Today we are talking with Dan and Renee about the significance of using yield efficiency in your operation.

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.

DAN FRIEBERG: When we talk about yield efficiency, to me, it comes down to us being willing to track the economics of the decisions that we’re influencing with the grower and tie it out economically for the grower. In a lot of people’s minds, yield has theoretically represented higher profits, but we also know that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes higher yields come at so much higher costs that they aren’t more profitable. In general, that hasn’t been that wrong. If we can produce higher yields many times, it is more profitable because you’re spreading more units of production over the same fixed cost, and one of the big fixed costs is land cost. Whether you produce 100 bushel of something or 200 bushel of something, unless you have a flex lease, a lot of times your land cost doesn’t change. There are rental agreements where the land owner is sharing both in the upside and the downside associated with higher yields and all that. So, yield efficiency, for us, is the dollar-per-acre return to land and management, and the reason we define it that way is because we don’t influence what somebody pays for land. We don’t influence their land cost.

Don’t get me wrong. They can use data. They can use the analytics we provide to make land rent decisions, to make land purchase decisions. So, they always have. They use analytics to help them decide what to rent and what to buy and all that. On a yearly basis, we’re not impacting land cost, and management cost is another one where we probably don’t have as big an influence.

There’s a lot rolled into management. For a lot of operations, it includes family living and health insurance and a whole bunch of other things that are really a key part of the operation but not something that we advise on. But we do advise on nutrients. We spend a lot of time helping growers manage their nutrient investment. We help them a lot with the seed investment, both what they choose to buy and where they plant it and at what rates. And we also help on crop protection decisions.

Then, the fourth one is operations. We don’t advise on operations. We don’t get into what equipment they should buy. There are a lot of data analytics tied to operations. We can analyze no-till versus conventional till, and we can break down and analyze differences in cost associated with different tillage types. Yield efficiency, for us, is just about how do we drive higher return to land and management? We do that through how we advise growers, how we advise them to spend nutrients, seed and crop protection dollars.

RENEE HANSEN: So, why is that becoming so much more important now than it was 10 years ago?

DAN FRIEBERG: It has always been important.

RENEE HANSEN: But are margins getting tighter than they were 10 years ago?

DAN FRIEBERG: Not today. They just blew. Margins are record high. I mean, people’s optimism at the farm gate has bounced way back. We’ve had this dramatic uptick, so margins are stretching back out. So, opportunities for people to make money, but Renee, it doesn’t matter. In good times and bad, this message resonates. It makes sense no matter what. Spending your money wisely just makes sense. Are growers more aggressive when the commodity prices are high? Some of them are. Some of them are way more aggressive. Will more growers take a chance on fungicides because of high commodity prices? Absolutely. Commodity prices have increased more than fungicide prices. When commodity prices are high, it takes less bushels to pay for the fungicide. So, more growers will probably take a shot at fungicides this year than in past years.

RENEE HANSEN: We also talk about, sometimes, growers wanting to grow their operation. Tell me more about that.

DAN FRIEBERG: It’s really natural. It’s just the competitiveness of agriculture. There are a lot of growers who are adding to their operation. They’re wanting to add. It’s all about spreading yourself and your employees and your equipment over more acres. If you can add another thousand acres and still farm in a timely fashion, it makes it more economical. Combines are really expensive, so being able to spread that combine over another thousand acres drives your per-acre costs down, which is the same with your labor. There is additional labor cost to farm another thousand acres. But even labor — employees come with a benefit package. You have to pay benefits. There are a bunch of employee costs that, if you can spread it over another thousand acres, it helps pay the bills and helps you be more profitable.

RENEE HANSEN: So, can you explain the metric that we’re using? We’re using a gauge or a metric, or we’re giving a yield efficiency score. We’re using that per operation, and we’re also doing it per field because we can do it spatially. So, can you just tell me more about each of those?

DAN FRIEBERG: Sure. So, the gauge you’re referring to is what we call the Yield Efficiency Score. Really, it’s a fairly simple formula. It’s just a benchmark selling price that every user gets to set. We’re not benchmarking who sold the best, so it’s a benchmark selling price times your yield. So, Premier Crop, part of our analytics program is we’re using the yield file. So, we’re receiving all this yield data. It’s benchmark selling price times yield minus your investment in nutrients, seed, crop protection products and field operation. What’s left is return to land and management. How many dollars per acre do you have left to pay for your land cost and your management costs? So, what you referred to is part of what we’re able to do. Let growers benchmark themselves, their yield efficiency score versus other growers in their area anonymously. Growers like that. It’s just another way to make sure you’re on track or just see how you’re doing compared to others.

So, that comparison, people like. They like to be able to anonymously compare with really quality data. That attention to getting the data right is really a big deal and having good quality data. So, that’s a big piece of it, but then the other part you referred to is being able to take it down to a field level. It’s not just benchmarking outside your operation. How do you compare to others? It’s within your operation. If you’re farming 50 fields, just being able to rank order those 50 fields from a yield efficiency standpoint, return to land and management, that’s a significant piece of analysis.

Renee, as soon as growers see those scores, trust me, they do the math so fast on land costs. They know exactly what their land cost is for each field. It’s not something they have to go look for. Then, the last one that you talked about is being able to do it spatially within a field, which means we can do it by management zone within a field. Which is really, by far, the most important to me because what we consistently do for our customers is we spend more in certain parts of the field. We know there are a lot of times, if you’re following our recommendations, it could be a $50-or-$80-an-acre higher input spend. In some parts of the field, we’re spending significantly more on nutrients, and we’re increasing the seed population.

So, we could easily spend more in part of the field, and the reason it’s so important to be able to track yield efficiency spatially within the field is so that, at the end of the year, we can prove to the grower that extra $50 an acre in the best part of the field generated more, far more, than the $50 of additional input costs. For me, this is, just this yield efficiency thing, is what we should have done. 10 years ago, yeah, we probably should have pushed harder to do it then because I think growers always respond to anything if you can prove that something pays for a grower. They’ll respond to that.

For a lot of new growers — we’re really blessed with a lot of growers who have been with us for decades, and the reason they have is we’ve convinced them over the years that it pays. They wouldn’t keep buying our service if they weren’t sure it was paying. But for a lot of new growers, this ability to tie economics and just have a report card every year that shows: where we spent more, we made more, or where we spent less, we made more.

Throughout the entire field, being able to document that what we spent made them more in either higher input investment or lower input investment. Really, growers respond to profitability, but there are so many people who talk about it, and they have no way to prove it. Everybody that drives up the driveway talks that way, but they can’t prove it. They can’t. That’s kind of the magic of what we do. This is the grower’s data. We’re using all the grower’s data, and we’re proving it.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, so tell me about using all the grower’s data. You say others are saying that they use profitability. So, what are we doing to prove it? You kind of gave a list of the seed, the nutrients, operations, crop protection, but can you go dive a little deeper?

DAN FRIEBERG: Sure. So, when we talk about all the grower’s data, it starts with just naming the field and getting a field boundary. Once you get the field boundary, you can go get the soil’s data, and now you can get LIDAR data, which is elevation data. So, you can kind of have an idea of how water moves within the field, but then we just keep adding to it. Soil sample information is a big part of it, whether it’s zone or grid sample. A lot of our customers are grid samples, which means we’re measuring organic matter and pH and soil test nutrient levels within the field in small increments, like couple-acre blocks.

So, we’re measuring all those layers of data, and then, when the planter makes a pass across the field, we’re grabbing planting date. We have row spacing and population and the hybrid and variety that got planted. And that hybrid and variety is not just the company and the number, but it’s also the trait package. We’re able to sort SmartStax versus VT PRO versus some other traits. When it comes to nutrients, we’re grabbing the soil sample data. For us, it’s about what we add, whether we’re making the addition of nutrients through manure, or whether it’s with commercial fertilizer. We’re tracking the rate, cost, timing, and if it’s fall versus spring versus side dress. We can track all those details. If the nutrient had an additive, we’re tracking that, and then you step into crop protection.

Now, because of weed resistance, crop protection is, again, becoming much more complicated than it was for a decade when it was just how many ounces of Roundup people were using. Now, it’s a lot more. There are a lot more products being used. It could be 40 different combinations of additives and crop protection products. Each time, it’s the product, the rate, the source, timing, costs, so just terrific detail. Tillage, field operations, how many passes, what the passes were. Just try to incorporate as much detail as we can about what’s happening within the field so that we can do the best possible job of managing all those inputs.

RENEE HANSEN: So, how do we compare this anonymously with another grower, apples to apples? Because you just listed a ton of data layers, a ton of cost information, and let’s say somebody else doesn’t have all that information in the system. How can you compare that apples to apples and get a benchmarking yield efficiency score?

