012: Does Grid Soil Sampling Pay?

grower and advisor

Today we are joined by Mike Manning (aka @datamanning on Twitter) and Renee Hansen as they travel through Nebraska, to discuss soil sampling.

Mike is an agronomic information advisor in the state of Nebraska. He’s a western Nebraska farm kid from the panhandle. Mike has been working closely with growers throughout most of Nebraska for the last eight years. He has a wide range of precision and agronomic experience.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

RENEE HANSEN: Welcome to the Premier Podcast. We’re traveling down the road in Nebraska here. I’m sitting here with Mike Manning, @DataManning on Twitter. We went to meet with some growers, and we’re getting to about that season where we can talk about grid soil sampling. So Mike, why don’t you just tell us of the benefits. Does it really pay to grid soil sample?

MIKE MANNING: Absolutely, and it really is the perfect time of the year to be thinking about grid soil sampling. We’re getting ready to put a bow on the crop for 2020. We’re starting to do some of that early harvest prep in Nebraska. We’re also getting finished up with some of our final irrigations in corn. We still have a little ways to go on beans. Now is the time to start thinking about our fall fertility plans.

When I think of fall fertility, I think of grid soil sampling, or minimally, spatial soil sampling a field.  Mainly though, we talk about grid soil sampling. Especially with what we do in Nebraska, and especially under irrigation, we look at a 2.5-acre grid sample. Sometimes at a higher resolution (1.1a, 1.5a), and sometimes at a wider resolution (3.3a, 4.4a). As we drive that combine across the field, we detect yield variability. Regardless of how table-top flat or how uniform a field appears, we don’t have uniform yield. We have yield variability across the field. That same concept applies to the soil fertility underneath the field.

What are our soil test values in the field? And, how do those soil test values change across the field?

RENEE HANSEN: What are you going to use that for, as the soil tests change across the field? How do you map that, and why is that so important?

MIKE MANNING: Bottom line, I really say the fundamental piece of precision ag, is a grid soil sample.  But what do we use that grid sample for? Primary use number one: variable-rate application of our dry fertility products. We think of that as phosphorus, potassium, lime in acidic soils, and potentially some AMS or CalSul, & sulfur-type products if we’re trying to manage or mitigate other field issues. We’re really looking at variable-rate application of your dry fertilizer products. Then identifying where we need more fertility in the field. We also identify the areas where we need less, or perhaps no additional fertility at all in the field. It’s really about reallocating the fertilizer dollar to where it needs to go within the field.

RENEE HANSEN: We were talking to some growers today. Sometimes, they say, that other growers want to cut. They’re so focused on the bottom dollar, or with the markets the way they are today, that they need to cut somewhere. But the growers that we were talking to today, the ones that work with Premier Crop, they’re not focused on cutting on inputs. They think that they know that utilizing this grid sample really helps them build that foundation. So, can you talk a little bit more about building that foundation using the grid soil sample?

MIKE MANNING: You hit on a couple of really good points there. Bottom line, at the end of the day, what matters on the farm is profitability. Every grower in the world wants to produce their crop as efficiently as possible. They also want to spend as little money as possible to do that. But they need to do so without cutting any corners in fertility to produce a good crop. and produce it profitably.  One of the easiest ways to do this is by variable-rate application of your fertility in a good, sound, agronomic manner.

Spatial soil sampling — in particular, grid sampling — has really been around for about 30 years. Early and widespread adoption more so came in the early 2000s period, combined with marrying it up to the yield data.  Early on, and understandably so, a lot of growers that were burned, or had a bad experience with either grid sampling or zone sampling. This was largely due to two false premises.  False premise number one: “the grid sample will show us the field variability and, Mr. Farmer, we’re going to make your field uniform.”

RENEE HANSEN: You and I have talked about that before, too, just how you want to make the field all green, and that’s just not realistic.

MIKE MANNING: That’s not realistic. It’s about identifying and managing where we need to add, where we need to reduce, where do we need to reallocate that fertilizer dollar?

False premise number two: “I’m going to save you money by grid sampling.”. We might save some money on our total fertilizer spend with a VR fertilizer spread. Pretty commonly though, we’re spending the same amount of money on fertilizer and, depending on what things we identify in that variability within that sample across that field, we might be spending more money. Again, I would say in the early days of grid sampling, there were guys that got burned on two false premises that were promised to them: “We’re going to make the field uniform”, and “I’m going to save you money.”. Very rarely is that ever the case.

One prominent exception would be acidic soils. From central Nebraska all the way to Indiana and Ohio, all the way across the corn belt, VR lime, 99.9% of the time will pay for that grid sample in year one. Instead of looking at a quarter section or an 80 or a 40 and saying, “I need to go apply two tons of lime because my composite sample says I have a pH problem.”, we can redirect that lime dollar where it is most needed, and hammer the areas that are really in tough shape. If we’re in a high pH situation or have an area of the field that needs no lime, and we go hit it with that area with the same two or three tons per acre, we may actually be hurting ourselves.

We also might not be applying enough lime in the really acidic areas to truly be mitigating the problem.  It’s a win-win. A lot of times we reduce the total tons of lime we need, and there might be hotspots in the field that need six or seven tons of lime, while half of the field, or large areas of the field, might need zero lime whatsoever.

RENEE HANSEN: Just tell me a little bit, does Premier Crop have any skin in the game when it comes to grid soil sampling? Why do we promote it so much?

MIKE MANNING: The primary reason I promote it to my growers — universally, we promote it to our growers, and to our partners within Premier Crop — is because it’s sound agronomics. It is what makes sense to better manage your farm at a spatial level. As the field changes, how are we adjusting our management to account for those changes within the field?

It starts by having good data to make decisions, understanding that field variability exists, and we need to examine that variability. We need to understand that variability before we start to try to manage it or change things. At Premier Crop, we believe management zones make sense. We like to manage by zones.  An advisor or grower may say, “Well, I have management zones. Why don’t we just variable-rate the fertility to those management zones.” I would say at a basic level, that’s an acceptable approach if you can verify that’s the right thing to do.  But this approach doesn’t account for the variability within the management zone.  It’s important to note there is fertility variability within each management zone.

So yes, I may have a 285-bushel yield goal in my A zone, but my soil fertility throughout that A zone is not uniform. And if I’m truly going to variable-rate my fertility to a yield goal, I also need to variable rate to the underlying soil test values within that zone.

In essence, what I am talking about here is we’re variable-rating the variable rate. We are varying our rate to that management zone by yield goal. And, we’re also varying our rate to the soil test variability from the grid soil sample, within that Management Zone (or sometimes a multi-sample zone sample within that zone).

There are a lot of methodologies and philosophies out there about how you go about creating management zones. One historic school of thought might be using the SSURGO maps, your NRCS and SCS soil maps. The soil type lines from the soil surveys. And that can be effective in some geographies. Largely however, in my experience in the state of Nebraska, our soil types are in that field, but those lines do not match up to where those soil type breaks happen.

The key reason for this discrepancy in Nebraska is that we have spent the last 60 years leveling ground so we can irrigate better. We’ve learned from some of our past mistakes. Those soil types exist in that field, but we’ve changed the soil dynamics since it was surveyed. In contrast, and I don’t have a specific example, there are a fair amount of places in Iowa where the soil type lines are darn near to the ‘T’. I’m sure some of my Iowa colleagues would disagree and say, “No, they’re way off on this county and this county.” But I’ve seen maps that match up to the line.

Back from the Nebraska perspective, even where we do have good soil type lines or we have another dataset, such as EM mapping or EC mapping, that maybe confirms those soil type lines, we don’t see a correlation to yield to those soil types.

RENEE HANSEN: Take this all the way from beginning to end. We prefer to have a grid soil sample because it is such deep data. You get so much more information from the field. And then you were talking about how you can variable-rate all of your nutrients. Then, you’re going to also variable-rate your seeding, and then talk about the yield. I mean why are all of those layers so important?

MIKE MANNING: Because yield is not created equally. Our best areas of the field have probably historically been the best areas of the field. Our poorest areas of the field have probably been our poorest areas of the field. That’s how geology created them. That’s how soil formation created them. It’s also influenced by how long a piece of ground has been farmed, and how it’s been managed for the last 50, 100, 200 years, and the practices associated with how you go about your farming.

Tying it all together, again, I strongly encourage every single one of my growers to grid soil sample.  If they’re not grid sampling, it’s not an absolute. You do not have to go do this. But if you really want to start putting the whole puzzle of soil fertility together, and really be able to look at the complexity of agronomy that happens within your fields, and begin to understand how to be more productive, and how to get more out of each field, and how to make each field more profitable, it starts by understanding what’s happening within the field with a grid soil sample.

RENEE HANSEN: I mean, when it comes down to it, a lot of people view Premier Crop as a data company, but we are highly focused on agronomics. You out in the field with your growers are highly focused on agronomics.

MIKE MANNING: Absolutely. It starts with soil. We build a crop from the ground up. We have to take care of the fundamentals, and we have to start with a good soil foundation under our feet to grow a productive crop.

There are a lot of products out there in the market that say “add this”, or “add that”. Don’t get me wrong. There are good products out there. There’s a lot of biologicals coming to the market. Some of those things have shown promise, and there’s definitely been some winners and losers. And I’m sure many of our growers have more than a few stories to share with that.  If we don’t have good fundamental fertility underneath us as that strong foundation, we’re not going to produce a good crop to begin with.  Regardless of what you throw out “on top”, is that additional product “X-Y-Z” supposed to result in “1-2-3”? Without a strong foundation, the “X-Y-Z” product afterwards is really just throwing your money away.

Grid soil sampling the first time can be scary. It can be daunting to some people, depending on change. Change can be difficult. If we’ve been composite sampling fields for years and years, and I’m putting out 100 pounds/acre of MAP and 50 pounds/acre of Potash, and that’s my dry fertility program at a flat rate. It can be eye-opening. It can be jarring, if you go pull a grid sample on that field for the first time because you’ve probably been noticing your yields slowly declining, or perhaps have plateaued, or are not increasing like we’re used to. You can’t quite get a finger on it, and you’re not quite sure what’s going on. In these cases, a lot of times, we’re mining out the best areas of the field. We have not been taking care of that the way we should be (crop nutrient removals).

Grid soil sampling is all about making sense of that.  Reallocate the fertilizer dollar to where it needs to go.  Sometimes this helps you save money. Other times, if a field has been neglected for 30, 40 years, or has just received a minimal flat rate for a really long time, there might be an eye-opening fertilizer bill the first few years.  But it’s something that you can stair-step into. We’re not going to go in and try to fix everything in one shot. Let’s go for a walk first. Let’s work up to a jog, and then we’ll condition for a little bit.  It’s not like trying to roll out of bed in the morning and go do the high jump.

One of the biggest things we say at Premier Crop is “identify limiting factors”. “What’s the number-one item that we need to address?”…when we get those grid sample results.  What are one, two, or maybe three, major things that we really need to start working on and address if we’re talking about a field that’s really out of whack?  The amount of dollars that get left on the table from flat-rate applications can be astronomical. We’re undoubtedly wasting fertilizer on the areas of the field that need little or none, and under-applying the areas that have been mined out.

grid soil sampling to benefit your nutrient foundation

Not necessarily devil’s advocate, but one example you mentioned earlier is “turning that entire map ‘green’ (making fertility uniform across the field). I work with a number of producers that have access to this “green mapmaker,” and that is manure.  Manure is one piece that can sometimes be an objection to grid sampling. “Well, we manure. We have fertility levels through the roof.” That very well may be true. So, I want to offer what I call a few best management practices for manure.

Practice number one: if you have regular access to manure (or you’re a farmer feeder), move your manure around. Your manure has value. It pays to put wheels underneath your manure. Do not hit the home quarter every single time or whatever field is closest to the pen. It pays to spread it around.

