Precision production, data-driven farming, digital agriculture: regardless of what name you give it, information-based agriculture isn’t just coming to a field near you, it’s coming to your fields now or in the very near future. With margins becoming tighter than ever, resources becoming increasingly scarce (and costly), consumers getting more and more demanding, and our industry’s mindfulness of the environment continuing to grow, optimizing efficiency through precision-based production is the evolution of agriculture. But don’t worry: you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.
Maximizing efficiency starts with identifying where there is in-field variability and what is causing it, then adjusting management to best address that variability. Over the past handful of years, piles of companies – from industry leaders like John Deere and CNH to tech start-ups of all kinds – have introduced whole suites of data-generating and data transmitting tools. Creating and collecting data is the easy part. The much bigger challenge is taking all that data and turning it into something meaningful: aggregating information and translating it into insights that can drive efficiency improvements in-field.
75 years ago, Simplot started buying processing potatoes from Canadian producers. Because we’ve always recognized that our success hinges on producers’ success, it wasn’t long before we expanded into the other end of the value chain: providing crop inputs where and when producers need them. Now, we’ve stepped into the precision ag sphere – in fact, we’ve developed a best-the-the-business, full-spectrum digital agriculture support system called SmartFarm – to further support our growers.
Precision agriculture isn’t and will never be our core business. Rather, we see our SmartFarm platform as a tool that offers value-add to and fosters relationship with our producers. We’re not selling stand-alone digital ag products and services: we offer easy, supported, one-stop access to complete digital ag solutions.
The efficiency gains precision agriculture can facilitate require continuous data collection, monitoring and adjustment. Is it worth the effort? While return on investment is farm-dependent, field-dependent and ultimately area-of-the-field-dependent, SmartFarm’s retention rate among farmers who are highly engaged is nearly 100 per cent, which gives us confidence that we’re providing real value.
Some producers are keen on jumping into full-spectrum precision agriculture; others prefer to step in more slowly. Since water is by far the most limiting resource in many fields, soil moisture probes are a great starting place for data-driven agriculture. As far as tools and instrumentation go, soil moisture probes are among the easiest to implement and can have a huge impact on management decision-making. Our soil probe expert, Scott Graham, will tell you more about moisture probes in our next article.
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