DAN FRIEBERG: We can walk people through this really quick. Renee, there are a lot of growers who have data. They just don’t — it’s scattered. I mean, they have data in the Ops Center. They have it in Climate. They have it in some retailer’s software. I mean, it could be a retailer’s software. It could be on their own. I mean, it’s all over the place. Sometimes it’s not in a digital format. Sometimes it’s written down. It’s just all over the place.

But a lot of growers have data, and part of it is how we pass down farm equipment. Every time somebody buys a new piece of equipment, they trade. So, it’s like existing farming operations. They trade, and as they trade, somebody else trades. And when they trade, they trade the technology with it.  They’re not stripping the monitors out of the cab each time they trade. A lot of times, they’re not. So, that technology is being passed down, meaning there are a whole bunch of growers who don’t operate new farm equipment, and they have the technology in the cab. There are just a lot of growers who have the capability. They have the capability of collecting data and capturing data, and they have a lot of variable-rate capability of which a lot of them aren’t using.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, I was just going to ask you that too. Can you elaborate? The growers have so much that they can do with their data. Do you feel that they don’t even know what they’re capable of getting and gaining with the technology they already have?

DAN FRIEBERG: I think, a lot of times, with a lot of people — a lot of growers and a lot of people — it’s finding somebody you trust. If the person you trust for advice doesn’t talk to you about this or doesn’t have a solution, you might not ever pursue it. You might not pursue it on your own because, in your circle, nobody’s championing why you should be using the technology in the cab or your data to make better decisions.

RENEE HANSEN: Well, if somebody doesn’t mention it to you, you don’t know what you don’t know.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, you don’t. You literally don’t. So, I think that’s part of what happens. Another place I wanted to go, Renee, was people talk — I mean, when I talk about everybody that drives down the farmer’s driveway has a profitability message, a lot of times, they say return on investment. They wrap everything. So, the number of times people say ROI or return, it becomes a buzzword that nobody backs up. Nobody has. When they talk about backing up their ROI, they pull out some plot book. It’s some trial that happened someplace else.

You can’t really tell somebody the ROI unless you do an experiment in the field, and that’s really what we do all the time. We do experiment after experiment, in volumes, in growers fields. It’s all in pursuit of having better recommendations so we can calculate ROI. It’s so that we do know whether that input paid or not. If I go out to a grower and I talk to them about nitrogen rate, and their total N rate is 200 pounds of actual N, and I think that they’re over-applying, the best possible way for me to have that discussion is just to suggest that we put a lower-rate experiment in their field. It doesn’t have to be a lot of acres, but if that works, then the grower saves money and gets higher yields or same yield. That’s a starting place and a discussion.

Same with everything. Every input decision can become an experiment. So, to me, the best way to get an ROI is to simply do a trial. And we’re not talking about — when I got in the business, a trial meant flags. It meant field flags, and it meant a ‘weigh wagon.’ That’s how you did trials. You just spent all your — like I spent all fall running around with a ‘weigh wagon.’ Literally, just day and night, running around with a ‘weigh wagon’ because that’s the only way you could do a field trial. And now, everybody’s got the ability to measure. The monitor in the cab is measuring.

So, a little bit of help on calibration, making sure you’re calibrated, and you’re off and running. We can use the technology to execute field trials, and it’s just so much easier than it was years ago. And it really just opens the door. It opens the door to back up the ROI message over and over again. It doesn’t have to be results from somewhere else. We say growers love local data, and you can’t get more local than my fields. That’s who we are. It’s not: ‘How did it do somewhere? How did it do for your neighbor?’ It’s: ‘How did it do for you?’ And doing trials is a big piece of what we do.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, and you’re talking about the buzzword of ROI, and I feel like Premier Crop has coined the buzzword of yield efficiency. I’m starting to see yield deficiency pop up in other places, people talking more and more about yield efficiency rather than using ROI. And why is yield efficiency a more important message than ROI?

DAN FRIEBERG: So, for me, they can be really similar. I mean, they can be part of the same discussion. So, for me, yield efficiency is just combining economics and agronomics, and it’s at every level. It’s sub-field, in a trial and management zones in a field. It’s this field compared to another field. Across your whole operation, how do my fields compare?

Then, it’s being able to go beyond your own operation to: ‘How do I compare to peers in my neighborhood or my region?’ A lot of times, when I think of ROI, I tend to think of it as — so, yield efficiency is this all encompassing bucket of nutrients and seed and crop protection and field operations. But, for me, ROI is more about individual components that make up those buckets.

If I’m a grower, it’s like: ‘What’s my ROI if I put 50 pounds of Y-DROP nitrogen on?’ So, later nitrogen. What’s my ROI if I do a fungicide? What’s my ROI if I do a biological? All those things, all those decisions roll up into yield efficiency because they’re all input costs. And, hopefully, they impact yield. So, all those things roll up into yield efficiency. But when I think of ROI, I’m thinking of individual decisions. I mean, decisions I’m making about input components of what goes into yield efficiency.

RENEE HANSEN: Well, and I think it’s important to note, also, it doesn’t have to be with a variable-rate application of anything. You can still get a yield efficiency score with flat rate.

DAN FRIEBERG: Sure. As we onboard new growers, that’s a big deal, just to capture where they are. Before you started doing anything, what was your yield efficiency?

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, so if somebody is coming on board and is not doing any variable-rate nutrients or seed, they can still get a yield efficiency score in a benchmarking setting.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yep. Renee, earlier on, I just remembered what it was I wanted to talk about. Earlier on, you kind of said or you asked something like: ‘Why don’t more growers, or why do I think more growers don’t do this or think like this?’ I think that a lot of growers have the attitude of: ‘Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt.’ They think they tried it. Somebody pitched them an idea, and told them about precision ag or whatever buzzword they used at the time. Then they created this expectation and didn’t deliver.

RENEE HANSEN: There’s no follow through.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, so there are a lot of growers who, you meet with them, and they say: ‘Tried that 15 years ago. Didn’t work here. Doesn’t work here. Maybe it works where you’re at. It doesn’t work here.’ Then, you really start asking questions about: ‘What do you mean it didn’t work?’ And what you find out is they never compared. They never looked at the relationship of yield and the prescription, whatever it was. Nobody did the basic analytics for them.

The classic one, 20 years ago, was people would say: ‘I’m going to grid-sample your field. We’re going to variable-rate apply nutrients. And all these multi-colors, from high to low, on the map, we’re going to even all those out. We’re going to build up the low areas pull down the high areas. Your map will all be green. We’re going to make your field uniform.’ And 12 years later, the field is no more uniform than it was to start with. And my point is that should never have been the goal. You get paid on yield efficiency and on generating more return for every dollar you invest. You don’t get paid for making your fields uniform.

The reason it didn’t work, Renee, is because the high-yielding areas tend to pull down nutrients because you’re consistently removing more nutrients from those areas. And even though the equation, the variable-rate equation, was supposed to be dealing with that, it never caught up. Those high-yield areas just kept producing more and more, removing more and more, and the reason the field wasn’t more uniform at the end of four years or 12 years was just they never kept up with that additional crop removal associated with really high yields.

RENEE HANSEN: So, the way I see it, utilizing a yield efficiency score, the way that we are calculating it, can potentially help a grower to grow their operation in a multitude of ways. Not only by gaining more acres, but they can also, potentially, gain more profits with what they already have by optimizing and utilizing some variable rate to see where their yield efficiency score is. They should be able to see what fields really aren’t producing as high, so they shouldn’t be spending as much in that field, in certain parts of the field.

DAN FRIEBERG: I think the whole yield efficiency message is just, I think, it helps growers know their costs. It helps them know. I mean, it’s just putting data to work for you. Really, like you say, you can drill down on which fields are most profitable, which aren’t. You can drill down on which parts of fields are most profitable. I think the more you help growers know their costs, the better managers they are.

RENEE HANSEN: But I feel like they already know their costs. I feel like most of them are like: ‘Oh, no, I got that. I got it on a spreadsheet, have my tally and  know exactly what I’m going to be spending on my inputs.’

DAN FRIEBERG: And you’re right. They know their costs across the whole operation, probably. I think the difference is just knowing it within field by field and within fields. So, it’s probably just the nature of being able to break it down into finer resolution. Renee, what we don’t do is take university-average cost associated with farming and divide it by their yield. This is not pretend economics. This is tracking. Like I say, we track if that part of the field is getting 10,000 more seeds than the other part. We’re tracking the cost associated with that 10,000 more seeds in the best part of the field.