Practice number two: Pull a grid sample after we have grown next year’s crop on that field.  Again, if you have been hitting the same field year after year after year, let’s find another home for it. That fertility is going to be through the roof.

For growers that are heavy manure users — whether hog slurries, beef slurries, dried beef scrapings, etc. (each of these manure products has a different consistency, are typically applied at different times of the year, obviously, are applied at different rates, and carry different fertilizer values.). My best management practice for manure users is to pull a grid sample after we have grown next year’s crop on that field.

Say if we’re getting ready for a Fall 2020 manure application with dry beef lot manure in November, 2020, and I go apply 30 tons of manure. We grow a crop on it all of next year (typically corn), and after harvest next year, we go pull a grid sample on that. Naturally, I expect to see a lot of elevated (soil fertility) values in the field when we get the results.  However, you’ll surprise yourself. You will have more holes, and inconsistencies out there than you probably thought.

Typically, we’re looking at 20 or 30 tons to the acre. We’re going to see those phosphorus values go through the roof. We typically pick up a lot of calcium. We pick up a lot of zinc. A pretty good shot of potassium, and hopefully not too many salts in the form of sodium. Say you’re at a 30-parts-per-million phosphorous field average, you might have a lot of values up to 100 parts per million, or  80 – 100 parts per million. But there could be some pretty good spreads between some of those points. You might still have a couple points at 45. You might still have a point down at 25 or 30, and the rest of the field is up at 80.

What guys and gals really need to be mindful of is manure is not a consistent product. Manure is a fantastic product that provides a lot of carbon back to the soil. But, it’s not a guaranteed fertilizer analysis that comes with an “N-P-K” label. Depending on the size of the stockpile, or the size of the barn, or the size of the lagoon you’re pumping out, I encourage you to take multiple manure samples throughout the season. If I’ve got a quarter-mile-long stockpile, I want three or four manure samples — good, consistent manure samples — out of that pile to get an idea of what I’m going to be receiving. Again, the bottom line is manure is not a consistent product.

RENEE HANSEN: It really starts with the foundation. We get started with a grid soil sample so we can ultimately make that crop as most profitable and efficient for the farmer as possible. Thanks for joining us today, Mike, as we’re headed down the road in Nebraska. Thanks for listening to the Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so we can continue to provide the best precision ag and analytic results for you.

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011: The Importance of Yield Efficiency

yield efficiency dashboard

Today we are talking with Dan and Renee about the importance of Yield Efficiency in farming. Topics covered include yield efficiency, how this effects output, and related subjects.

About Dan: Founder and current VP of Technical Services. Since founding PCS in 1999, Dan has witnessed many changes and transitions in the ag data industry.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

RENEE HANSEN: All right. Welcome, Dan, to the Premier Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. Today, we’re going to focus on yield efficiency and have you explain to us how important yield efficiency is and why a farmer should be focusing on yield efficiency.

DAN FRIEBERG: In general, people have used yield as a measure of profitability, meaning that, as long as we achieve higher yields, that is our measuring stick for how good we are doing. Across the nation, we keep stair-stepping up, from a yield perspective. But, of course, we know that higher yields come at a cost. They come at a higher cost. What yield efficiency is for us is combining agronomics and economics. It’s just being willing to really put the dollars and cents from the grower’s perspective on the line. So, yield efficiency, the way we’re defining it, is the dollar-per-acre return to land and management. And the reason we exclude land and management is that we want to create a score that growers could anonymously benchmark against other growers in the area.

And when you include land cost, it really can be very distorting. Some people own their own ground, and they don’t necessarily charge themselves an opportunity cost on the land. Others are paying cash rent, and there are all kinds of different land arrangements. Plus, land cost is really personal and private. Taking land out of the equation from an economics perspective, when a grower sees a yield efficiency score, and it’s a dollar-per-acre return to land and management, they instantly are able to take their land cost out of that number and know how much is left for them. A lot of times, the return to management is profit. It’s family living. It’s what’s left over. So, yield efficiency is really, for us, about tying agronomics and economics together.

It’s perfect timing for the market because things are so tight at the farm gate. The economics are really tight. There’s a lot of operations that are struggling to break even, let alone make any money. It’s a great time to focus on not just better agronomics but better economics, as well.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, that’s such a great point, Dan, the fact you’re saying to focus on agronomics and economics. How is Premier Crop doing this different with our growers? How are we separating ourselves out from the marketplace? Because there are a lot of red waters out there and competition, so how does Premier Crop do this differently?

Managing on a Spatial Level

DAN FRIEBERG: Renee, it’s just about being real. We’re not just taking the statewide average cost of inputs divided by the yield file. What makes us different is we’re doing this spatially within the field. A lot of our go-to-market involves helping growers manage different parts of their fields differently. When we talk about yield efficiency, we’re talking about keeping track of all the input dollars as they change within the field. So, if you’re variable-rate applying part of your fertilizer, we’re tracking the cost associated with those variable-rate applications. If your variable-rate seeding, we’re tracking the difference in seed cost as you move across the field. With yield efficiency, maybe the best way to talk about it is it’s real.

This is a dollar-per-acre return that is tied to not somebody else’s costs but your actual costs. That’s probably the biggest, that there’s a fair amount of work involved to get there and to really have it be meaningful and right. There’s just a lot of shortcuts that people take. There are other solutions that do this at a field level, and we do that too. So, growers, they get a report card on every field, but what makes it even more unique is we drive it down within fields. It’s within-field measurement. I was doing a grower meeting last winter before COVID, and one of the growers saw me and said: “So, you can actually tell me if I got my management zones right.”

Yield profit by field

And I couldn’t figure out exactly what he meant, but then I finally figured out what he is talking about. What I was showing is we can actually measure yield efficiency down to a management zone. If we’re spending more on inputs in what we think are the best parts of the field, we can show the economic return to spending more. Renee, our company is 22 crop seasons into this. We’re getting ready to head into our 23rd crop season, and I’m convinced that the number-one reason that precision ag, as we talk about it and talk about all the things we do, the reason it’s not bigger is we haven’t consistently proven to the grower that it makes more money. That’s really the missing piece.

Every grower will respond to economics. If they can be assured that every year they will know that everything they are doing and being told to do agronomically actually pays, they would do it. It’s on us to step up our game and to be willing to measure our success, not just by yield but by dollars and cents. Are we able to drive higher returns in how we manage inputs? The big components of yield efficiency are yield times the selling price that the grower gets to set minus what they spent on seed, crop protection, nutrients and field operations. That’s how it’s all calculated, and it just generates a dollar-per-acre return.

Yield Efficiency by management zone

RENEE HANSEN: I’ve been out in the field too, Dan, and growers that have been using Premier Crop for multiple years, let’s say five to 10 years, continue to say that the service that is offered far outweighs the economics. And I think a lot of growers are afraid to jump in because they’re either not variable rate seeding or variable-rating nutrients yet because they haven’t seen the benefits. If they could understand what their yield efficiency can be by utilizing Premier Crop on a per-acre basis, not an average. And those growers continuously say, over and over again, that the money that they’re spending on the service far outweighs what they’re making back in returns.

DAN FRIEBERG: It’s being willing to measure whether what we did worked or not. There’s a lot of people who generate a prescription, but there’s no validation at the end of the day, whether that paid or not, and that’s the difference. Being able to validate whether using a prescription actually delivered more return to the grower, that’s really what this is all about.

RENEE HANSEN: Validating it, and they can compare against others in their region, Dan. So, can you share with us how we benchmark? They benchmark against themselves, but they also can benchmark against others in their region.

See Beyond Your Operation

DAN FRIEBERG: It’s the idea of benchmarking versus peers in your area. The ultimate benchmark is benchmarking in your own operation, so being able to have a handle, just knowing the most profitable parts of each field and how your fields compare to each other. That’s the first starting place. Every grower wants to see beyond their own operation. It just amazes me. They love to be able to compare in a system where quality data is really key. They love to be able to compare how they did and are doing compared to their peers. What you see with the yield efficiency score is, right away, what you see is sometimes the growers that had the highest yields that year didn’t have the highest yield efficiency.

How do you rank in profits as a farmer

And it’s kind of that gut check. When you see that your yield is the highest but your yield efficiency isn’t, that’s kind of a wake up call. And it really creates dialogue, like: “What am I doing? What’s different? For people who are having a higher yield deficiency, what did they do differently?” And that’s really the details and that’s really what makes it fun, having those dialogues and figuring it out. But the first point of it is actually measuring. It’s actually knowing where you’re at. We’ve talked on an earlier podcast about: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Or another way to say it is: “What gets measured gets focus.”

That’s where people focus. If you’re not measuring the dollar, if you’re not measuring everything you’re doing agronomically economically, then you’re not going to focus your attention on it. So, we just believe that it’s time, in this day and age with the technology we have available, it’s time that we deliver analytics to the grower that shows how we’re investing. The only way to drive yield efficiency is you have to figure out where, within every field, to invest and how much to invest in each part of the field. Sometimes, investing in nutrients in some parts of the field is literally a waste of money because that’s not what’s yield limiting. It’s something else.

RENEE HANSEN: And if you can save money in that part of the field, why wouldn’t you? You talked about how critical this market is. Why is it so critical right now? Why is it more critical now than it ever has been in the past to determine yield efficiency?

DAN FRIEBERG: It’s so hard to make money. It is really, really hard to make money. It’s just very difficult right now. It’s difficult, and things are just so tight. Commodity markets have really taken a tumble, and we’re just in a really tight time, so it’s really hard. Renee, in those 23 years, sometimes, I think we actually grow fastest as a company when things are the worst at the farm, when the economics are the worst. And I know that doesn’t make sense to some people, but when it’s so hard to make money, that’s when growers decide: “Okay, I’ve got to do something different. I’ve got to focus on managing in much more detail.” And that’s kind of what we do. We help them plan and, really, we help them spend every input dollar as wisely, within each field, as possible to try to drive higher returns.

RENEE HANSEN: There’s that saying of: “Spend money to make money.” What would you have to say about that and where we are right now?

DAN FRIEBERG: You do. Another way to say it is: “You can’t save your way into prosperity.” That’s really the magic. Sometimes, there are areas where you can save money, and those are really critical. Saving money in those areas makes a lot of sense, but there are other areas where you have to invest, that you have to invest more to make more.

Get Started with Yield Efficiency

RENEE HANSEN: And just be more efficient. And that’s what we’re talking about with yield efficiency. Dan, how does a grower start? How can they get started to determine their yield efficiency?

DAN FRIEBERG: What we do is we lead them through. We try to get accurate yield data, and then it’s about tracking the input cost. If they’re doing any kind of variable-rate activity, we’re looking for those files. We’re looking if they’ve done anything variable rate because we’re trying to track that difference in cost within the field. It’s like: “What did you apply and how much did you spend?” And if that’s variable-rate, that’s great. If it’s just straight-rate, then that’s fine too. That’s a way to get started. It takes yield. We’ve got to know yield and have to know the key input costs.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, and this is something that Premier Crop has been working on. You talk about how, when you started Premier Crop, that you were going to focus on costs, as well, but didn’t back then. And now we’re really bringing it back to that and merging the agronomics and economics. Can you talk about the direction where we’re going in the future?

DAN FRIEBERG: You’re exactly right. Premier Crop started with this, and we have customers who have done this for 20 years. We had a slightly different approach then, and we still do it. We can calculate break-even cost per bushel, but break-even cost per bushel includes land and management. Land and management, for a grower to share land and management, it’s really personal. It’s very private, and it doesn’t work where it has issues when it comes to benchmarking. But we can definitely do that. We can go to break-even cost per bushel.

I think yield efficiency, for us, seems like a way to get started, a way for us to get started with growers. The reality is we don’t influence land costs. The places where we spend most of our time are talking about how you manage seed, your seed investment, crop protection, nutrients and operations from a tillage perspective or field. No-till versus strip-till versus conventional or conservation. It’s all those pieces and how they integrate with the crop protection plan and other parts of them.

