Fourteen Years’ Data Guide Darle Elkin’s Decisions Darle Elkin used to man Air Force nuclear weapon guidance systems, so it’s…

A successful crop means checking your work to track trends. Blocks have always been linked to learning. As children, we…

Agronomically, most of us are “land grant” educated. Land grant universities were established with the Morrill Act in 1860’s and…

We’re fortunate in the U.S. to have digitized soils. What historically used to be contained in a book of maps…

Long before GPS was part of our acronym vocabulary, my early agriculture career started in eastern Iowa and northern Illinois.…

Yield results are in and every plot or trial has an overall winner! Winning a plot isn’t easy. Sometimes, luck…

Several years ago, I had customers tell me we could grow our company a lot faster if we had something…

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a target on your back! Our modern crop production system is on a collision…

When I’m visiting with growers and advisers, I frequently say that maps are a great way to view data, but…

I don’t like it when people generalize about the characteristics of a demographic group — like when people say, “Bald…

Increasing return on investment for every input is clearly on the mind of every grower. They are in an economic…

Is it possible that 3 and 2 can equal more than 5? That’s the concept of synergy — when the…

Sometimes “average” can be your worst enemy. Everyone has heard far-fetched examples that illustrate the problem with “average.” Picture standing…

Some people remember phone numbers or calendar dates; I remember farm fields. Before the 2005 crop year, the program leaders…

Throughout Premier Crop’s nearly 20-year history, we’ve perhaps been the most diligent at communicating that what we do — big…

Virtually every precision ag survey done with growers and industry over the last 20 years would rank “getting different systems…

Hunters and soil scientists may seem like an odd pairing but they have at least one thing in common —…

Telling your customers they are under-performing never seemed like a great business model to me. Benchmarking can have that exact…

1 pound into a sample bag, send it off to the lab, get the results back, and then pretend that…

Difficult economic times tend to bring out skepticism or at least a review of current practices. Recently, I was asked…

Every week I see ads using the latest marketing buzz- words to describe how a company is going to use…

For more than a decade, GPS technology has allowed you to capture variability within a field — from yield to…

At this time of the year, it’s easy to feel like yields are largely a function of weather — temperature…

I’m always looking for parallels — examples from other industries on how they use data to drive better decisions. On…

Are you confident? Where does that confidence come from? From your life experiences? From your successes? Even your failures? What…

Entering our 17th crop year, Premier Crop has been challenged by growers and industry skeptics. The recent euphoria over the…

Is your own story that powerful? Are you producing more crops with less inputs per bushel produced? I spend some…

I’m a big believer in the practice of split-applying nitrogen — specifically sidedress-applying a portion of the nitrogen after planting.…

Sometimes life events leave a market for generations. The Great depression created generations of frugal farm family survivors. Feeding a…

One of the services Premier Crop provides growers with is community or group data analysis from a regional basis. Growers…