RENEE HANSEN: We talk about plans, like having a plan and then pushing that to ‘actual.’ This is the ‘actual.’ I mean, we’re talking about what actually happened.

DAN FRIEBERG: Growing your operation is a tough one, Renee, because there are so many pieces to it.

RENEE HANSEN: Right.

DAN FRIEBERG: One thing that stands out to me is — it was from a winter grower meeting. And these growers were talking about how there was an area where there’s a lot of livestock also, and they were talking about how every pen of pigs or cattle that they sold, they knew the economics associated with that pen, meaning they tied it out economically. In livestock, it’s just such a part of the culture. Every unit of production gets tied out economically.

So, sometimes, I’m so jealous of the livestock industry because I feel like: ‘Okay, you guys are way ahead, like we’re playing catch up.’ But that’s really what we’re trying to do. Tie out every unit of production economically. It’s not enough to know just what the total weight was. It’s converting the weight and the input cost into dollar returns. And that’s kind of what we’re focusing on.

RENEE HANSEN: 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 our blog at premiercrop.com.

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Today we are joined by Mike Manning (aka @datamanning on Twitter) and Renee Hansen as they discuss nitrogen strategies for your fields.

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, with a wide range of precision and agronomic experience.

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

RENEE HANSEN: Hey, Mike, welcome to the Premier Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about helping a grower have a nitrogen strategy. So, first, I know you’ve been on the podcast before, but can you just quickly introduce yourself and tell us what you do at Premier Crop?

MIKE MANNING: Hi, Renee. Good to catch up again. Mike Manning, Premier Crop Systems. I’m our Nebraska Account Manager and Agronomic Information Advisor. I support some of our retail partners in a few different areas and work directly with a good set of growers across the state of Nebraska.

RENEE HANSEN: Thanks for that intro, Mike. Also, I know there are a lot of people who follow you out on the Twitter world, and you’re known as who on Twitter?

MIKE MANNING: DataManning. You can find me on Twitter @DataManning.

RENEE HANSEN: Perfect. Great. Well, thanks for that introduction. So, let’s go into this nitrogen strategy and why we believe that a grower and why you believe and work with growers who should have a nitrogen strategy. Let’s just take it from the first step of planning and having a plan and a strategy when it comes to nitrogen.

MIKE MANNING: Well, you hit it right on the head. First, we have to have a plan about how we’re going to go about applying our nitrogen or what our season-long plan is for nitrogen management. The simple answer is there is no one-size-fits-all solution, especially when it comes to nitrogen management. It needs to fit into your rotation. It needs to fit into your logistics, your available labor, how you’re going to manage different cultural practices and other tools that you have at your disposal, whether that’s equipment limitations, irritation or rainfall limitations, yield potential. All these dynamics play together.

One I’ve left out there would be topography and soil types. Also very important. A lot of nitrogen plans probably have fallen under that cultural practice of what a specific area has been accustomed to doing. Some examples of that might be 100% of total expected nitrogen needs applied in the fall with anhydrous ammonia or spring-applied anhydrous ammonia. I’d say, really over the last 20 years, you’ve seen more of a move towards split application of nitrogen. There’s a fair amount of research that’s come behind that’s, I would say, pretty widely accepted in the industry now that split application of nitrogen is much more common than it ever used to be.

With what I work with in Nebraska, it’s almost universal. I know that’s not the case in some of the rainfed states and different management systems and on different soil types. I wouldn’t even say growers that are limited to owning their own equipment. Even one split application, maybe anywhere from 50 to 75% of their nitrogen upfront in the spring pre-plant or early post-plant and, then, a single side-dress application.

Probably, more commonly, what I see for that nitrogen delivery method is some form of upfront pre-plant. Pretty common to come back with a weed and feed pass, where we have 32 or 28% nitrogen, potentially some Thio-Sul mixed in with an early post-planter, early post-emergence application. Then, perhaps another trip back across the field with a coulter bar at about V5. In the great state of Nebraska, with our irrigation, we tend to put it on season-long. We’d like to fertilize through our pivots, generally, at about 50% of our total N needs.

RENEE HANSEN: So, Mike, you’re talking, I mean, you’re going right into application timing. How does somebody plan for their application timing? Obviously, in Nebraska, they do have the capability to do that because they are working with a pivot, but for the rest of those who don’t have some kind of irrigation system, how do you plan for those different application timings? What are you looking at to make that plan? Are you using data from the past? Can you do it year one after you use the data, or do you need to be in a system for numerous years to develop a bigger plan, a bigger strategy?

MIKE MANNING: You’ve asked some multifaceted questions there. So, let’s kind of break that down one by one. Let’s just go. Let’s say we’re making the decision to go between a single application, like we historically have, and two applications. We’re going to split some portion of our total nitrogen pounds. The best way I explain it to growers is that our corn crop has a season-long nitrogen requirement. The closer that we can supply our synthetic nitrogen to that growing crop, or to the crop as it’s growing through the course of the season, the better efficiency we’re going to have.

There are definitely places in Iowa and Illinois with very high organic matter. Very strong holding capacity and some very nice flat-level fields. Dan Frieberg shared it many times in the past. Well, we kind of call it our surrogate data. Why are we seeing, in the group data, these 100% nitrogen fall-applied ammonia always showing up as the highest yielding in the database? Well, we were making those applications to some of our best fields. We could go place all that nitrogen at that time, in the fall, how to be available. And there are prime acres to begin with. The acres that were receiving a split application, or had some other balance of nitrogen pounds throughout the season, were those rolling hills mixtures of sand and clay and just more marginal acres that needed to be managed with a different stroke anyway.

Probably one of the biggest things I see, as it convinces growers to spread those nitrogen pounds out over the course of the season or minimally making more than one application, they see improved efficiency. And by improved efficiency, talking about pounds of nitrogen to produce a bushel of corn. We generally see higher yields at the same time. So, it becomes a win-win. To what I think was one of your second questions: how many years of data do we need to have, or how do we arrive at our total nitrogen requirement? Again, we can kind of break that apart in a couple of different pieces. For somebody that is making a single application, I would say just take a couple of fields and plant a split application. Again, how does that fit into your labor and logistics workflow?

For growers that own their own equipment with the sprayer, it’s pretty easy to convert. Not too much more difficult to incorporate a weed and feed side-dress nitrogen going on with your post herbicide. For guys that hire their spraying out, it might make sense for them to acquire a coulter bar and go make an application in season. Or at least go rent one and try it. Take a handful of fields and just try it for a couple of years. Now, if you have 6% organic matter on perfectly flat earth, you’ll probably completely disagree with me. If you farm anything other than that, I would put my money on split applications just about every time.

RENEE HANSEN: The split application is really becoming more popular. You mentioned that in the beginning of this podcast, that you’ve definitely seen the trend move the line more towards split applications. So, you did mention this also about nitrogen efficiency based off of the field. So, can you talk about why having a plan, a nitrogen strategy, how that makes you more efficient with your nitrogen to gain more yield?

MIKE MANNING: Combination of factors. I’d say, bottom line, it does. A split application helps us be more efficient. If we’re measuring the results off of our farm, we can actually see what those real efficiency values are. With Premier Crop, we talk about zone management a lot, managing fields by zones. Zone management makes sense. Just for my standard disclaimer on that, we’re not talking about zone soil sampling. We still have a grid soil sample underneath of that. One of our favorite methods for arriving at Management Zones is principally looking at historic yield data. For the most part, the best area of the field has always been the best area of the field. The poorest area of the field has always been the poorest area of the field. Using other pieces of spatial data to maybe augment that, whether that’s grid sample data, EC, EM data, soil survey maps, where applicable. We can use that to help augment and guide zones.

So, now we think of our traditional Premier Crop ABC management zone approach. We start seeing efficiencies. You start breaking that out year over year, especially in those corn years. If I see consistent efficiency of, say, 0.75-0.8 pounds of synthetic nitrogen per bushel produced in my A zone, maybe 0.9 or 1.0 in my B zone and maybe anywhere from 1 to 1.2 pounds of nitrogen in my C zone, I see that consistency. We can confirm our zones. A, we know our zones are behaving how we believe they ought to be behaving. B, we’ve dialed in management, probably with a variable-rate seeding approach, as well. And C, now we can start incorporating these nitrogen efficiencies that we’re observing within the field. That becomes an efficiency driver.

If I’m producing 280 bushels in my A zone, but my efficiency is at 0.7 pounds of nitrogen, I really only needed 196-200 pounds of synthetic nitrogen in that A zone. In that C zone, that’s at 1.1, and it’s producing 225. I probably needed 240-250 pounds of nitrogen in that C zone. At the end of the day, it’s spatial management. As things change in the field, we’re adapting our management to it and, then, marrying economics and efficiency back to it. Now, it also ties right into sustainability. We’re being a lot more — we’re just being smarter with how we’re applying fertilizers on our fields.