RENEE HANSEN: Great. Well, thanks for joining us today, Dan. I believe, on the next podcast, we’ll talk more about farm finance and the economics of the situation that we’re in, in this critical market. Is there anything else that you’d like to add in regards to yield efficiency or getting growers on board?

DAN FRIEBERG: When you ask about: “You have to spend money to make money.” In general, there’s a lot of truth behind that. But, sometimes, throwing the kitchen sink, like throwing the kitchen sink at a crop, isn’t always profitable either. It kind of goes to changing the paradigm from high yields. High yields are really critical to remain profitable, but it has to be done efficiently. It has to be done with an eye towards: “How do we generate more return?” Not just the highest yield, but how do we generate more return to every grower’s operation?

RENEE HANSEN: Thanks, Dan. Maybe we’ll get Darren back here. He’s probably working on his golf game right now, so hopefully we’ll get him back on our next podcast. Thanks for listening to the Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so we can continue to provide the best precision ag and analytic results for you. And to learn more about Premier Crop, visit premiercrop.com.

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010: Why Creating a Farm Plan Matters

farming on ipad

Today we are talking with Dan and Darren about the Derecho land hurricanes and storms that wrecked havoc on growers and their crops. We also cover why creating a farm plan is important in agronomy with some key take aways for those looking for a planning strategy

About Darren: CEO and President of Premier Crop. Fehr joined Premier Crop in 2018 and has successfully led the company in significant growth over the last two years. His passion for mentoring, leading and growing the business will be instrumental in the future of Premier Crop.

About Dan: Founder and current VP of Technical Services. Since founding PCS in 1999, Dan has witnessed many changes and transitions in the ag data industry.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

DARREN FEHR: On a little more somber note, we’re coming off of a week that has seen some record devastation, some real problems. And first of all, first and foremost, on behalf of Premier Crop and all of us, I’m really, really sorry to see all of our farm friends and family go through this. Our hearts, minds and prayers go out to all those who have had such significant loss. Four dead: three in Iowa, one in Illinois. There were, 200,000 people without power for more than seven days, which is really, really difficult. I’ve heard something like 10 to 15 million acres damaged or written off completely. Some really serious devastation, and, even more than that, we have a grain storage problem with thousands of on-farm storage bins damaged or ruined completely.

So, we have a fairly significant weather issue, and it kind of sets up the topic for today on creating a farm plan. And this is a question that we get often from either prospects or customers: why should I spend so much time planning when I can’t control the weather? Let’s just talk a little bit about that, about what goes into the resulting yield efficiency. How should we think about farm planning in light of the fact that, yes, we do not control the weather and we cannot predict the weather? So, what advice, Dan, do you have for our listeners?

Farm plan to mitigate weather

Creating a Farm Plan

DAN FRIEBERG: Sometimes, it’s best to tell a story or to paint a visual picture in people’s minds. This is one I have used over the years, and, as farm size gets larger, you may need to change the numbers. A lot of times, this is a dialogue with growers, and the question comes up, and what happens is they’re just so frustrated by an event like what happened. You have green snap, you have a wind event, you have hail, you have drought. There’s just this frustration, and I know that’s where it comes from and I understand the helplessness.

I ask farmers and have them paint this picture: in your local area, in your local market, there are 160 acres that are coming up for sale. That’s 160 acres that is really uniform. It’s all one soil type, and it’s been farmed for the last 30 years by the same operator. It’s been rotated as 160 acres for 30 years. In this case, it’s either been corn or soybean. So, it’s coming up for sale, and the auctioneer sells it, initially, as a 160-acre track, but then, sometimes, they will divide the track. They offer it as two 80s, and, sure enough, when they split it up and offer it as two 80s, it goes for a much higher price as two 80s than it did for the 160.

I ask the growers that I’m talking to: how much yield difference, or you could say how much yield efficiency difference, could there be between the two 80s? What I’ve done is I’ve basically said: this is uniform. It’s been farmed the same, and, because it’s a 160 acre field, those two growers are going to experience the exact same weather events. So, I ask them how much yield difference could there be? In the case of corn, it’s a 30 or 40-bushel difference, so think about that. If there could be 30 or 40-bushel differences, you’re talking more than a $150-an-acre swing in yield efficiency.

The whole point of that exercise is, in everybody’s heads, they know that management matters. No matter what the weather, the details that go into farming really do matter. The management decisions that each of those growers makes, that’s where all the profit is. Details matter. Management matters. That’s what we’re all about. Farm planing matters no matter what the situation is.

DARREN FEHR: We’ve seen that time and time again, where our customers are constantly in the top 10 percent of the performance in their counties, for example, where, typically, you’d see some similar climatic conditions. Where management is intensified, or where we get this behavior of professional  farming, you have the ability to make a difference. How do we approach farm planning, knowing that we can’t control the weather? What should we plan for, in terms of environment? If we talk about genetics and environment and management, there’s a management piece as a component, which we do a lot to help with, in terms of managing right-rate technology. But how should we approach weather in terms of: Am I planning for a dry year? Am I planning for a wet year? Am I planning for a 15-year average? What do you say about what should be the lens?

DAN FRIEBERG: So much of planning and, really, so much of the way people farm is about managing risk. A lot of the decisions are risk management. It tends to be very individual. Some people’s tolerance for risk is much greater. And how that plays out agronomically is, if your tolerance for risk is greater, you might be more aggressive in the way you plan and the decisions you make. And if your tolerance for risk is less, that could just be the financial constraints you’re under. When you’re under financial constraints, sometimes, you have to be a little bit more conservative.

For example: hybrid selection. If you’re more conservative, you might deliberately choose hybrids that have a lot of flex. By choosing flex, it allows you to deal with the diversity of weather that you might experience. It would let you plant at a lower population. So, in a dry year, you have a lower population. You’re better able to handle the moisture stress. And in a wet year, you have a little bit more potential for the hybrid to flex versus you know, when you make that choice, you could be choosing to give up the top end. There may be a racehorse that is capable of hitting the very highest yield for your area, and you may have passed on that, but you passed on it because you’re managing risk in a more conservative way versus somebody who’s maybe more aggressive.

DARREN FEHR: I want to dig into soil fertility a little. You’ve been a soil fertility expert for many, many years.

DAN FRIEBERG: I’m kind of more of a practitioner, just somebody that’s had the luxury. I’ve had the luxury of seeing lots and lots of data.

DARREN FEHR: You have had the luxury of experimenting with other people’s farms and seeing terrific results of all experimentation, which is fantastic.

DAN FRIEBERG: It has been fun. That is what’s really fun about all this. You see all this going on in the data, but then you’re able to actually put down a trial or an experiment and follow through and see the results. So, it’s really been fun that way.

How to create a farm plan to help with profitability

DARREN FEHR: Which is such a big reason why we’re so passionate about what we do. It’s because we see the results and the reality of it, but, on a soil fertility level, we’ve seen it time and time again. We’ve gone through weather events, whether it’s drought or flooding, and where we have established really strong long-term soil fertility principles, we have seen it time and time again. Our customers go through that easier or with better performance than others. Why?

DAN FRIEBERG: I think what you’re speaking to is when the weather turns against us, and that could be dry because we’ve got areas that have drier weather. So, when the weather turns against us, I think that’s when the reward for having a farm plan and managed fertility really pays, whatever that weather event is. I think we see more response to having that long-term fertility management in stress years than we do great years. I mean, when everything’s perfect weather-wise, you still see it in data, but I don’t think it’s quite as dramatic as it is in a stress year.

DARREN FEHR: A farm plan is almost like an unseen insurance policy, to some extent. It’s not going to save you, but it’s certainly not going to let you get as severe as others.

DAN FRIEBERG: It is. That’s exactly what it is.

DARREN FEHR: I think that’s the premise of this farm planning piece, that we can’t save our way to prosperity. We know that. This game isn’t about cutting costs. It’s about managing costs. And when we talk about farm planning, we’re talking about managing costs, managing resources in a way that we’re allocating them to the areas that can return the greatest. And we’re managing risk in areas where we know that productivity has historically been low.

DAN FRIEBERG: Sometimes, I get challenged because of what we do, like you’re programming the field on how to behave. You are literally telling the field how to behave. Well, yeah, we’re doing it, but it’s based on data. It’s based on how the field has behaved, and then we constantly challenge ourselves. We put check blocks inside learning blocks inside prescriptions, just constantly to validate if we’re missing something, to make sure we don’t make a mistake in how we program the field.

To me, this weather piece of planning has everything to do with it. There’s a lot of growers who are sitting on a mountain of historic yield data, and they haven’t necessarily used it very effectively. And to me, that’s a great starting place. It’s just a great way to get started and to use your historic yield data, to identify. It’s part of setting realistic yield expectations. Having realistic yield expectations for every part of it. There are areas that people farm that are never going to produce at the highest level. Then, it’s just about managing way more conservatively in those areas.

DARREN FEHR: You made a comment to me several years back: sometimes, it’s not even what you buy. It’s where you put it and how much you put on. I believe that the products that you use matter. I believe that we should plan before we buy.

DAN FRIEBERG: Everything works somewhere. Nothing works everywhere.

DARREN FEHR: Right on.

DAN FRIEBERG: Farmers are just bombarded by all kinds of new products: yield enhancers or efficiency this or that. It’s just constant. It’s microbials and stimulants and seed treatment. They all work in some place. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have found their way to the market, but they don’t work everywhere. I’ll guarantee you that. There’s something else that’s more yield limiting than whatever they’re fixing. So, figuring out what works where and at what rate is just the magic that we’re all chasing.

Pros and Cons to Spatial Farm Planning

DAN FRIEBERG: Darren, there are operations that treat thousands of acres the same. They literally do everything exactly the same on every acre. So, going to a field level is a great start for them. It’s finally starting to acknowledge that there are differences within fields. That’s a great start, but, for us, it’s way deeper than that. Squeezing every possible bushel and dollar out of every acre is just critical. We think where this obviously leads is managing and creating a farm plan within fields, within areas of fields that have dramatically different productivity potential.

DARREN FEHR: Yeah, and just for our listeners’ perspective, we were literally managing every 20 by 30-foot area inside of every field and looking at them uniquely, looking at them as it could be different. And if it is, we would do something different in that small area of that field.

DAN FRIEBERG: It’s all within the equipment restraints. We’re realists. We kind of know the constraints of the equipment as it goes across the field and what it’s capable of executing on.

DARREN FEHR: When we think about applying our right-rate technology to farm planning versus field-level planning, how much money is at stake? Is it worth it? Is the hill worth the climb?

DAN FRIEBERG: It sure is. It’s not hard, in data, to find 100-dollar-an-acre swings. You think about where we’re at today. 100 dollars an acre is just gigantic. It’s easy to find individual decisions that amount to 100-dollar-an-acre swings. There are hundreds of dollars an acre differences.

DARREN FEHR: It’s a huge deal, and farm planning without proving the result doesn’t really do us any good because we can’t really tell how effective our farm plan is. Something that we do very well is prove that the prescription pays or prove that the farm plan pays.

DAN FRIEBERG: Just that constant analyzing what you did, making sure. We analyze, and then we turn that into advice, and that advice could be anything related to how you make management decisions or agronomic decisions. That advice turns into action. The action, many times, is driving differences in how we treat pieces of fields. It’s just a continuous cycle. It’s all about shared learning and continuous improvement.

DARREN FEHR: We’ll keep talking about creating a farm plan and yield efficiency in our upcoming podcasts. Dan, thanks for being here. I hope you have a fantastic birthday. For anybody who wants more information on farm planning and proving your plan pays, you can get a hold of us at www.premiercrop.com. Thanks for being with us today.

