What is in this article?:
- Analytical, data-driving horsepower primed to transform farming
- Avoiding bad decisions
- On-farm data will help farmers make more informed and accurate business decisions.
- Farmers have become their own worst enemies by becoming more efficient.
- Input stewardship will be critical to crop production in the future.
Avoiding bad decisions
“It’s gotten to where every decision has to follow an intensive study and to be carefully considered before it’s implemented,” says Kim Wilkins an Alabama Extension regional agent who operates on the Gulf Coast.
“For example, one bad variety selection could mean a wipeout of the crop from a threat like soybean rust or Hessian flies before the farmers could even anticipate them,” she says.
In recent years, Runge has seen firsthand how some farmers have had to work furiously to capture lost ground following a bad farming decision.
“We’ve had some producers come to us and say, ‘I’m $300,000 in debt and I’ve got to hit a home run,” Runge says, adding that this is precisely the sort of situation that farmers should studiously work to avoid.
“The luckier ones manage to knock the ball out of the park —often by selecting the right commodity at just the right time and pricing it to hit the top of the market,” he says. “But it’s unlikely they’ll stay in business over the next three to five years following a game plan like this.”
Runge says the times are pushing producers to develop a new integrated farming mindset, one that is as much about investing in the future as it is about being frugal in the present. And this will involve investing in management strategies and technologies that not only insulate them against crises— weather events, insect or weed threats, or economic downturns, for example — but that also better equips them to capitalize on future opportunities.
Fulton has a term for this too: input stewardship.
“We’re reached the point where input stewardship is not only critical to production but also to ensuring that we maintain the profits to stay in business,” he says.
“Yes, you’ve got to look at ways to capture savings and improve efficiency, because every cent counts. But it’s also as much about farmers investing on a field-by-field basis and in ways that enable them to derive the optimal benefits from each field.”
While some of these decisions may not begin paying off until years down the road, they are no less important to the success of a farming operation, Fulton says.
But it’s the way in which input stewardship will be combined with analytical horsepower that will transform farming, he predicts.
For now, analytical horsepower, despite its immense promise, remains a sleeping giant with much of its potential still locked in the yield monitors and other precision farming technologies that farmers use routinely.
“Right now, the argument can be made that all the precision agriculture data has no value because it’s not yet being used,” Fulton says. “I think the farming community would be surprised by how much data is left on machines and never downloaded and archived — or, for that matter, acted upon.”
But this is changing rapidly as more companies perceive the vast potential of this data trove in helping farmers make better informed decisions. It’s the reason why Fulton remains optimistic about the future of farming, particularly U.S. farming, despite its current challenges.
Two giant retail companies, Wal-Mart and Kroger, already have demonstrated how data sets can be used to enhance the shopping experiences of their customers. As he sees it, farming is not too far behind.
What emerges will likely be a farming sector that is more adaptive, more environmentally sustainable and, most important of all from the perspective of farmers, more profitable, Fulton contends.