RENEE HANSEN: Mike, that was going to be my next question to you, and I think you already answered it. When it comes to nitrogen and efficiency, it couples the economics, so profitability for the farm and sustainability to the land.

MIKE MANNING: Absolutely. It’s agronomics, economics and the sustainability piece. Agronomically, we’re producing good bushels. Economically, we’re doing it very efficiently. Sustainability-wise, we are being good stewards of the land and being good stewards of our fertilizer resources.

RENEE HANSEN: Lastly, can you talk a little bit about what Premier Crop is doing with what we call Enhanced Learning Blocks and possibly what you can do with a nitrogen strategy?

MIKE MANNING: Sure. So, Enhanced Learning Blocks, I’m pretty passionate about Enhanced Learning Blocks. I’ve been using them widely since 2016. I haven’t done a ton with nitrogen, but there’s certainly an opportunity to do that. So, an Enhanced Learning Block we’re taking builds off the traditional Learning Block concept.

Let’s take a two or three-acre block in a known area of the field, and let’s change our rate. Let’s go up or down. Well, Enhanced Learning Blocks enabled us to introduce both randomization and replication. So, instead of testing a single rate in a two or three-acre block, let’s test three or four different rates and then replicate it five times. So, now, in the case of nitrogen, if I was, say, on a side-dress application, I was coming in with 30 gallons of 32%. Let’s pull up 28.005. So, if I was at 30 gallons there, I’m looking at about 90 pounds of nitrogen.

Within that Enhanced Learning Block, maybe it’s about four acres in size now. Let’s test rates at 20 gallons, 25, 30 and 35. Or 25, 30, 35 and 40. This system — we build it into the prescription system — enables that application to execute in the field. Then, we can have statistically valid nitrogen response results to review at the end of the season. That becomes very powerful. What is the right rate? Obviously, one trial one year from one field is not going to answer the question for your entire farm. It starts you down that path of learning.

In many cases where I use Enhanced Learning Blocks with my growers, we have multiple blocks where you have anywhere from one to five blocks per field, and we replicate that on just about every field they farm. So, they’re building a research quality data set off of their own farm with their precision equipment. I’ll leave it at that. Nitrogen management and how nitrogen behaves in the soil, in the environment, and how it performs agriculturally, agronomically for us, is probably one of the most complex aspects of agronomy. Again, just to reiterate, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but it is about tailoring and optimizing things that best suit your farm.

RENEE HANSEN: And that’s why having a nitrogen strategy and building that with an agronomic information advisor like you, Mike, is really helpful. You have the knowledge. You see the data, and you can help the grower learn, year over year, how to best get the best profitability and sustainability on their land.

MIKE MANNING: Absolutely.

RENEE HANSEN: 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 our blog at premiercrop.com/blog.

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Today, we are talking with T.J. Masker, Senior Product Manager at Tractor Zoom, headquartered in Urbandale, Iowa. They are focused on helping bring price transparency to farm equipment and valuations for farmers, bankers, equipment dealers and insurance companies. T.J. has a lot of experience and knowledge in the precision ag space. Today, I asked him questions on how to unlock new insights to your farming operation using precision ag.

RENEE HANSEN: You are listening to the Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic. Today, we are talking with T.J. Masker, Senior Product Manager at Tractor Zoom, headquartered in Urbandale, Iowa. They are focused on helping bring price transparency to farm equipment, and valuations for farmers, bankers, equipment dealers and insurance companies. T.J. has a lot of experience and knowledge in the precision ag space. Today, I asked him questions on how to unlock new insights to your farming operation using precision ag. Hey, T.J., welcome to the Premier Podcast. Just wanted to talk to you a little bit about unlocking some of the new insights to a farming operation. I know you have a lot of experience. So, can you tell us a little bit about your background?

T.J. MASKER: Yeah, I grew up on a small family farm in southwest Iowa and did the traditional thing. Went to Iowa State, got an ag business degree. For the last 11 years of my career, I’ve been working directly with farmers, helping them manage and understand their data better. So, whether that be agronomic data like soil tests, machine data that we get around like fuel usage or, in my current role helping farmers really value farm equipment, as that’s becoming the second highest cost on the balance sheet. What we’re really trying to understand is how we can make better decisions from that data. But the common theme is that ever since I went to Iowa State and graduated college, I’ve been passionate about helping farmers with data to make better decisions.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, you’ve had a lot of experience with data since you’ve been working in the field. So, can you tell me that? What is your experience with other precision ag systems, and what makes data so important?

T.J. MASKER: Yeah, I remember this, probably, like it was yesterday. I was covering a territory in south-central Iowa for one of the major seed brands. And I had farmers who kept asking me, like: ‘What can we do with this data? How do we start to think about how we utilize it more?’ This was almost eight years ago, and I literally Googled, like, ‘farm data’ something or another, and it led me, ironically enough, to Premier Crop and filled out the ‘contact us’ button. Then, I think it was Tony or Ben or somebody who reached out to me about: ‘Hey, we’d love to talk to you, understand where you’re coming from.’ And that ultimately led me to working with Premier Crop about seven-and-a-half years ago and doing direct advising with farmers in central Iowa.

Many of those farms that I worked with back in the day, I’m still really close with today as I’m trying to solve new and unique problems. I think, at that time, I had zero experience with precision ag. So, I had to learn how to set up the monitors, what Ag Leader SMS was, what software was to make better decisions. It was also my job to go out and recruit farms and help their operation. So, over that time, I had to learn a tremendous amount about precision ag. I had to learn what it was capable of. Ultimately for me, it came down to that there’s so much value in this data and what we can get out of it if we’re measuring things correctly.

I think one of the things I experienced, even with the farms that have been collecting data for 15 years, was that, man, if we get this data structured in a way, it’s going to allow us to unlock so much potential. And whether that be if you’re using Climate FieldView or using John Deere Ops Center or using Granular, where I was at. It doesn’t matter unless the data is structured in a way that you can get the results out of it. And that, to me, was always the biggest ‘light bulb moment’ for a lot of the farmers.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, so since you’ve had the experience working with multiple different systems, what makes a specific platform better than another?

T.J. MASKER: When I talk to farmers about it, it’s really measuring the ROI, I think. Dan, I probably coined his phrase too, but if every agronomic decision is an economic decision, and we think about things that way, it fundamentally changes why we might do something. So, I think about systems that are able to actually provide that value to you as a farmer, and there’s not a ton of them out there. But we also need those systems that allow us to move data more easily. So, that’s why Climate, John Deere Ops Center, Ag Leader AgFiniti is another great example.

Those tools help us get the data from the farm into the trusted advisor or the partner’s hands really quickly to make better decisions. That is valuable. I can tell you that there’s a reason why those tools are so heavily used because it solves a pain point. What I like to think about is: that’s one step. The next step is taking all this data and turning it into a better plan for next year. So, if I was at Granular, the way I described this problem is like: ‘I need to understand what we did and then how we did to understand what we need to do differently next year.’ So, if you focus on farmers collecting all this data on what they did, let’s get the scorecard for how they did at the end of the year.

So, tools like Premier Crop. You think about all the things you can do with the query tool to answer questions from your data. Then, the real power is like: ‘All right. Using all this data, I now know with a high level of confidence going into next year that I’m going to have the best possible plan I can have.’ Mother Nature and God willing, things are going to fall into place. Well, let’s use everything we’ve learned to come up with the best possible plan, and we’ll adjust in season, right?

Planting could get delayed by two weeks, so we might have to adjust seeding rates. All those things come into play, but let’s start with the best possible plan. And I think that starts with collecting and analyzing really great data throughout the previous growing season or previous seasons if you will, if you think about how many years of data a farm might have.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, I think you said something in there, like competence. Where a grower just really needs to have that competence within the data. They’re collecting so much of it anyway. So, getting a grower started, it seems really overwhelming sometimes. Just getting started with data because of the systems you mentioned. They have Climate. They’re using John Deere Ops. Then, to add another system to their whole platform can seem really overwhelming.

T.J. MASKER: I’ve done customer discovery the last seven-plus years in my different product roles. If you talk to every farmer, they’ll tell you they just want one system to manage everything. The reality is, that’s not possible. We as an industry need to do better to make things connect more easily. You’re starting to see that. The easier we can make it to connect different parts of the puzzle to the key people that need it, that is where you really drive value for the farmer.