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Free Resources:

009: On Offense During Farm Planning

farmer and advisor

Today we are talking with Dan and Darren about going on offense during farm planning of each season. Topics covered include ever changing complexities in the field, using data to create a farm plan for planting, and treating different parts of the field differently.

About Darren: CEO and President of Premier Crop. Fehr joined Premier Crop in 2018 and has successfully led the company in significant growth over the last two years. His passion for mentoring, leading and growing the business will be instrumental in the future of Premier Crop.

About Dan: Founder and current VP of Technical Services. Since founding PCS in 1999, Dan has witnessed many changes and transitions in the ag data industry.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

DARREN FEHR: The point is, to be responsible and to plan appropriately, it takes a lot of effort. And I think that’s the theme for this podcast: it isn’t easy to plan ahead for some of these things. For you to be successful, it isn’t easy, and it takes some time. With all that being said, Dan, what are some of the key principles here to plan effectively, prior to purchasing products and prior to getting into the production cycle?

DAN FRIEBERG: Part of what amazes me so much is how much the growers we work with plan. That’s what they do. They plan. There’s an old saying that says you plan your work and then you work your plan. To be successful, it’s all about getting organized ahead of time. For a lot of them, it starts really early. It’s really common.

We are coming up on August of 2020, and, for a lot of growers, that’s when the 2021 plan details really start to take effect. It’s because they can’t do anything else. In August of 2020, in a whole bunch of the market, you can’t do anything to affect the 2020 crop. Any kind of treatment is done. Then they turn their attention to 2021. For a lot of growers, it’s what fields are going to be rotated into what crop. They’re starting to make crop rotation decisions really early the year before.

One of the big benefits of being a great planner is related to buying opportunities. You get out in front of everything, and that sets you up to figure out when to buy what during the year. Of course, the plan is not just what’s going to happen agronomically to set up for the next crop year. It’s also your budget. It’s having placeholders in your cash flow for those buying opportunities.

DARREN FEHR: I had a chance to work with farmers for several years now. I asked every group the same question: do you plan before you buy, or do you buy before you plan? And I would say the overwhelming number bought first because there’s this pressure of getting in early, getting the early program discounts. So, speaking for products and committing to something, and then doing some detailed planning with the products that they purchased.

DAN FRIEBERG: That really happens a lot with seed. Some people think crop protection is like this area that you can’t plan, and that’s just nonsense. It’s really easy to develop a crop protection plan. All you gotta do in August is do some evaluation of what worked and where you have escapes. You can evaluate. 80 to 90 percent of your crop protection could be planned a year ahead of time because you know what weeds escaped. You can plan to tackle them next year, as you go into rotations.

DARREN FEHR: For the likelihood of having new weeds appear, would you say that’s reasonably low? Do you have a pretty good idea of your weed spectrum, your resistance levels, from year to year?

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah. Growers can definitely get a feel for resistance. Weed resistance doesn’t happen overnight, obviously, so they can get a feel for that really quickly. We went through a decade where we didn’t have weed resistance, and crop protection planning was way easier. It was just: how many ounces of glyphosate are we going to use? Now, it’s really changed, but most of it can be planned. And by having a great plan, that lets you take advantage of prepay opportunities or the right pricing opportunities.

DARREN FEHR: How do you prepare for farm planning? What data is relevant, as you think about planning your next crop year? We’re sitting here, and we’re going to start looking at variable-rate nutrient recommendations in August. What’s the relevant amount of data that I need to start planning?

DAN FRIEBERG: In our case, we manage fields based on different productivity opportunities within the field. We manage how we create zones, where we’re more aggressive or less aggressive, so that’s a component of it. Obviously, some have some kind of a spatial soil sample, where you’re capturing pH changes and organic matter changes. In soil tests, nutrient changes throughout the field is a big piece of it. That’s kind of annual, where a certain percent of the acres are getting re-sampled every year, so that information is constantly being updated. Those are big parts of the nutrient plans.

DARREN FEHR: One of the myths is planning is an event. It happens, and then you’re done, and then you go on to implement. But, Dan, that’s not what I’ve seen from farmers who are effective planners. It is a multistep process. Would you agree, and what would you see as those multiple steps that farmers need to take to plan effectively?

DAN FRIEBERG: Maybe the best way to explain it is to use an example. When you talk about farm planning with growers, one of the things they’ll say is: “It’s all weather dependent, and I can’t plan. Nobody can forecast the weather. Nobody can predict the weather. I can’t plan because I don’t know what the weather is going to be.” And in their defense, it does seem like we are having bigger swings and weather events than we did before. It could be that we are coming into a period with more weather variability.

What I find is that people can plan around weather. With nitrogen management, a lot of these growers plan their nitrogen program to have handoffs during the year. A lot of growers in heavier soils want to do some nitrogen application early because it takes the workload off. Instead of applying nitrogen in the spring, they’re planting. So, they’ll do some nitrogen ahead of time. They’ll do some nitrogen at planting, and the idea of that is to have something immediately available to the young plant. That could be a starter or a weed-and-feed application. They’ll plan a post-emerge application, and that could be anywhere from when the corn is really small to a Y-drop application later. At different places, you’re handing the crop off to different types of nitrogen applications.

We have a partner, Central Advantage in southern Minnesota, that has a program called Nitrate Now that they branded. It’s a planned side dress program, where they’re doing spatial nitrate sampling in not quite 100,000 acres every year. It’s a planned handoff. They basically account for weather. If it’s a great mineralization spring, like this year, where everything warmed up great and we had adequate moisture and everything took off, they probably are saving growers a bundle. There’s probably a lot of planned side dress that didn’t happen because it wasn’t needed. What you don’t want to do is be reactive. There’s a lot of mentality around: “I’m going to take a picture of the field through an image, and I’m going to identify, through the image, the areas that need something.”

DARREN FEHR: Definitely.

DAN FRIEBERG: Well, by the time the crop tells you it needs something, it’s too late. You’ve already lost yield. If an image tells you that the crop is denitrified, it’s not that you shouldn’t address those denitrified areas, but you’ve already lost yield. The idea is to never have the plant have a bad day. That’s what high yields are all about. You just want, from start to finish, to execute this plan where the plant never has a bad day, and that’s how you maximize yield and yield efficiency.

DARREN FEHR: Now, you talk about maximizing yield efficiency. Well, a lot of the farm planning that I’ve seen take place really has an agronomic emphasis. The economics are more difficult. Tell me about how we can effectively plan for yield efficiency.

DAN FRIEBERG: For me, it’s really in the details. These plans that we’re talking about are very detailed, and part of the detail, Darren, is we have to get out of this mindset of treating entire fields as though they’re the same. They’re not. There’s terrific variability within fields. If we’re going to drive higher return to land and management, if we’re going to drive bigger dollar return, it’s all about where we invest and how much we invest in what part of fields and how we treat parts of fields differently and how we treat fields differently from one another. They’re not all the same. Managing that variability is where the big dollar returns come in. We have single decisions that are 100-dollar-an-acre swings, basically 100-dollar-an-acre net swings for growers.

DARREN FEHR: The devil’s in the details. The complexity is: “If I’m going to variable rate my nutrients and my seed, that’s more difficult and adding cost to it is difficult.” But you’re right. Every high-performing grower that we have in yield efficiency does those things extremely well with our team, with our people.

DAN FRIEBERG: The difficulty is that’s what you pay an advisor to do, to make it not difficult, make “complex” easier. You can’t make “complex” simple, but you sure can make it easier. That’s the whole idea, just to make it easier. The outcome, by having a plan, is growers feel more in control. And when you feel more in control, you have more peace of mind.

Right now, the world seems pretty darn out of control. We’re finding out just how much our food production system is a just-in-time delivery system. There’s a lot of just-in-time everything, and that’s all detailed planning and logistics. It’s an amazing system, but, right now, having a better plan in really tight financial times just gives you more control and more peace of mind.

It’s amazing, over the years, how much I’ve witnessed, for example, growers who plan seed around the destination of the grain. Based on where the grain is going to go, they plan what they plant where. For fields that they know are going to be the last to be harvested, they are picking hybrids that have terrific standability and retention, that can stand until very late in the fall. They have fields that are coming out early to fill the grain dryer, to get the grain system going. They’re chasing an early ethanol bid on some fields. Everything is planned for details that are very plannable, but it’s just thinking ahead.

We have growers who plan manure applications two or three years ahead of time. They’ll contract with a turkey litter company way out. It’s their fertility plan. They know, every few years, they’re going to get access to so much litter or so much manure, and they plan that far out. They plan rotations around that. It’s impressive, just that ability to manage details and use your data to drive confident decision making.

DARREN FEHR: As we wrap up here, what historical data is relevant? How do farmers go about starting this plan, and what should they have prepared when we start putting their plan together, prior to harvest?

DAN FRIEBERG: For us, it’s just identifying field boundaries and grabbing anything we can. A lot of growers are sitting on a lot of yield data, historic yield data. We love to grab that because we can put that to use immediately. A lot of growers haven’t really done much with their yield data. They haven’t made a lot of decisions off of it, so they really like the idea of being able to take advantage of some of that data they’ve been collecting. We’re really big on getting a benchmark year started when we get started, so we like to grab the current planting data and applied fertility data. That way, we can establish a baseline year and judge ourselves and mark ourselves by how much we improve yields and yield efficiency.

DARREN FEHR: Yeah, we’re setting up the next podcast to talk about yield efficiency, but I want to make sure that our listeners understand we do this full, end-to-end planning process with growers, prior to them purchasing products and after, if that’s the case. I just want to remind everybody that this is a great time to get started. Make sure you contact us if you want to get involved or get started or have an opinion on our planning process. Dan, thank you again for today for being part of this podcast with me. I hope everybody has a fantastic beginning to July.

DAN FRIEBERG: Awesome, thank you.

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Free Resources:

008: You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure

farmer holding tablet

Today we are talking with Dan and Darren about how to manage what you measure when it comes to your farm operation. Topics covered include ever changing complexities in the field, monitoring your return to land and management, and how to simplify your data to understand it better.

About Darren: CEO and President of Premier Crop. Fehr joined Premier Crop in 2018 and has successfully led the company in significant growth over the last two years. His passion for mentoring, leading and growing the business will be instrumental in the future of Premier Crop.

About Dan: Founder and current VP of Technical Services. Since founding PCS in 1999, Dan has witnessed many changes and transitions in the ag data industry.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

DARREN FEHR:  We come across a lot of people who have a very small or narrow group of metrics that they’re measuring, and, consequently, the question that comes back to us often is: how do I improve my performance? So, let’s start here, Dan. Defining success is a very important first step. How has the definition of success evolved over time with the farmers that you have worked with?

DAN FRIEBERG: In general, growers get that, in order to drive higher profitability, they need to drive higher yields. So, they understand that higher yields are key, and the reason that’s the case is because row-crop farming is a high fixed-cost business. If you think about before you plant a crop, most of your machinery investment is locked in. The fuel and the labor to actually make passes across the field is variable. Obviously, land cost, whether you own it or rent it, is, by far, the biggest fixed cost. There’s a lot of other costs: family living, health insurance and all those things.

Whether you produce 100-bushel corn, or 200-bushel corn, or 50-bushel wheat, or 80-bushel wheat, it doesn’t matter. You still have a bunch of fixed costs. Producing more bushels is the only way to drive your cost down. So, yield has become the surrogate for profitability, but we know better. We know that all yield isn’t created equal. It’s really not about yield. It’s about how efficiently we produce yield and how many dollars do we return to land and management.

DARREN FEHR: We started talking about this topic, I don’t know, 18 months ago, 24 months ago. Now, economics is a really big part of the conversation. When people think about how they drive success, what are some of the big barriers to actually uncovering this idea that I know what my profitability is, or my return on investment? This ROI thing gets thrown around really easily, but this isn’t easy to get to. What advice do you have for farmers to really be proactive in getting to understand how much they get back for every dollar they spend?

