as planting or as glamorous as harvest, but planning is a crucial part of a successful farming operation. Farmers know better than anyone that planning in agriculture can prove very difficult.
Throughout a growing season, there are many unforeseen variables and obstacles farmers must overcome for success. This unknown may cause some farmers to simply skip planning altogether. They think, “If I know I’m going to have to change my plan anyway, then why even have one?”
I’m reminded of a Dwight Eisenhower quote: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Even farmers who frown on planning will enter a crop year with at least some forethought. They may begin by considering what hybrids or varieties they will plant and place an early see order, or they may estimate a rough amount of acerage for each crop. They might look at what they bought last year to prepay for fertilizer. But is that really a plan?
What if we got more specific?
There’s a new tool that can help us do just that. AgSolver is a new platform recently added to Incompass precision ag software. Using field boundaries, yield or satellite-imagery data, and a crop budget, growers can create an initial profit plan for any field in less than five minutes. From there, various individual components of the original plan can be adjusted to generate different expected outcomes.
One of the key parts of this process is the software’s use of yield or satellite-imagery data from previous crops to break down the productivity of each field to a sub-acre. This can be eye-opening information! Every farmer knows that some parts of a field yield more than others, but there hasn’t been a good way to quantify that in terms of actual net profit. With access to that information, we’re able to make informed decisions on how to manage those individual areas. Maybe that means making investments to improve production or selecting acres that would be best left out of production all together.
Farmers currently using AgSolver are exploring other ways this data can help them increase profitability within their operations. Some have used the data to evaluate the potential long-term financial advantage of adding drainage tile, sediment basins, irrigation, or other improvements to a particular field. Some have used data to determine a field’s profitability to reach an agreement that is fair for all parties involved when negotiating new lease situations. An obvious use is comparing expected yield outcomes of different variable seeding and fertility rates. In all of these cases, the key takeaway is that the tool generates information needed to enhance a farmer’s ability to make informed decisions. This technology is part of a growing trend toward managing for profit instead of
managing for yield only.
Perhaps technology like AgSolver will eventually become a necessity for farmers. Twenty years ago, farming could be compared to playing a game of chess, but today it is more like playing 10 games of chess — all at the same time. I anticipate that as each operation evolves and grows, technology will continue to play an important role in helping farmers keep track of all those moving pieces.
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