If you think about all the trusted people that the farmer is working for, you’ve got agronomists, an equipment dealer, a seed rep, and a banker. You’ve got probably a commodity broker advisor. You start to see all of these people that are helping the farmer with all the information they have. It becomes really powerful if you can connect all those dots. I think, for a while, we as an ag industry or a tech industry didn’t do a good job of this. I think everyone was trying to build a complete way to solve every problem. And now you’re starting to see that change quite a bit, and I believe it’s for the better because the more connected these things are, and the less you can alleviate a lot of the pain of getting data from one spot to another, the better off everyone’s going to be.

RENEE HANSEN: In one of our previous podcasts, we talked about how you need to connect all the pieces of the puzzle, and it sounds exactly what you’re talking about. You just need to connect everything together. It’s one big puzzle, and when you finally get it together, it starts to work like it’s more of a system. Growers have all this information. They have these systems and monitors. They have the tractors, like you said, that they’re heavily invested in. So, why would they invest in a service that helps them manage their data, that helps them make better decisions? Why should they do that?

T.J. MASKER: Yeah, I think this is really important, and I think understanding who you’re partnering with is really important too, from a farmer perspective. So, I think you’re going to see a lot of the bigger ag companies continue to invest in this space for good reason, right? They know there’s a tremendous amount of value in this data. What I also think is extremely valuable is what that independent advisor can mean to your farm.

For example, I was out at one of the farms I used to work with on Friday, and we talked a lot about this. If you think about 7-8 years ago, where they were at, they were trying to manage it in house. They were writing their own fertilizer recommendations. They were collecting all their data. And now, fundamentally, they’re approaching things differently, and every year they’re trying to chip away at this thing. So, a great example is when I started working with them 7½-8 years ago. We talked a lot about: ‘Wow, you guys can grow really great soybeans. What if we grew more soybeans, for example?’

As they approach planting season this year, they’re going to start one planter on corn and one planter on soybeans at the same time because the data has shown them that if they get in earlier on soybeans and get those soybeans in, there is X-yield gain from that. And that wouldn’t have been the case seven-and-a-half years ago. What data allows us to do is to test little things. The way I always approached it with farmers was like: ‘Give it three years.’ We have the data that tells us that this decision is likely to produce a positive outcome. If we try it, we can’t just try it for one year. We have to commit to trying it for three because odds are, over those three years, we’re going to see that return.

So, I think that’s where the power of having a system or a service to manage that is critically important. And I think you’re starting to see a few others come up in this space, as well. They probably realize a little bit of the model of that trusted advisor is the most powerful model. And it’s because, fundamentally — again, I think Dan will probably laugh — but agronomy is local. What works for the Des Moines Lobe might not work as well where I’m from in southwest Iowa. It might not work as well for my buddy that farms in eastern Iowa.

Data’s valuable, but data in the hands of the right people with the right context is really, really valuable. I think a lot of farmers are frustrated with managing that data. So, how do you find somebody that can help you and kind of provide that ROI? And, at the end of the day, they have to prove their worth, right? Fundamentally, they have to prove their worth, but I think they’d be surprised what they would see from partnering with somebody like that.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, definitely. Like what you said, there is definitely a shift that you’re starting to see with farmers. They are wanting to see more of their data and utilize more of their data. In the past, there was a lot of resistance and maybe because the market was too flooded. So, what would you tell a farmer who has resistance to working with a precision ag service?

T.J. MASKER: Once, I think I called on a farm for three straight months that was resistant to this. It wasn’t because they didn’t see the value. It was that this was a piece of their operation that was so important to them that they’d been trying to figure out. One of the things is when you have a group that’s been around for, let’s say, 15-20 years, there’s a lot of value in that. I might be a little bit more skeptical of somebody that’s only been around a year or two. There’s that track record there.

So, what I would think about looking at is who has a track record? Do they have farmers that are willing to talk to them about why they decided to partner with this person? Because, at the end of the day, we know there’s value in the data. But, maybe there’s an opportunity for a farmer to share their story with another farmer that’s a little bit resistant and tell them: ‘Hey, I was exactly where you were at seven years ago, and now the way we do things seven years later is fundamentally different.’ So, I would just be open to having that conversation with others that are finding success in this area and help them along in their journey.

RENEE HANSEN: Well, sometimes, you get in a pattern where you are very comfortable with what you’ve been doing the past years, and you’ve been successful. You’ve been profitable, but there comes a point where there’s a tipping point where your margins are starting to get a lot thinner, and a grower needs to maybe change some practices. And that data can tell you exactly what practices to change.

T.J. MASKER: Yeah, it definitely can. I mean, all these things come flooding back to my head. You think about some of the marginal areas of your farm that just don’t produce much.

We did the math 5-6 years ago, and it said: ‘Hey, if we don’t apply dry fertilizer on these spots, we can save an average of $5 an acre across all the acres.’ And the reason why we weren’t going to apply there is: one, we didn’t expect the return, and two, guess what? When we analyzed the soil test results by those areas, they were, a lot of times, the highest soil test values. If you back away from it, makes a ton of sense. If you’re applying the same rate of fertilizer across the field, and the good parts are taking off more, you’re going to see these lower-yielding spots, for example, have higher soil tests.

So, you start to tell that story, and all of a sudden, you’re like: ‘Wow, just by doing that one thing, I’ve saved $5 an acre across all my acres.’ I don’t know what fertilizer prices are at today. Normally, I’d have a better pulse on it, but it might be higher. It might be $6-$7. I don’t know. But you start to approach things from that standpoint and manage each field like it’s its own kind of factory. I know there’s that analogy out there, but it really does make sense when you start to look at it at that level.

RENEE HANSEN: And a lot of companies are talking about data science and machine learning, and they’re trendy words. I don’t want farmers to get afraid of companies starting to use this because if they are resistant to using precision ag, they’re going to think: ‘Oh, well, now they’re just turning this into something that’s more automated.’ So, what do you think companies mean, and what should a farmer know about data science and machine learning within the precision ag space?

T.J. MASKER: Yeah, so companies are investing a lot of money into data science, and it’s an ability to take a lot of the data we have and try to learn really quickly. Versus a traditional method would be: ‘I’m going to evaluate this year’s crop. Then, I’m going to go around and implement three practices that I learned from this year’s crop.’ Versus: ‘Hey, could we speed this up through data science and machine learning and try to learn from 15 crops and apply that knowledge to one year?’ Most farms I’ve worked with want to learn from the data on their own farm. That also means they can leverage data science on their own farm.

So, the way I would think about it is to think about trials that you’re running. How are you setting them up? Because that truly is data science in its very, very simplistic form, but that’s what it is. We’re trying to test and validate things and use the data. Another trend, like with machine learning, is you’re going to hear more and more about ‘combine automation,’ which is real.

I was listening to a podcast the other week about how they go out to a farm and demonstrate this to a farmer. Most people would say: ‘Hey, I know I can adjust the settings on my combine better than any computer can.’ One of the things they do is they completely purposely set the settings wrong on the combine for one pass, push the button and watch it adjust. They watch the farmers’ eyes light up with how quickly and how accurate those adjustments are.

As I’ve been talking to farmers specifically about equipment, the tech side of things is tying more and more into that equipment-buying decision. So, what technology are you using? Who’s the provider, whether it be John Deere or Case, or what’s the system that’s going to manage it? And they’re starting to talk more about making decisions for new combines based on automation. Machine learning taught that. I think you saw some announcements from John Deere in the last two weeks with the See & Spray technology with the acquisition of Blue River.

So, this stuff is going to keep coming, and it’s going to come pretty fast. But at the end of the day, it’s just like a trial on the farm, where seeing is believing. Once you see this technology in the hands of different people, you’re going to see people adopt it at different rates. I’m pretty bullish on the ‘combine automation’ stuff just because of what I’ve seen and what it can do. And I know, from direct feedback from 50-plus farmers over the last four weeks, that is something that they’re looking at.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, it’s pretty incredible, the advancements that they’re making within the technology, just with the tractors, the combines. But, then, also kind of going back to that data, too, and data science. If a grower is anywhat interested in their data, having to layer all of that in a spreadsheet of Excel and having your brain trying to figure it out, it’s just too difficult. Let the computer do the mathematics for you. I mean, that’s the whole purpose of the data science. It’s learning through your data. So, I’m just kind of reiterating what you were saying, T.J. You’ve shared a couple of stories. You shared that you talked with 50 farmers within the last four weeks. What are some of the most successful stories that you have from a farmer using precision ag?