DAN FRIEBERG: It is really complex. I had a friend, a professor at Iowa State, who said real-world agronomy isn’t rocket science. It’s way more complex than rocket science. His point is we put somebody on the moon with what wouldn’t be the equivalent of a PC now, or a laptop now. He’s basically saying that real-world agronomy is just super complex because it’s this interaction of all these different biological factors, including the weather and soils and fertility and seeds and genetics. If you appreciate that agronomy is incredibly complex, and you add economics to that, then everything agronomic is economic.

The reason we make the agronomic decisions we do is because we get that there’s an economic impact to them. When you add all those pieces together, there are lots of complexity to deal with. What we argue is that agronomic-economic complexity is very spatial, meaning it’s changing within fields. There are parts of fields that are just begging to be managed at a higher level. And there are parts of fields that are sending signals, like, you just need to quit wasting money here. You need to change to what is successful in each part of the field.

DARREN FEHR: Dan, as the industry’s evolved, and we’ve got this many billions of dollars of venture capital funding come in towards a variety of different ag tech startups, we have this division happening. We have precision ag that’s more agronomy focused, and we have farm management information systems, which is arguably more economic focused, maybe less agronomic and more economic. Why is there this division happening, where people are having to choose: am I going to focus on subfield agronomy? Or am I going to focus on field-level economics?

DAN FRIEBERG: Of course, our answer is you don’t have to choose. That’s what we’re about. We are all about combining those pieces together. Our solution is not one or the other. It’s both.

With Premier, this is 22 years, maybe 23 crop seasons. I’m convinced that the reason every grower doesn’t do what we do — and this is not just us, this is not just Premier — is the precision. If you put every company that has any kind of a precision ag offering, and that includes a lot of major companies, like really big companies, there’s a whole bunch of offerings. But the reason every grower doesn’t do what we do is we haven’t shown, year after year, that it pays. It’s almost that simple. If we show growers that it pays every year, they’ll do it. There’s always an adoption curve, but, eventually, everybody gets on the bus because it’s just a matter of proving that it pays.

That’s why, for us, this push to tie economics to agronomics is such a big deal. That’s what we’re doing year over year. We’re proving that it pays. If we advocate or advise the grower to spend more money in the best part of the field, at the end of the year, it’s not a “trust me” it works. We’re providing the dollars-and-cents analysis to show that they got a higher return. So, to your ROI message, that’s exactly what we’re doing. A lot of times, they’re spending 30 to 50 dollars an acre more on inputs in the best part of the field, but we’re generating an additional 80-dollar return to land and management beyond that input spend.

yieldefficiencygrowervsgroup

DARREN FEHR: You’re saying that there’s that much money left on the table at the end of the day. Once people have an accurate view of precision economics at the subfield level, there is that much money left on the table?

DAN FRIEBERG: There is. The more we get people excited about doing this, the more we’re going to be able to stretch those numbers even higher. There is no doubt we need to continue to push higher yields. The times right now demand that you scrutinize every dollar you spend to get the higher return. We used to have a slump in commodity prices. It begs that we just have to be keen on how we spend every input and every input dollar to get higher returns.

DARREN FEHR: So, in this environment, what we’re facing, with a significant cash issue at the farm gate, this isn’t about cutting costs. This is about managing costs, so that every dollar we spend stretches as far as possible.

DAN FRIEBERG: You may cut costs in some parts of some fields. It would be a false promise to suggest that you’re not going to spend whatever you save, that you’re not going to spend extra in the best part of the field. The point is we have the ability to prove and to deliver a report card on every field that says it paid. It paid better than if we flat-rated it and pretended it was all the same.

breakevencostperbushel

DARREN FEHR: So, we started off with how you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Dan, what are the metrics? What should farmers be measuring?

DAN FRIEBERG: Everything. That’s what makes it so complex. We talked about 400 layers of data at a subfield level, and people just think that we’re crazy stupid for handling the complexity of all those data layers, but that’s reality. So, the idea is it’s not one thing that matters. It’s the combination of a whole bunch of things that matter, and it changes. It changes within fields, so what matters is different within different parts of the field.

Darren, everybody in the United States can bring in digitized soils. Digitized soils means we get soil type and texture and slope and drainage class and things like that. You can bring in soils layers, which is a great starting place. In our case, we have a lot of spatial soil sampling, meaning zone or grid sampled. Instead of just doing one sample that represents the entire field, you’re capturing differences, which means you’re capturing differences in organic matter and pH and fertility. There could be a couple dozen layers captured that way.

We capture as-applied fertility. That’s more complex than people think because there’s a lot of growers that would put nitrogen on five different ways. There would be some with the phosphorus, some weed and feed, some primary N goes on or side dress or manure or starter. We capture rate, source and cost, so those are all sortable data layers that can be analyzed. We get probably 15 layers off the planting file: its population, density, seeds and things like hybrid and variety. There are hundreds of layers that aren’t necessarily captured on a monitor that really matter.

Manure would be an example. There are a lot of manure applications that really have a huge impact, both agronomically and economically. There’s a lot of input capturing the real cost associated with all this, too. It’s just a lot of detail, but that’s what we do because we think that’s what’s most meaningful.

DAN FRIEBERG: Darren, you said that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. That was a Peter Drucker quote. I would recognize the name, but the younger generation doesn’t even recognize Peter Drucker’s name. He’s a management guru, but people have added on to that Drucker statement. One of the add-ons to the Drucker statement is: things you measure tend to improve. So, if you don’t measure it, does it have any chance of improving? It just really goes to being intentional and having a goal. That’s what we do with growers when we’re interacting with growers.

Every year, there’s a goal-setting discussion about: how are we going to measure success? With some growers, they want to drive yield efficiency. They want to drive higher returns, so that they can hire some help and their family life can improve. They can have more time with the family because they’re able to afford hired labor. Others want to expand their operation. Everybody’s got slightly different goals, but, usually, it comes down to: they’re business people, and they want to generate more returns or hold their operating capital in check.

DARREN FEHR: The reality is the definition of success is different for everyone, but the other reality is that profitability matters. In having a business, whether it’s farming or anything else, everybody’s trying to make some money. Measuring the right parts to drive operational growth and profitable growth is really important. So, we’re going to talk about trying to stay ahead of the game, trying to plan before you buy, as opposed to buying and then trying to plan where you place the input. Stay tuned for that. Dan, thanks a lot for being with us this morning and talking about how you can’t manage what you don’t measure and driving higher yield efficiency.

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007: Leveraging Big Data

big data

Today we are talking with Dan and Darren about big data. Topics covered include how big data can influence the ag industry and data you have access to in your existing equipment. We will also talk about the benefits of not only big data, but big local data.

About Darren: CEO and President of Premier Crop. Fehr joined Premier Crop in 2018 and has successfully led the company in significant growth over the last two years. His passion for mentoring, leading and growing the business will be instrumental in the future of Premier Crop.

About Dan: Founder and current VP of Technical Services. Since founding PCS in 1999, Dan has witnessed many changes and transitions in the ag data industry.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

DARREN FEHR: In today’s session, we’re going to talk about big data. I should start off with the definition of big data, so our listeners can get connected to what we’re talking about. It’s a phrase that has integrated this world of technology across industries. It’s about capturing relevant data from a huge number of sources, collecting it today and translating it into something that people can use, into actionable insights to solve problems at scale and at speed. In this world of ag, we have billions of dollars of venture capital funding pouring into agriculture through technology builds. Big data has been at the center of a lot of that. How do you see this being advantageous for agriculture?

DAN FRIEBERG: Darren, I think it depends on the lens that you’re looking through. If you’re a manufacturer, there’s probably a different set of values from big data than if you’re a grower. So, it probably depends on your goal. What do you want to accomplish with the data? Obviously, big data is enabled by computing power. We just have a lot more capacity because of server farms and cloud computing. We just have way more capacity, which lets us collect more and then lets us crunch through more data.

In ag, it’s relatively recent. Before yield monitors, many decisions in ag were based on small data, which was a lot of replicated trials. We’re talking tiny. A replication in a trial might be 25-feet-long, replicated three times. That becomes an observation. So now, with yield monitors and all the other devices, we’re able to collect data at such high resolution. In a hundred-acre field, we would divide that field into 4,000 unique observations that are geo-referenced. We tie that with a lat, long, yield value and hundreds of layers of data underneath that.

DARREN FEHR: I want to get back to our big data collecting capabilities. There’s a ton of data being collected in ag today, from a lot of different sources, and a whole bunch of it is public. It seems like there’s a lot of these newer companies coming out, trying to take advantage of public data and the complexity of sourcing it and putting it together into some usable format. What are the benefits for the farmer, in terms of seeing all of the publicly available data and, specifically, for their farm and how it helps them make decisions?

DAN FRIEBERG: With a lot of the public data, for us, it’s really course. We would call it really course, meaning it’s not drilled down to a level where I think it’s all that helpful. But if you’re a company, and you’re selling an analytics package to a grain trading company, the truth is you don’t need it refined. That coarseness is fine because you’re trying to understand global yield trends and how it will move the supply chain. So, to me, a lot of the public sources aren’t as valuable to a grower as they are to other stakeholders.

DARREN FEHR: Let’s talk about some of the myths out there on big data, and this is one thing we hear a lot. We hear the words “weather modeling,” but what we’re talking about is predicting the future. It might be future weather or future performance. Tell me about big data in predicting the future. My understanding is it’s always been based on historical data, and if the historical data isn’t validated and verified at a high enough resolution, how do we use all of this to predict or model future production trends?

DAN FRIEBERG: All models are based on assumptions. They’re based on data, but there’s some assumption built into them. It’s about understanding specific geographies within fields, how they’re similar to other similar geographies in other fields. It’s almost like the more data you get, the more it lets you break it apart into more meaningful insights. The power of what we have in ag is that you have different growing environments every year. As we grow as a company, we have different growing environments within the same year. So, Nebraska or Minnesota can have a dramatically different growing environment than Indiana and Ohio. For example, you could see how a hybrid or variety performs in the same year in dramatically different growing environments, just because you’re seeing it across these big geographies.

DARREN FEHR: But that’s highly dependent on believing in this idea that agronomy is local, that agronomy and geography have a really close relationship with each other. There’s this whole idea of big data and aggregating it across multiple different agronomic environments. How do we give it enough credibility that people can make decisions from it?

DAN FRIEBERG: Over the years, as we’re building as a company, the ability to aggregate data geographically is a big deal. The ultimate power of all this is subfield because that’s where you drive change. If you’re actually going to change and make improvements, it’s going to be subfield. Everybody wants to see beyond their own operation. They want to see agronomic practices or agronomic trends or rates. When somebody comes in, they want to see the biggest data set possible, which means bigger geography. The bigger you get and the more data you get, then, all of a sudden, they’re like, “I really don’t care about seeing the big data. I want to see the local data.” Local is king in ag. The bigger, richer data set you can get locally, the more powerful it is because there are more things that are relevant and stay the same.

We almost went through a decade where it seemed like the whole seed industry on corn was going to a lot of fixed-year numbers. The only way you could drive yield was to drive population. In the data, no matter what size of database, there was this trend. We were marching up 400 or 500 seeds per acre for a decade because that’s what it took in order to drive yields.

Now, we’ve gone through almost a decade where it seems like there’s a lot of flex in numbers, so we’re producing much higher yields at lower populations. But, when we were going through that match up in population, all of a sudden people started looking at row width. We had this phenomenon where everybody was chasing 20-inch corn and even narrower corn. 39,000 in a 30-inch row is too close. The plants are on top of each other, and need to space them out more.

In the data, 20-inch corn was a South Dakota and southern Minnesota phenomenon. That’s where we were seeing the most 20-inch corn. We had people outside of that area that wanted to drill down. They wanted to see data outside of their area because they were trying to make a decision about switching to a narrower row of corn, as a way to space out the plants as they continue to drive the population.

