At this time of the year, it's easy to feel like yields are largely a function of weather – temperature and rainfall. Over the years in hundreds of grower meetings, I've heard that sentiment repeatedly. If you are inclined to think that way, think about this scenario.

Every week I see ads using the latest marketing buzzwords to describe how a company is going to use your/their big data to revolutionize how you farm. Estimated rainfall using radar images is being claimed as “hyper-local”. UAV’s, imagery and crop models being claimed to replace scouting for diseases and insects. Proprietary algorithms use big data to manage all your inputs so efficiently it will be “game-changing.” That’s one of my favorite buzzwords- “game-changing.”

Increasing return on investment for every input is clearly on the mind of every grower. They are in an economic squeeze, but that doesn't mean they won't invest more in crops. It does mean they are scrutinizing every dollar they spend. The current success measure now goes beyond yield increase to include which inputs offer better return on investment.

I'm always looking for parallels – examples from other industries on how they use data to drive better decisions. While on the road, I listened to several Freakonomics podcasts. One that related well was titled Bad Medicines, Part 2: (Drug) Trials and Tribulations.

Virtually every precision ag survey done with growers and industry over the last 20 years would rank "getting different systems to work together" as the greatest frustration and obstacle to growing the overall market.

Dan Frieberg talks about the Silver Bullet of precision ag and how there is no "Silver bullet". The point is the "Silver Bullet" for growers changes within every part of every field and can change every year. Watch now...

I have had the privilege of being in the “Precision Ag business” for over 20 years now. A lot has changed since I started, but some fundamental issues still plague our ability to make it easier for users to leverage the various technologies that are available: having systems “talk to each other” technically referred to as “interoperability” is a key challenge. This issue is apparent from a recent survey conducted by AgGateway, a non-profit industry consortium that is focused on promoting and enabling the industry’s transition to digital agriculture with a goal of maximizing efficiency and productivity (www.aggateway.org). As an industry our goal is to make these technologies relevant to a large cross section of growers, so in the future we don’t refer to “Precision Agriculture” instead we just say “this is how you do Agriculture.”

I’m a big believer in the practice of split-applying nitrogen – specifically sidedress – applying a portion of the nitrogen after planting. Being able to apply part of the nitrogen closer to plant uptake always made sense to me because the nitrogen is less available for loss before that time. However, oftentimes it is difficult to find the advantage of sidedressing in the data.

I spend some of my best work days with growers – encouraging them to use their data to drive better agronomic decisions. Of course, I'm frequently also inviting them to become customers.