T.J. MASKER: Yeah, I remember this was kind of the fun one and like the best case study that I have. It was that we started working on a problem, and the same thing applies to product management if I’m trying to solve a problem for a farmer. But it’s like: ‘What’s the goal here?’ And it’s like: ‘The goal was to increase soybean yields for this specific farm.’ They couldn’t get above 45 bushels. So, we started to break down the problem and study the group data that we had, to say, okay, well, we haven’t ‘limed’ in five years. Maybe that’s something we could do. Another thing that the farm hadn’t done in five years was try a different seed brand or variety. So, that’s another thing we could do.

Another thing they typically did was only fertilized ahead of the corn crop. Okay. So, let’s split up that application. So, we literally picked a field and said: ‘We’re going to kitchen sink it. We’re going to try everything we can. We’re going to make sure we have trials set up within the field.’ I think we ended up hitting 75 or 80 bushels per acre. That was almost double what their average was.

Now, granted, Mother Nature cooperated and rained when it needed to rain. But the point was we were able to say fungicide meant ‘this.’ A different variety meant ‘this.’ Using lime, dry fertilizer on this part of the field meant ‘this.’ And we literally laddered it up to that number. To me, we can spend a lot of money on inputs and resources. Just calling it the ‘kitchen sink’ but having our checks in place fundamentally changed how that farmer grew soybeans moving forward.

We were able to increase the average over a lot of acres, 15 bushels. But if we didn’t identify what the core issue was and start to think about how we strategically implement different tests, we would have never gotten there. And I laugh because the same thing exists in product development, where you’re trying to build things for farmers. It’s like: ‘What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? How do we prove value, and how do we incrementally get there?’ It’s all about how you break it down. Whether it’s agronomy, software development, or building the next widget for a John Deere tractor. It’s how you solve problems and measure it to make improvements.

RENEE HANSEN: Well, that’s a great success story, and the fact that, just in one year, how much they can learn and then take it to the rest of their operation over the next 3-5-10 years. And the profit that you’re getting out of that service is tremendous. I mean, it’s definitely worth the cost of the service.

T.J. MASKER: Absolutely.

RENEE HANSEN: You mentioned a little bit about where precision ag is going in the future, but where do you think precision ag is in the software space? So, we talked a little bit about automation with tractors and combines, but what about in the software space? Where do you think precision ag is going?

T.J. MASKER: I think it’s going to continue to get ‘smarter,’ which is kind of an annoying tagline, but it’s going to get smarter about how much you’re applying what rate on what date. A lot of this, we’re getting so good at understanding the impact, and we have enough data to understand it. I also think I’m pretty confident — we saw it in a past experience. I see it in the current one. The value of the mobile device is going to continue to dominate this space from a software perspective. You think about: ‘I can pull up Climate or the Ops Center on my phone and have an answer really quickly. I want to show my landlord how the field yielded in a second.’

Farmers are going to continue, in my opinion, to demand that the tools they’re using be accessible from anywhere. And so, precision ag, yes, there’s the technology in the cab. Yes, that’s important. But I would argue that this device — the phone, the tablet — probably more so the phone than anything is going to continue to be such a critical piece. It’s how farmers run their business, and they expect to have things on their phone. So, I would think if I’m working with a provider, that is going to be one of my number-one needs. It’s also going to drive a lot of engagement for that farm, as well. That is critical for any tool you’re trying to use because a farmer’s going to get value out of a lot of things. Having that answer really handy with them whenever they need it is very, very valuable.

RENEE HANSEN: Getting your data any time, anywhere, is a tagline that we use. Even with one of our mobile apps that we have within Premier Crop. But I think I agree with you that farmers want it. They want to pull it up, and they want to see it. They need to show it, whether that be the banker or the landlord themselves. So, they’re looking at the field, getting ready to plant, getting ready to harvest. All of the above.

T.J. MASKER: Yeah, and it has to be easy to use, which is such a challenge, right? Because if you talk to the 50 farmers that I’ve talked to, you’re trying to pull out the nuggets that are similar between all of them. There are always unique use cases, though. As long as you’re solving for the 90%, you’re going to be well on your way to help the farm make better decisions. That is ultimately everything that we’re about and trying to do.

RENEE HANSEN: Great. Well, thanks, T.J. Thanks so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed all of your knowledge and your experience and sharing on the Premier Podcast.

T.J. MASKER: Awesome. Thank you.

RENEE HANSEN: 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 our blog at premiercrop.com/blog.

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Today on the Premier Podcast we are talking about common frustrations with precision ag. We are joined by Katie McWhirter, Manager of Training and Development at Premier Crop Systems.

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

RENEE HANSEN: Today, we’re talking with Katie McWhirter, our Manager of Training and Development. She is chatting with us about the frustrations with precision ag.  Katie, tell us a little bit about your background and a little more about you and your role at Premier Crop?

KATIE MCWHIRTER: I was born on your typical farm in southeast Iowa, livestock and row crop. My father’s just now retiring, but funny as he is, he is in his late sixties, and in 2013, he invested in electric drives to be able to variable-rate seed. He variable-rates his fertilizer. He does all that, which is so not what people think of that generation, embracing technology like that, but he knew that, working with me, he’d be able to make use of that equipment that he was investing in.

Then, on the flip side, I have a brother who was, I guess for lack of better words, gifted or brought into the row crop world. He’s actually in the livestock industry and doesn’t have that technology, but we started talking one day, and he said: ‘I think I can use my data to do better. It’s not that good.’ So, talking with him, does he have the latest and greatest? No. But, again, his data is everywhere, and it’s just meeting him where he’s at to say, okay, I realize you don’t have this technology or this technology, but we can still use what you have to make a better decision.

Even as recent as about an hour ago, I’m entering in some of his costs and his inputs to really make him see that there is variability within his operation even at a field level, which means profitability is variable at that field level. So, I’m excited to watch his journey as he gets more into this space.

FRUSTRATION #1: CONNECTIVITY

RENEE HANSEN: So, Katie, what would you say? We were talking before we hit record on this podcast, how do you come up with a list of five to 10 things that growers don’t like or are frustrated about with ag technology?

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Well, those frustrations definitely vary in the different hats that I wear. Probably the biggest frustration is that these technologies, if you’re talking about in or on the equipment, would be that they don’t communicate together, especially if they’re not a solid color, meaning they’re not all the same brand of equipment. That is a frustration for growers.

I would say, also, a very big frustration, and funny as I’ve been out here in the last couple weeks, growers don’t think that they could, I wouldn’t say, benefit from our services, but they’re very worried because they don’t think their data is good. So, it’s two combines, it’s three combines, it’s not calibrated. How can you change some of these frustrations? What we can do, is take that data, and as long as it’s capturing that variability and we have an end measurement, whether that’s going to be bushels or yield, we can post-calibrate or make that data usable within our system. I think even the simplest technologies really can benefit from what we do.

I think one of the things I’ve learned is that we really have to ask questions to these growers to find out, when they talk about ag technology, no different than what I did with you, to find out what exactly they’re frustrated with. If they’re frustrated with data, what do they mean by that? I mean, is it they’re frustrated because they’ve got two or three combines or two or three planters and it’s not all brought together? Is it because they don’t feel like they’re getting a complete picture?

I met with a grower yesterday who said: ‘The soil sampling is here. We’ve got these spreadsheets on our computer. Their data’s all over the place.’ I smiled, and I said: ‘You just want to put the pieces of the puzzle together to see exactly what the picture is.’ They’re like: ‘Yes, that’s what we want because we’ve invested in it. We know that each of those separately has been bringing us value, but it’s also bringing us frustration as we know we should be bringing them all together to make an even better decision.’

FRUSTRATION #2: DATA ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

RENEE HANSEN: What was some of his biggest hesitation? I know you mentioned that he felt his data wasn’t good enough but elaborate on that a little bit more. Tell me more about that.

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Well, the yield monitor doesn’t have a card in it, so we haven’t been collecting yield data. So, I mean, the basics of what we’ve always said is a must. It’s really what we’re rooted in, but with our new planning tools, I immediately was like: ‘Okay, but there’s so much more we can do even by putting together, at the field level, his yield goals and his expected revenue and his variable-rated nutrients because he’s been grid sampling.’ Even though he doesn’t have what we, even a month ago, thought was an essential piece of what we had to have to be able to work with a grower, he’s going to test me on this one because he’ll get a yield monitor.

That’s the agreement by fall, but I believe we can still provide him value being early enough and being able to identify his yield efficiency scores, his planned yield efficiency scores in each field, to be able to potentially identify profit robbers and how we could try to lessen that on his operation as a whole. Yeah, he definitely was hesitant until I showed him. I’m like: ‘Here’s what I need.’ And he immediately says to me, he’s pointing at the paper, and he’s like: ‘I’ve got this. I’ve got this. I’ve got this.’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, you’ve got the pieces. Let’s get them put together.’