DARREN FEHR: With this idea of resolution, first of all, it’s data resolution. You mentioned the word subfield. When I say high resolution, I’m meaning subfield. This goes beyond the field boundary, and we’re looking at different parts of different areas inside of every field. So, high-resolution data means subfield.

We walk around with our cell phones, and they’re not phones anymore. They’re cameras, obviously. They’re used for filming and capturing videos. I always marvel at the fact that, when you capture a digital photo today, at a very high resolution, you can blow it up and make it as big as you want, and it’s still clear. I think about big data that way. If we capture and collect it at this subfield or high-resolution level, we can blow it up, and we can use it so that the insights are still clear.

DAN FRIEBERG: No matter how much you blow it up. Versus the other way. If you don’t capture that kind of detail, then, as you blow it up, it distorts.

DARREN FEHR: Myths about big data: if you haven’t got involved in big data now, you’re probably too late.

DAN FRIEBERG: No, not at all. A lot of growers are sitting on data, and nobody’s helped them use it. Yield data is, by far, the most. There are growers who quit caring about yield data because they haven’t used it. One of our successes is that, as we get engaged, we grab that historic yield data and try to use it to capture the variability that exists within fields. With a lot of growers, their data is in different buckets, and it’s not put together in a way that they really can capture it. A 3,000-acre grower in our system would create 120,000 observations. We would see yield by all these hundreds of layers of data, 120,000 times, just on a 3,000-acre operation. You can go from zero to big data really quick in farming. Anytime you get started is great, and you can start creating value right away.

DARREN FEHR: Another Big Data Myth: Data is messy, it’s complex, it can be confusing and it can be deceiving. Let’s talk about this idea where I see relationships between the data, which you have always talked to us about in terms of correlations, but not always do those relationships cause an effect. Talk about causation and correlation.

DAN FRIEBERG: We’re capturing data off the planter, as it goes across the field, we’ve been able to calculate planting speed. One of the very early signs was we had a report that showed the faster they planted the corn, the better and higher the yield. That’s an example where faster planting speed was correlated to higher yields. Parts of the field worked up rough. They slowed down because they were trying to maintain seed-soil contact. As they went into those areas that worked up rough, they slowed the tractor down and slowed the planter down. In the part of the field that worked up great, they planted at normal speed or higher speed and, that was where the higher yields were. The rougher areas worked up rough, so the real correlation was to field conditions of planting, but it showed up as planting speeds.

So, it was an example where you can have correlation, but it doesn’t necessarily mean causation.

DARREN FEHR: Let’s talk about nitrogen and data. Nitrogen seems to be a very popular topic, and there’s always this idea that one pound of nitrogen is enough to produce a bushel of corn. Talk to me about this generalization of data.

DAN FRIEBERG: For decades, we lived in a world of this idea of 1.2 pounds of nitrogen per bushel produced minus credits for legume. If you’re on a corn-soybean rotation with a 250-bushel yield goal, or 200, 1.2 would be 240 minus 40 or 50 pounds of credit for a soybean crop per head. That would put you back at about 200 pounds of N. So, that 1.2 less credits led people to this notion of about a pound of nitrogen per bushel produced. Certainly, what our experience has been is that’s no longer at all close. Nitrogen use in the data, Darren, tends to fluctuate a lot with the price of commodities. I hate to say it, but when we went through a seven-dollar corn cycle, you could see it in N rates.

Now that things are tight again, we’re back to trying to squeeze every bushel out of each pound of nutrient that we apply. In times like this, we’ve seen people produce plus 200-bushel yields on 0.6 pounds of N per bushel. That’s really scrutinizing your nitrogen and it’s using variable rate to do nitrogen. Growers want to make sure that nitrogen is not what’s yield limiting. They tend to be aggressive a lot of times, and so we try to help them put that in perspective. Actually, that idea of a pound of N per bushel may not be that far off, except that there are zones within a field where 0.7 pounds of N per bushel might be ideal. And there are other parts of the field where it might take more than a pound of N per bushel produced.

We believe very much that nitrogen response is very spatial. It changes. The ideal rate changes within each field. Of all the nutrients, nitrogen would probably be the one that is the most uniformly applied. A lot of growers put the same rate on every acre, and so we see it as an opportunity for dramatic improvement.

DARREN FEHR: We are somewhat biased because we’ve been promoting variable rate technology for two decades. Seed population and planting population aren’t that much different. We’re biased because we see the incredible amount of dollars left on the table. Planting population, specifically in soybeans, have just taken a dramatic turn. Talk about that.

DAN FRIEBERG: Soybeans have just been the opposite strategy of corn. We keep backing off the population in the best parts of fields and seem to actually continue to increase yield. We probably hold our populations a little higher in the worst part of the field, just to be more aggressive in those defensive areas. There’s not as many dollars in play from a seed investment perspective. We’re still seeing dramatic positive results from reducing populations in almost any kind of a growing environment. Last year, Darren, was the exception because we had so much late-planted. Because of 2019 being such a wet spring, we pushed soybean planting so late that it was probably the outlier in the data.

DARREN FEHR: What are some examples? You’ve done a lot of work on the economics of variable rate. What are some examples that you can think of that come to mind about just the shock and awe of how much money is left out there when we deploy flat-rate solutions?

DAN FRIEBERG: We have the big data analytics, and we have all kinds of big data analytic tools, but now we’re able to do replicated trials in mass, in volume, in growers’ fields at the speed of farming. The equipment is executing the trial, so it’s preprogrammed. The trial is preprogrammed into the prescription, so we’re laying down replicated trials. We’re ramping up really fast, and then we can aggregate those trial results to like-agronomic environments.

I’m a huge advocate of variable rate everything, but now we’re able to put the dollars and cents to it through replicated trials. And it really surprises me. We’re talking about 100-dollar-an-acre net swings for as little as a 4,000-seed difference. Just dramatic swings. So, if you push over the top, if you push populations too far, not only do you spend more on seed, but you can drive yields down really fast. Getting the rate right in every part of every field is big time dollars. On nitrogen, it could be 50-dollar, 60-dollar-an-acre swings.

In this world that we’re in right now, when you talk about 50 to 100-dollars-an-acre differences, that’s it. We’re going into struggling to break even. We’re going to need some combination of crop insurance. Growers absolutely hate it, but we’re in a situation where, just to break even, we’re going to need some government program. There are all these political debates on how much to subsidize what part of the sector, but in the ag economy, it’s really difficult to make money, to break even. So, 50 to 100-dollar-an-acre swings, just on how you manage inputs, is real, and it’s big dollars.

DAN FRIEBERG: Big data needs local context. The best big data is local big data. Sometimes I think the best thing about big data is providing the questions. Big data lets you see relationships that you couldn’t see before. It sets you up to do a trial to answer the question. So, big data can be the source of what to look for next. Instead of providing answers, it provides the next question, which is what we’re all about: this continuous improvement.

We’re all about: what can we do to change? What can we help you change to drive continuous improvement? Sometimes big data provides answers that you can take to the bank, but a lot of times it provides insights that lead to questions that lead to: let me do a trial. I think I see something, and now I want to prove it.

DARREN FEHR: That’s an incredible insight. Dan, it’s always a pleasure. It’s always fun to hear your thoughts, your experiences. Thanks for sharing your ideas and thoughts on big data.

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006: Innovating During a Crisis

innovation

 

Today we are talking about innovating during a crisis and how efficiency in agriculture is key. Topics covered include how this pandemic will be remembered, keeping an eye on your bottom line during a tight economy, and how farming is like golf.

About Darren: CEO and President of Premier Crop. Fehr joined Premier Crop in 2018 and has successfully led the company in significant growth over the last two years. His passion for mentoring, leading and growing the business will be instrumental in the future of Premier Crop.

About Dan: Founder and current VP of Technical Services. Since founding PCS in 1998, Dan has witnessed many changes and transitions in the ag data industry.  Data analytics will show how efficiently farmers produce. It’s about getting serious about producing efficiency in agriculture and it’s all in the details.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

All Change is Preceded by a Crisis

DARREN FEHR: Hey Dan, our topic of the day is all change is preceded by a crisis. It’s sad to say, but it’s funny how innovation takes wild turns and only at the advent of a crisis. Tell me a little bit about what you think this COVID-19 business is going to do, in terms of transforming the way we farm.

DAN FRIEBERG: Well, for me personally, it’s reminiscent of the 1980s. I started my career in the 80s and plunged right into the farm crisis. And so, it feels a lot like that, Darren. I feel like credit is going to tighten people. Growers are having trouble getting operating lines extended to cover everything they need. So, it just feels like that 80s crisis. There are differences. We have cheap interest. At that time, we had really high interest and high inflation, and there were a lot of other dynamics. But when your operating budget goes upside down, when it gets negative, it causes dramatic change. I remember the 80s well, and I remember having to just scrutinize everything we did differently. I mean, just through that lens of how hard it was to make money.

DARREN FEHR: Do you think a farm gaped cash flow is the biggest issue? What do you think are some of the biggest issues that farmers are facing that are really going to reflect on their ability to either grow, expand or need to get out?

DAN FRIEBERG: There are about three or four big ones for me. One is just keeping your operating capital intact. It’s just so easy to lose operating capital, and it’s different. Nobody wants to touch your land equity or any of that. I mean, there’s a lot of equity, but it’s just about whether you have operating capital and having your operating capital intact while a lot of people expand. To me, there’s this real false narrative, and it just repeats itself over and over again that farmers are great producers and bad marketers. They may be bad marketers, but the idea that everybody’s a great producer is not true, either.

We see it in data. That’s what we do. We do a lot of data analytics, and we see huge swings in how efficiently people produce. So, to me, when you talk about innovation in the middle of a crisis, it’s about getting serious about producing efficiently. And producing efficiently is all in the details.

DARREN FEHR: It’s interesting that you talk about efficiency and production because we talk to so many farmers who say, ‘All I want to do is farm. Leave me out of the details or the administration because the data thing is complex.’ How do we work through this idea that I want to farm because of what I enjoy, but how do I do this efficiently? What does that mean?

DAN FRIEBERG: I totally understand exactly what they’re saying. Our experience as a company is that growers don’t want to do all the data work. Growers want us and their advisor to do the data work. They want to consume the output of their data analytics, and for us to provide analytics that are meaningful and advise. Then, the following step is to take action on it. So, it’s just that constant improvement cycle that we go through. They want to consume data analytics. I mean, all the detail that goes into having great data, that’s not what excites them. They’d much rather farm than they would be in the details of the data.

The Importance of Planning

DARREN FEHR: Do you think that there’s enough emphasis placed on pre-production planning? We talk a lot about the ag technology that’s been invested in in-season crop monitoring. A lot of the seasonal, cyclical buying lends itself to think that there isn’t this early season, robust planning process. What do you think is going to change here after we get through this crisis that we’re facing, in terms of this planning piece?

DAN FRIEBERG: There are exceptions to this. One of the exceptions is high value crops and irrigation. With high value crops and irrigation, you can turn on a dime. You can adjust everything because you can treat the plant and feed it like it’s on an IV. But most of North American production is rain-fed, so planning is everything. Just having detailed plans and not missing any of the details in that planning process is everything.

One of the quotes that’s battered around a lot is, “you don’t want the plant to have a bad day.” If the plant tells you it’s suffering, it’s too late. It’s like when people show these images of denitrification, and it’s like, ‘Okay, you’ve already lost yield. You’re right, you can correct that.’ But the whole goal is to never get to that place. And that’s the reason you do plans. The reason you spend that time making sure you got the plan right is so that you’re avoiding those train wrecks. You still have to monitor the crop. You still have to respond because there are things that happen. But even with plant diseases, you can plan for those. You can plan for insects. A lot of the decisions are all pre-budgeted.

