Do you ever feel like you are collecting loads of data but it’s just sitting on a flash drive or in a cloud storage system doing little more than building a pretty map? Organizing and analyzing that data can seem like such a daunting task. Before you even get to organizing the data you need to figure out what data is worth collecting. With the help of a Premier Crop Advisor we help you prioritize your data and use farm analytics to make more confident decisions using your data.

My grandpa turns 91 years old this spring, has farmed for 75 years, and retired last fall. I can’t help but think of all the changes he’s seen in agriculture during his lifetime. From equipment to genetics, chemistry, and technology, the changes seem almost endless. Though he’s made numerous advancements in his operation, change didn’t always come easily. When I was selling hardware, I thought auto-steer would be a great addition for him. I think his exact words were “If you can’t drive straight, you shouldn’t be farming!” He eventually adapted, but it’s not easy to let go of the wheel when you’ve driven for that many years. He started farming with horses and now he runs a 500 horsepower QuadTrac steered by satellites.

"At the end of the day, one of the things I hope comes out of this, is a new appreciation for what agriculture does, and what the food industry and all of us are about, just the totality of what agriculture does for the American consumer and for the world."

- Dan Frieberg

In this Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic. We invite you to listen to Aaron Seifert, Business Development Manager in the West, and Dan Frieberg, Co-founder of Premier Crop Systems and VP of Technical Services, discuss the value of precision agriculture during tight economic times.

As the calendar turns to April, and the 2020 planting season nears, many producers are finalizing planting plans. Your planting operation (hybrid and variety selection, seeding rate decisions, and the execution of it all) will lay a critical foundation for your 2020 growing season.  

In farming and a pandemic – having the right denominator matters

This blog builds on the information I shared in “What is Efficiency in Farming?”.  If you haven’t already, I recommend reading it first. If you have read it, here are a few bullet points to jog your memory.

It’s hard to avoid hearing about the promise of “big data.” Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations, it is also easy to spin conspiracy theories. There are many big-data analytics examples cited, such as Amazon and Netflix. They suggest books and movies we may enjoy based on what we have “liked” in the past or what other people who seem similar to us like. Google, the National Security Agency and others evidentially collect data bout what we search, what and whom we email, and much more.

The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, is quoted as having said, “there is nothing permanent except change.” If that is the case, why do we fight it so hard? I believe the answer is because we are comfortable with where we are. In our comfort zone, we know exactly what to expect day in and day out, but in our desire to be comfortable, we remain exactly the same. If we don’t continue to learn and apply our new learned knowledge, how will we get better?

Some questions that get asked often about precision ag, and precision tools in general, are “what makes sense for my operation?” or “how do I get started?

Several years ago, I had customers tell me we could grow our company a lot faster if we had something like their planter monitor that flashed the dollars being lost from poor singulation. We needed something visual on a display, changing as growers moved across their fields to get their attention. Something cool.