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, putting it together all in one system, and you also mentioned connection and connectivity. I mean, that seems to be everything’s everywhere. So, you also tell me, what are you doing to help him solve that and get all the information into one spot? I mean, you are doing some of the work for him.

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Right. So, I get the pleasure of contacting the people on his agronomy team. I think, before, some people might’ve seen us as the competition or a threat, and what I’ve said to both his seed supplier and his crop protection and fertilizer salesperson is I’m not here to step on your toes. I don’t sell those things. What I’m doing is I’m trying to help him be more profitable. That’s been fun to talk with his team, and, in fact, as soon as I start putting these pieces together, I want to meet with his team and show them what we’re trying to do for him in order to make him a more profitable farmer.

FRUSTRATION #3: DIFFERENT COLORS OF EQUIPMENT

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, and what about the color of equipment with numerous different colors of equipment? Or the farmer, the grower, isn’t applying some of their inputs. Somebody else is doing it for them. How do we go about getting some of that information?

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Oh, definitely. Again, I met with another grower yesterday. As we’re talking, sometimes they think all this information has to be captured somewhere or captured on a monitor. It has to be captured somewhere, but there are so many different pieces of information that we keep track of. I think that is a really big misconception, what data is. Some people, I’ve laughed, they think it’s a singular thing. For us, it’s a plural. I mean, so much data can be collected not necessarily on a monitor. So, putting that all together in one system, be able to look at it, to get a clear picture as far as what’s correlating yield or, more importantly, what’s driving profitability or, better yet, holding the entire operation back from being more profitable.

FRUSTRATION #4: IS A PRECISION AG SERVICE PROFITABLE 

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, you’re talking about some of the things that they can start inputting and putting the pieces of the puzzle together. So, what’s the output? What do they get? What are we giving a grower? How is it going to benefit him?

KATIE MCWHIRTER: What it gives the grower is a clear picture of their operation as far as profitability, that return to land and management. The numbers don’t lie. I mean, I’ve always said the numbers do not lie. Take the emotion out of it, but that’s not where it stops. Essentially, it’s a continuous cycle. Don’t give me a pretty map, and that’s great, right? Don’t give me that. I need you to be able to, and our growers need us to be able to, without any bias, to say: ‘Here’s what we could do with it.’

Ultimately, it’s going to be the grower’s decision, and that’s what I was telling the grower yesterday. We’re never going to do anything that you don’t want to do. We will challenge you as far as this is what we’re seeing in the data. If you’re wanting to improve, it really looks like this is an area that we could focus on.

FRUSTRATION #5: FEAR OF CHANGING EVERYTHING AT ONCE

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, something that you mentioned, Katie, was it’s a continuous cycle and how it’s never ending. You’re constantly learning. So, even at year one, there is so much that we can learn about. So, tell me, what does a grower learn at year one?

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Which is funny because, when I got back into working directly with growers, that was one of the questions that they asked me when we were first sitting down: ‘What do you think we’re going to learn this year?’ As I was getting all this data from him, and I’m like: ‘I don’t even want to take a guess.’ I have a suspicion, but I don’t want to say it out loud, but I think it was just their biggest ‘aha’ was I’ve never looked at my data like this before. I’ve seen it on the typical red, yellow, orange, three-shades-of-green map. Maybe I’ve done a little bit of comparison in some of these other platforms before, but never have I looked at it this way before.

Whether that was in charts or in our data visualization tools and then, ultimately, to tie those costs back to it. Some of the things they thought, they were right, and some things they were kind of surprised, which has led to decisions. When I started with them in August, I mean, I told them I was not going to push them to anything that they didn’t want to do technology-wise. All of a sudden, we’re sitting down for our planning meeting in December. I’m like: ‘Oh my goodness. Four months ago, this is not where we were.’ I didn’t think this is where we were going, and now we’re jumping in the deep end of the pool. I don’t want you to do this and be uncomfortable. I want you very comfortable with the changes that you’re suggesting we make.

That’s been fun, though, to lead people through because we all know that change is hard, and it’s very hard to get outside of our comfort zone. So, I actually start my sales training, my leadership training course, with: ‘Here’s your comfort zone, and outside of it, that’s where the magic happens.’ That’s so, so true with farmers.

FRUSTRATION #6: DATA IS OVERWHELMING

RENEE HANSEN: Just within our own family operation too, sometimes you can get so comfortable diving into something new. They want to, a grower wants to get into something new. But where do you start? How do you get started? It’s having a service, something that Premier Crop offers and you offer. It’s helping them and starting to input the information, contacting the people to get the information, knowing who to contact. So, right now in 2021, we’re at the beginning of March. Why would a grower need to get involved in something like this? Why should they wait?

KATIE MCWHIRTER: I don’t think they should wait. I think it could seem very overwhelming and don’t know where to start. It just takes that conversation to get them going. That’s why it’s so wonderful that we have the great group of advisors that we have to guide them through this process. We all like to be guided. We all like to know what’s next. I don’t care if it’s the program at church, the bulletin to what’s next. Or when you get on an airplane overseas, and it’s saying: ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. Then, this.’ That just puts everybody to ease and guide them along.

Our advisors, it’s like we farm with them. I know I wasn’t going to go back and farm. But that love of agriculture and helping farmers, that’s our group of advisers. That’s their characteristics, their qualities. They genuinely want to help because it’s like they’re farming.

RENEE HANSEN: 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. To learn more about Premier Crop, visit our blog at premiercrop.com.

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Today we are talking about the expectation vs reality in your farm data. We are joined by Aaron Seifert, Business Development Manager of Premier Crop Systems.

About Aaron: “I am a lifelong farm kid. I grew up in Southern Minnesota, and my family still farms up there. Livestock, as well as row crop operations. My in-laws farm here in central Iowa. And I have the great opportunity to be able to help out a bunch of different farming operations, which is really fun. And so it keeps me grounded in everything that I do. I have a history in the hardware side of precision ag. I dealt a lot with third-party hardware applications. And now I’ve shifted more to the software side and have a great opportunity to be a part of Premier Crop and spread the word, so to speak, out west as we expand our territory. ”

RENEE HANSEN: Today, I’m here with Aaron Seifert, one of our business development managers, and we’re talking about precision ag and “expectations versus reality.” What are some farmers’ expectations when it comes to precision ag?

AARON SEIFERT: Good question. I think precision ag expectations seem to be all over the board, and I think oftentimes that’s because every growers’ operation is a little bit different. There are growers who have expectations around time and data management. Some growers have expectations around better managing their input costs and fertility. There are growers who have expectations around greater visibility to their data and using that data to make better decisions.

I think expectations really vary. Every grower’s operation is a little bit different, and every grower is in a different place when it comes to precision. There are a lot of growers who are maybe just getting their feet wet, starting to figure out what the precision side of things mean. There are growers who are taking advantage of the equipment that they’ve purchased, or the technology that they’ve purchased on their equipment, to already do a bunch of variable-rate things but maybe don’t have the analytics. I think that really affects what expectations can be. A lot of times, I think expectations are set really high, maybe based on some marketing or advertising or things like that. In many cases, those can be ill-informed and maybe just not possible, but I think, in any case, the precision side of agriculture has grown because it does pay.

There is value and there is benefit to utilizing the technology that’s on these pieces of equipment and the technology that we at Premier Crop employ from a software side of things to help growers make better decisions. So, expectations can be all over the board. I think the good thing is that there are expectations because that’s what we need to do from a precision standpoint, to help meet those expectations and prove that managing our variability and using the technology does pay.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, so let’s say one of a growers’ expectation is that they have to do it on their own. Tell me a little bit about if a farmer thinks that, oh gosh, they have to do all this precision ag on their own. What is the reality when working with a service?

AARON SEIFERT: I mean, it does seem a little daunting when you think about it. Even me, I’ve been in precision. I started on the hardware side and am familiar with different monitors and all those kinds of things. Even for me, when you’re going from one piece of equipment to the next, and maybe you have different technologies in each tractor, I mean, it seems pretty daunting to be able to say: “Well, how do I manage all this stuff?” It’s coming from different places. I have it in different places, and some of it’s in this service on the cloud. Some of it’s on a thumb drive, and my fields don’t match in my monitors, and it just seems like it’s a mess. It can definitely seem daunting, but I think the good thing is how we go to business.