When I talk about managing operating capital, there’s a lot of input dollars at stake and how you spend those input dollars is what I’m talking about with how efficient you farm. These really tight, upside-down economics that we’re in just screams that you have to stretch every input dollar absolutely as far as you can. You just can’t be wasteful. It’s all about investing every dollar at the right place at the right time to get the best return.

DARREN FEHR: You make a really good point here. By the time you see the problem, it’s probably too late. It’s probably because you missed some of the symptoms. Now, we spend a lot of time talking about what happens below ground, and we do a lot with nutrition and soil fertility. Is this an area that we can get better at or we can help people with more, in terms of the planning piece and planning to deliver, over time, higher organic matter or more efficient nitrogen use? What’s your take on our ability to help production efficiency below ground?

DAN FRIEBERG: We will look back a decade from now and think how crude we were in 2020. We will look back and think how crude we are. So, we’re going to continue to make dramatic advancements. For us, it’s all about how we characterize like-agronomic environments and how we treat them differently. We believe that the ideal rate of everything changes within geographies within fields. So, we are going to get better and better at all of this.

Darren, so much of crop production and so much of the science behind crop production is a little bit siloed. And in the real world, it’s all integrated. So, if you even think of it in university settings, we have etymologists and we have plant pathologists and we have nutrition specialists. And even in nutrition, they tend to be specialized by nutrients. But in the real world, it’s all those things colliding together. And so there are all these interactions, and that’s what makes real-world agronomy so complex. There’s just lots of room for improvement, and that’s what we’re going to do.

You share a common background that I have. We both grew up in the livestock industry, and sometimes it’s just shocking how much the livestock industry is so data-driven. People don’t realize just how data-driven it is. You come from the dairy industry, which was decades ahead of everybody else, even the rest of the livestock industry. The dairy industry was data-driven decades ago. And in many ways, with crop production, because of GPS and the ability to spatially measure yield in responses to different treatments, we’re playing catch up right now.

DARREN FEHR: So, does that mean that maybe the livestock business went through this kind of a crisis way sooner in its life cycle? I don’t even remember this digital transformation and the need of data in livestock, but it feels like we’re going to be very intentional here in transitioning to more of a data-driven industry in crop production. Is that the case, or is this just going to feel very normal to people who are farming, progressing and growing?

DAN FRIEBERG: Hopefully, it feels more normal. A little bit of what’s happened in livestock is it’s obviously become really specialized and consolidated into fewer hands and all that. But a lot of times, when we get in front of growers who are also actively involved and at risk in the livestock industry, they will draw the parallel. They’ll say, ‘Oh my goodness.’ It’s almost like a wake up call. And they’re not talking about just feed efficiency and rate of gain. They’re talking about knowing the economic numbers associated with that unit of production.

When we show them what we’re doing, they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re talking about treating my crop land the same as I treat a pen of pigs or a pen of cattle.’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.’ We’re tying all the pieces together, not just production efficiency or nutrient efficiency. We’re tying economics to every part of the field.

DARREN FEHR: Isn’t it the same, like in sports, where you want to improve performance? There are certain metrics that you’re going to do to improve your end result. My golf game is really crappy, and I measured the end score, but there’s a ton of other metrics that I could measure if I wanted to get a lot better in certain parts of my game. And isn’t farming sort of similar to that?

DAN FRIEBERG: It is. It really is. I obviously work too much and don’t golf enough, like you. There’s a saying in golf, at least among us really crude players, “you drive for show and putt for dough.”

DARREN FEHR: I have no dough because my putting is horrible.

DAN FRIEBERG: But sometimes, in crop production, high yields have become the show. They become what you do for show. And to me, it’s like, ‘Okay, that’s part of the game.’ I mean, yields are really key, but it’s not just about yields. It’s about return to land and management. How do I make more money? The metrics that we use to measure have got to have an economic component because not all yield is created equal. You can throw the kitchen sink at something and have high yields, but that doesn’t mean you’re improving your operating capital.

DARREN FEHR: You’ve got to get down the fairway, and if you can’t chip and putt, you’re probably not going to score real well. To all of our listeners here, this is sort of the final word: if the seeds of innovation are born out of a crisis, Dan, what should farmers be thinking about today?

DAN FRIEBERG: Just focus on how to be more efficient, how to produce more efficiently. Keep scrutinizing. Darren, the other thing is they’re managing multi-million-dollar operations. I feel for them because they’re constantly learning a new skill set. As a manager, you’re managing more complexity and more people. They’re all turned into financial managers. In some cases, it’s just finding somebody to help you manage the details. In our case, that’s our value proposition: let us help you manage all the agronomic and economic details associated with crop production.

DARREN FEHR: Awesome. It sets us up for the next podcast that we’re going to have, talking about big data. And we can talk about COVID-19 and how the delivery of this exceptional data has helped us think through this crisis and how agriculture uses big data. So, thanks Dan for joining me today on our podcast. Stay tuned next week for our podcast on big data.

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005: Verifying In-Season Applications and Profits

farmer

Today we are talking about verifying in-season applications and profits in your field. We are joined by Pat Mai, Account Manager for Ag Partners and his grower Shaun Wolf. This is Shaun’s first year using a precision ag program. He shares insight he has learned from the past few months and his experience leveraging data in his operation.

About Pat: Account Manager for InSiteCDM. He assists the western territory of Ag Partners. Focusing mainly on InSiteCDM management, setting up management zones, and making recommendations on his findings based on data from growers.

About Shaun: A grower that farms in Northwest Iowa entering his first year using a precision ag approach to data in his fields.

If you are enjoying the show, tweet us using #PremierPodcast.

PAT MAI: I’m in charge of the western territory of Ag Partners. I mainly do CDM management where I help set up zones, and make recommendations for seed and fertility according to those zones. I query data for guys in the program who have questions.

SHAUN WOLF: I’m Shaun Wolf and I farm in Northwest Iowa. Last fall, Pat approached me to sign up for the program, and we signed up. It’s the first year and, so far, it’s going well.

What are some of the benefits of verifying in-season applications?

SHAUN WOLF: Certain products and practices perform better than others. If you have any crop injury, you have everything documented in your records. It helps me remember, all season long, what has been done come fall. Everything you’ve done all season long is documented and easy to access.

PAT MAI: What do you think of the use of precision ag as a service?

SHAUN WOLF: It helps me determine how much I can put into my inputs while getting the best return on investments. They have a program to take all your production data in one area and tailor a program suited for you, instead of taking broad data from around the country and trying to apply it to your farm.

PAT MAI: You get some local answers instead of out-of-state stuff. Well, Shaun, how does farm analytics help you identify problem areas and improve them?

SHAUN WOLF: They help break down your operation farm by farm. They help find problem areas and resolve issues. If you have consistent low-yielding areas, they help determine the cause and hopefully improve it. If you can’t improve it, you can put that area in a CRP or lower your populations to get your best return on it.

PAT MAI: Or you can take your above average ground and push that harder to improve that. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your worst ground. We’ve been doing some ELBs (Enhanced Learning Blocks) and running some NexGen recommendations for nitrogen. Where do you think that can take us in the future?

SHAUN WOLF: You can measure how hard to push populations in your A zones and how far you can drop your population in your poor zones before you see a yield reduction. It’s just trying to maximize each acre and get the full potential out of it.

PAT MAI: With these new hybrids coming out, we can learn where the right population is for each zone, with your ELBs.

SHAUN WOLF: Right. And you can place certain hybrids in different areas to perform better.

How do you think agricultural technology can make your farm more efficient?

SHAUN WOLF: It reduces the chance of skips in the field. Pat showed me he hasn’t skipped when he’s planting. There’s less time spent in the field, which saves fuel and labor fatigue. You can produce more while using less inputs and improving your yields. It just all around makes your operation more efficient.

PAT MAI: What have you learned from precision ag and how has it benefited your farm profit?

SHAUN WOLF: This is the first year for the InSite program. It’s looking to increase yields by pushing populations in your better areas and border populations to get the best return on investment there. You can save a little seed in the poor areas, increase your fertilizer in your better areas and just learn how to maximize.

How do you work with your advisor to develop a crop plan?

SHAUN WOLF: First, we give all our yield history to create zones. And then from that, we create our planting population maps, rate maps and fertilizer recs.

PAT MAI: Yeah, I took your zones, made them and brought them back to you. Then you tweaked them and told me if I was right or wrong.

SHAUN WOLF: Well, as the farmer, we know our ground better than, let’s say, Pat. He just comes and sees what’s on the computer. But we’re out farming the ground every year. So we know the farms. We might have a better understanding of what’s doing what, if it’s a wet spot or a sandy area.

PAT MAI: It could have been a hybrid failure one year or green snap.

SHAUN WOLF: Yep. So, yield data doesn’t necessarily tell you everything. It gives you a broad idea, but it may not be accurate every year, if you had an issue. And that’s what helps. Instead of just saying, here’s your recs and good luck, we can work with them and tailor it to what you think is best.

PAT MAI: We don’t have to waste one year of trial and error learning the ground. Since his grandpa’s been farming and his dad and now him, there are 70 years of knowledge there. Let’s utilize it.

SHAUN WOLF: When Pat and Clint approached me, it just made sense. We’ve had all this yield data compiled and nowhere to go with it. With data, if you don’t have a place to utilize it and put it to work for you, there’s really no point in having it. Doing a soil test, we’re operating our fertilizer, but we haven’t yet railroaded too much with our planting. But I think this will really take it to the next level. Especially with this farm economy the way it is, you need to be as efficient as possible. Then also with our cost tracking, worked out farm by farm, you get a better understanding of where you’re at for break-even to get the best return on investment. You can’t afford to be losing money where things are now.

PAT MAI: We ran some cost tracking modeling on a couple of his fields to see if it was beneficial to keep the rotation or switch to a corn-on-corn rotation. Just with the pricing and marketing of it, that’s an added benefit to help make those decisions before you actually get it into the ground.

SHAUN WOLF: At the time, it probably was wise to do corn-on-corn. But then, obviously, this COVID-19 came and things changed again. It’s an ever-changing market. I do all our own spraying, so when I’m spraying herbicide and fungicide, it’s all documented: day, time, temperature, wind speed. However, I really didn’t do anything with it. Obviously, the fungicide and herbicide will probably overlay with our harvest maps and see if there was a response. If we didn’t leave some strips, maybe we compare herbicide-wise. We have it documented if there’s a crop injury or if things didn’t perform like they were supposed to. With your alternative things like fungicide, you definitely want to see if that’s paying for itself.

Every season’s going to be different but, historically, the InSite CDM program is showing every year that it pays for itself. So, with that knowledge, it makes you more willing to spend the money to put a fungicide on. You wonder, should I do it or shouldn’t do it? But then you pass it up and lose out on yield.

PAT MAI: And you’re trying other types of fungicides or other trials with other companies that were recording. We can do validation reports on it to help verify that it’s working. If you’re splitting a 40-acre field and doing half and half, or doing certain seed treatments or graphite on seed, it helps keep that all straight and documented to actually see if it’s working and paying.

SHAUN WOLF: Yeah, I’m doing a Compass Minerals trial. They have a seed treatment. It’s basically a talc you throw in the planter. Nothing real crazy about it. You just treat it as you normally would for your talc or graphite. And then, in-season with the herbicide pass, there’s a foliar treatment to put in. And then, late-season, we put a fungicide on the corn ground. Another foliar treatment is put on, and it’s all on the same acres.

PAT MAI: We’re running it through CDM, and we can kick out a validate report. And it’ll break it up by soil type, fertility levels, which hybrid it is. I mean, it gives you a base of data underneath to see if it is that stuff or what’s actually helping it. With the plan, we’ll just watch what we did this year, what we learned from it and if we like it.

Going forward, we really won’t know a whole lot until harvest rolls around and we see the results, or the answers, of what we did this year before we can go ahead and make a plan for 2021. We’ll look at the group data and see if what happened on his farms is an anomaly. If everyone had just as good of luck with certain hybrids, speed the process up instead of planting the same hybrid for three years and seeing if that’s the right one for us. So, we can look at everybody else’s data, also, and either not plant it again or try it again. To make a plan, we have to see how this year goes first.

SHAUN WOLF: You basically looked at your yields, and it helped determine if, next year, we’re not going to plant this hybrid because it didn’t do well. Or, next year, we’re going to plant more of this hybrid because it did do better. But, as far as changing our program, it really didn’t do anything because it couldn’t put the data in and change it for you. So that’s why we were really more interested in signing up, to just have one place to put your data and get some results and be able to change things.

I’ve known Pat for a long time, and he already knows the history of our farm. So, that helped a lot. Last fall, I wanted recs made and I think, within 24 hours, Pat had them to me. It was quick, with good answers. Pat’s always there, and if he doesn’t have the answer, he’ll try and find it. So, it’s been nice to have somebody to lean on and get the answers, instead of just guessing.

PAT MAI: You got to see a presentation of everybody’s data then, for 2019, which brought back a lot more questions for me and helped query a lot of data he was thinking about.

SHAUN WOLF: We’ve been backing off our bean populations, just from data we’ve seen, and it helped confirm that we’re doing the right thing. So, that gave us peace of mind that we’re doing the right thing there. It takes the guessing out of it. That’s why I like the program. It’s basically telling you what to do, instead of shooting from the hip. It takes the guessing out of it.

PAT MAI: It gives you more concrete evidence of why we’re making these decisions. It’s not just me pulling it out of the sky, thinking you should just try this. I can give him a good answer with data to prove it to him. And it helps him sleep at night, just knowing that there is something backing it, not just willy-nilly.

SHAUN WOLF: You feel a lot better having it and not worrying about it.

PAT MAI: Thank you for taking the time for this podcast. Are there any other closing remarks? We appreciate your business.

SHAUN WOLF: I appreciate you. If I have a question, you’re there with an answer. And as we go forward, we’ll rock this operation.

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004: Protecting Crop Profits

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Today we are talking about the value of protecting crop profits during uncertain times. Listen as Rodney and Eric discuss variable rate seeding, managing your input costs, using learning blocks to better understand your fields, and other related topics.

About Eric: Eric farms row crops Southeast of Britt, IA. He was born and raised in Britt and started farming with his dad in, roughly, 1997. He has slowly taken over the farm operation and added to it over the years using ag data to make better decisions in his fields.

About Rodney: Rodney is with SciMax Solutions, helping growers use their data to make better decisions on their operation. He has been working with Eric for a number of years on his operation.

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RODNEY LEGLEITER: How does farm analytics help your farm become more cost efficient?

ERIC MARCHAND: When you break your farm down, you can see where the profit robbing issues are. You can try to correct them or combat them. Some examples would be using different hybrids, nitrogen rates, fertilizer responses, or variable rate planting in certain areas. SciMax compiles the data from other growers in the area, then helps find different practices that are working versus what isn’t working. You can not only see your farm operation, but see what others are doing anonymously. This way you can manage each acre slightly different to maximize your profitability on each acre.

RODNEY LEGLEITER: How do you manage input costs to protect crop profits?

ERIC MARCHAND: It’s about having the right population of the right hybrid on each acre in each area of the field, as well as optimizing your nitrogen rate, your micronutrients, and even your P and K rates. Going clear back to the basic as-planted map and overlaying that with your yield mapping, you can determine your crop profits by field, acre and hybrid.

RODNEY LEGLEITER: Talking about variable rate, you’ve been variable rate seeding for quite a few years. Tell us the timeline and history of how you’ve been using variable rate prescriptions and seeding.

ERIC MARCHAND: In 2013 I purchased hydraulic drives on my planter and knew I could variable rate. Since I had the technology available to me, I tried a little bit of corn in a field or two each year. I broadened that into trying a field of beans based on pH and adding four more corn acres. It went to having a prescription written for every acre of corn and beans that I plan to plant each year.

I believe variable rate really pays off in optimizing your population. I wouldn’t say you’re cutting back in the less productive acres. You are cutting back your population, but you’re optimizing your population more than just cutting it back to save seed. Cutting back saves the seed cost, but it also allows the best population on that acre to produce the best yield. Saving input cost, as well as increased yield for return, is a double-ended benefit.

RODNEY LEGLEITER: There’s a misconception that you’re going to cut your seeding costs drastically, but that’s really not the case when you’ve pretty much got the same average rate across the field.

ERIC MARCHAND: You’re right. If you decide the ballpark of what you would flat rate that field by seed, most of the time you’re within one bag. So you’re not cutting back seed. You’re taking it out of the less productive areas and putting it in the higher producing areas. You’re trying to be a little more offensive in the good ground. Meanwhile, you’re more conservative to optimize the situation in the less productive ground.

RODNEY LEGLEITER: Throughout the years you’ve tried the SciMax Nitrogen program with variable rate nitrogen and you’ve been able to reduce your rates by anywhere from 25 to 30 percent over those acres and still maintain, if not, increase yield. What are the different things you’ve tried with the SciMax Nitrogen program?

ERIC MARCHAND: Yes, definitely. With the variable rate single application or dual applications, you can cut your rates back. I used Learning Blocks® to test different rates to see if there was a yield drag where the nitrogen rates were cut.

I used learning blocks as a convincing agent, especially with variable rate nitrogen. Guys have thought if you pump more nitrogen out there, you’ll get more yield. Seeing data SciMax has with reducing nitrogen rates challenges the comfort zone of the ‘old-time-thinking.’ We wanted to see for ourselves. We put a learning block out that used my old nitrogen rate, and a higher rate. When we got our yield maps and lay over the nitrogen rate learning block, we saw little to no change. We even sometimes saw a negative response on the higher rate. It builds confidence to make the decision for the right rates next year. And it’s not only nitrogen, you can start analyzing nitrogen rates to planting population to micronutrients and fungicides.

Instead of doing strips where your ground varies across a field, do sections where you see if what you’re doing matters. You can start to ask the questions, ‘What if I went and did that? Would I have had the same results anyway? Did I just get a banner year and get a good yield out there? Or did I do the right thing by pushing the population or by cutting the population back?’ The Learning Block tells you changing if what you changed provided a result. In some instances, maybe changing this didn’t work. But it’s not a test plot from a hundred miles away. It’s your learning block right there in your own field.

RODNEY LEGLEITER: The farm economy is being impacted, more so in some areas than others. Tell me a little bit about your thought of the farm economy and what you’re seeing, how it’s affecting you and what keeps you up at night, as far as the current farming economy?

ERIC MARCHAND: In tough economic years, it’s even more important to manage your inputs and to maximize crop profits. Way too often, I hear people want to maximize yield and, obviously, the more bushels you have, the more you have to sell. But if they cost you too much to raise, you might not have increased your profitability by increasing yield. I’m proud to say I have a good partner in SciMax by managing input costs, maximizing profitability, and helping protect my crop profits.

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003: The Value of Precision Ag During Tight Economic Times

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Today we are talking about the value of precision ag and data during tough economic times. We are joined by Aaron Seifert, Business Development Manager and Dan Frieberg, Co-Founder of Premier Crop Systems.

Listen in as Aaron and Dan discuss the effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the agriculture industry, observations they are both seeing, and how growers will push through this difficult time.

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AARON SEIFERT: There is some additional uncertainty with COVID-19 in markets and things like that. Where does the value of precision ag come up in these types of times? Producers are probably making very difficult decisions. How does precision ag bring value today?

DAN FRIEBERG: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So for us, it’s all about trying to use the data and the analytics to just constantly refine everything. As a company, I don’t think we’ve benefited like other companies did. Between grain storage and artificial drainage, there have been lots and lots of equipment upgrades. But I think we actually grow quicker and faster when the economics are really tight for the grower. When budgets get upside down, like they are now with the economic crisis, it’s hard to make money. It’s really hard to make money.

For young farmers, it’s hard to make money to grow. It’s hard to make money to hire the next person. And when you get into really tight economic times all of a sudden, then it’s like, ‘Okay, I need to do something different. I’ve got to find ways to squeeze more out of every dollar I invest. I just have to.’ So, that understanding of how hard it is to make money, it helps us because, hopefully, growers are looking for a way to do that, and that’s what we do every day. We help manage that totality of input investment, including field trips and all that. We help manage and advise, and it’s all in the name of driving higher yield efficiency or higher return to land and management. How can we squeeze more dollars out of every dollar that we invest?

AARON SEIFERT: We’ve heard a hundred times that you can’t cut your way to prosperity, right? You can’t save your way to prosperity. So it’s not necessarily about spending less on the investment side, it’s about getting more out of every dollar that you are spending on every input decision that you’re making.

DAN FRIEBERG: And to me that always happens in the subfield. You can make really crude adjustments, like treating fields differently. That might be a starting place for some people. But to me, it always drives way deeper than that. If I’m going to drive economic change and higher returns, I’ve got to change things within the field. Not every acre is the same. Geography matters. Where you are in the field matters, and how you manage what you do in parts of fields makes all the difference.

AARON SEIFERT: That’s great. I think the focus on the efficiency pieces is always bigger. Regardless of what the market’s like, you always want to take advantage of the dollars that you spend, but it’s exceptionally important in times where margins are critically tight.

DAN FRIEBERG: And this COVID-19 thing is going to have a long tail, I believe. And I believe that it’s going to change our world. Over the 20 years of our company history, one of the big changes has been the connectedness of the world. The reason the virus could spread so much quicker is we are so connected as a world. And what’s going to come to the forefront is all these integrated supply chains and all the things that we take for granted. But one of the things that I think is going to play out is how much we take the food supply for granted. And I think we could have significant disruption in the food supply, including the meat industry.

So many people in the world have taken for granted how darn efficient the food chain is. Capitalism has an amazing ability to drive cost out of the system. But what happens? When you drive cost out of the system, you end up with a whole bunch of just-in-time delivery. It is the whole system. Why, all of a sudden, do we run out of everything at the grocery store? It’s because everything is managed so tightly. The whole supply chain is managed so tightly that it’s a well-oiled machine. But when you throw some big wrench into a well-oiled machine, you’re going to see more empty shelves.

You know, I couldn’t find chicken at the store last night. I mean, I could find drumsticks and wings, but I couldn’t find any other chicken. And it’s a big store! But that could happen over and over again. It depends on how this plays out. But 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. What a job we’ve done at a very low cost. And hopefully, in turn, we end up with some higher prices. We sure need some luck that way.

AARON SEIFERT: Yeah, that would help out the outlook today for sure. The good thing is that ranchers are still ranching and farmers are still putting seed in the ground. Like you said, we’ve gotten so incredibly good and efficient at doing that. That’s where it just becomes ever more important to manage those growers’ operations better and better, taking every opportunity to learn from something and try something new and to continuously improve. Because if we’re not doing that, then our outlook looks pretty bleak if we’re not constantly improving.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, we’re really fortunate. Farmers, by nature, are incredibly optimistic, but it’s hard. It’s hard to stay optimistic sometimes, but they are by nature. That’s why they do what they do. It’s fun. It makes it fun to work with them. When we get involved, we understand the economics because we deal with it. We deal with the economics. We know how ugly it is and how hard it is to make it work. Knowing the grower’s economics makes us better at what we do. It makes us work that much harder because we know how tight it is for the grower.

AARON SEIFERT: Absolutely. Alright, well we appreciate your time today, Dan. Thanks for the insight. Looking forward to the many changes to come, and we’ll see what happens here after COVID-19.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, we can talk again sometime about the future, but there’s going to be a lot of change in the next 10 years for sure. That’ll be another fun discussion.

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