Being able to help a grower through our software platform is great, but I think, really, the other big benefit here is our advisors. The advisors that we work with, that we have at Premier Crop, help a grower on-farm be able to manage that data and manage all those precision pieces that kind of seem overwhelming and complex. I think there certainly is a myth of having to do everything on your own, and there are some services that you could potentially have that would like you to do it on your own. I think we’ve seen and have had a lot of success by being a partner with the grower and being there with them and helping them through the process, taking some of those complex pieces off their plate and putting it into a much easier-to-use system and helping the grower through every step of the way.

RENEE HANSEN: I think a lot of that reality is telling farmers that we can show up on your farm. The advisor helps export the data. You don’t have to do it on your own. You don’t have to send it to us. It can be all put into one place.

AARON SEIFERT: I was just going to say that’s just part of it. That’s just managing the data. The data management piece of it, is a huge help, to have our advisors there to help the grower. Even more important is getting decisions out of the data. That is the really difficult part that. We at Premier Crop try to make much easier. That’s what we do. Our goal is to have that data works for the grower and help them make better decisions with it.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, because you’re talking about that complexity of data. There are so many layers of data, and I know Dan Frieberg talks about all the layers of data. Just within the soil, there is the soil sample, the topography, the water distribution. Another expectation or myth that some farmers might have is that they have to spend a lot of time researching and studying the data. So, what’s the reality of precision ag when it comes to layering all of the data, and how does precision ag or a company like Premier Crop help?

AARON SEIFERT: You talked about the layers of data, and I like to say that every piece of data is important. Every piece of data has some value, but, really, it’s not until you bring them all together in one place and find the relationships between those layers of data that the value really shines. I think that’s really what we do. We bring all that data into one place, look through those different layers, find the relationships that are potentially profit-limiting or the “1+1=3” type things that are going on out there in the field and try to replicate those. That’s really the complex piece that we, as a company, have software that helps us do.

You could spend all your time researching. Looking through all those pieces of data and trying to make it make sense. Having somebody like Premier Crop on your team to go through that data for you, have software help, have conversations with the grower, help put those pieces together and then come up with an action plan. Really, we’re delivering insights. We talk through scenarios and trying to find the best way forward, based on what the data is telling us. We are able to look through the different layers, find the relationships, have conversations with the grower about things that the software can’t see. I think that personal piece is always important. That’s a great place where our advisors help growers understand what the data is saying. Then they can help come up with the best recommendation possible.

RENEE HANSEN: So, it’s not only the data. It’s the data coupled with the agronomy, with an advisor, coupled with economics. I think that was a really great point that I just wanted to pull out that you stated.

AARON SEIFERT: Absolutely. It’s those pieces, along with the experience of the grower. It’s hard to have software do it all right. Being able to tie it all together with an advisor, is really key.

RENEE HANSEN: As we talk about another expectation or maybe even a myth, it’s that some growers think that they have to have it figured out right away. Or, they have to have a variable-rate planter. That’s not the reality.

AARON SEIFERT: One of the things that we try to do is meet growers where they’re at. This depends on wherever they’re at in that precision ag timeframe or continuum. If they’re really early on, or if they’re experienced with precision ag, there’s something that our advisors in our program, our system, can have to offer them. You can do a lot with just variable-rate fertility. You can do a lot with just analyzing what’s going on out there to help you figure out what things you need to replicate, what things you need to focus on, what areas are potential profit-limiting areas for you and factors that influence those.

I think the important part is getting on the bus, like Dan always likes to say. Let’s get them on the bus. Let’s figure out where they’re at today. Figure out what the ways are forward. It doesn’t mean equipment upgrades. It doesn’t mean spending a ton of money on this or that. It’s really about figuring out where we’re at. We need to do what we can with what we have.

The biggest thing that I think about farming and precision ag is the insights. If you’re not learning, you’re not trying hard enough. There’s always something we can learn from every year. Every year is different, and it brings new challenges. Being able to pull out little nuggets of knowledge from every year that we get to do this is the important part. There’s always something we can do to get a little bit better.

It’s really helped growers continue to learn. We can take them where they’re at today and figure out what it takes to continue to improve. What it takes to get them to the next step. There’s no silver bullet anymore. Every grower is different, but the data tells a story. When we bring that all together and figure out what’s going on, then we have a lot of success managing the variables that are out there. We help growers both take advantage of those high-producing areas, as well as minimize their risk in those low-producing areas.

It’s a good thing to just keep learning. You don’t have to have it all figured out, but if I can learn a little bit faster, that’s a really big deal in today’s world. Hybrids don’t last that long. Rental contracts are often a year or two or three. We need to try to figure stuff out fast to take as much advantage of those inputs as we can. For instance, things like our Enhanced Learning Blocks really help growers do that at a quicker speed.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, let’s elaborate on that, too. A little bit more because another expectation is that you might have to have an agronomy degree to be successful with precision ag. The reality is you can learn faster. Talk a little bit more about how we can help a grower learn faster.

AARON SEIFERT: Our goal and our advisors’ goals are just to continue to learn. We want to share in the learning because we don’t have every answer, either. I think what we do have is the ability to work with a grower to figure out what’s going on out there, how we manage it, and how we do get better.

There are a lot of complexities that go into agriculture. Anything from equipment to agronomy to soils to weather. A lot of the things we can’t control. A lot of them we can. So, it’s about pulling out those pieces that we can control and really learning with the grower on what works, what doesn’t. We want to make sure that we prove it along the way. Maybe there was a yield increase, but it wasn’t profitable. Or maybe we’re growing super high-yielding crops. We figured out a way to do it sustainably, a way to do it profitably and economically. That’s really the ultimate goal. It’s about the amount of dollars you put back in your pocket. Not necessarily the bushels you put in the bin.

RENEE HANSEN: Yes, exactly. Well, thank you, Aaron. Really appreciate your time today on “expectations versus reality” with precision ag and with the Premier Podcast.

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In this episode of the Premier Crop Podcast, we listen in on a year end grower meeting with one of our partners, SciMax. These meetings are often done in a grower’s home at the kitchen table to plan for the upcoming year ahead. On the call today we listen to Peter with SciMax Solutions and his grower, Landon Aldinger, a 4th generation farmer in northern Iowa, as they discuss year end results within their row crop operation using data to drive results. They also talk about how growers can utilize a Yield Efficiency Score.

PETER BIXEL: Good afternoon. My name is Peter Bixel with SciMax Solutions, and today we’re north of Iowa Falls and visiting with a client of ours, Landon Aldinger.

LANDON ALDINGER: Hello. This is Landon Aldinger. I farm around the Iowa Falls area with my father Mike Aldinger. I am a fourth-generation farmer in our family. We currently run a row crop operation. I have some beef cattle and some hog operations. We also have a sales and consulting business here in town called Precision Farm Management.

KATIE DECKER: Tell me a little bit about how you got started with SciMax and why you started working with Peter.

LANDON ALDINGER: Yeah, so I would have met Peter through my father. I believe, the connection point was through Latham, correct? Yeah, Latham Hi-Tech Seeds offered a service that was called seed to soil. My brother-in-law Randy and myself and my dad and my dad’s Latham RSM kind of introduced us. Dad was actively working with SciMax at the time through Latham. We’ve kind of grown our relationship together over the years, adding various products.

KATIE DECKER: Do you still farm with your father?

LANDON ALDINGER: Yeah. We have a full corn and soybean farm and a few fat cattle here up at my place. We own some hog buildings that we do odds and ends with. And then we have a sales and consulting business. We sell a full retail line of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, any crop protection products. Then, we also sell Latham Hi-Tech Seeds and Wyffels Hybrids.

KATIE DECKER: Talk through how you guys work together.

LANDON ALDINGER: I call Peter and then he doesn’t call me back. No, I’m just kidding. I’m kidding.

PETER BIXEL: It was that way.

LANDON ALDINGER: No, it’s the other way around, usually. I use all the folks at SciMax to assist in creating that crop plan for the year, obviously. Planning from seed placement, a variable-rate nitrogen piece, our variable-rate seeding rates, just pulling all that data together and maximizing our potential profitability and efficiencies. Then, we get to this time of year, where we’re looking backwards and kind of addressing: “How did we do in analyzing that?” The analytical side is why I enjoy the relationship. It’s easy to go out and just pick corn and say: “I got 200 bushel, or whatever you got, and that’s great.” But what did you do to dictate that outcome?

KATIE DECKER: Do you have an instance of a problem you guys were faced with, and then once you started working with SciMax, how they helped you overcome that?

LANDON ALDINGER: Yes, my grandpa actually owned the fertilizer plant.

PETER BIXEL: They had a fertilizer plant, so their fertility levels were really good. As they’ve been pulling off more yield, it just helps Landon now that we’ve been watching the fertility levels by the yield that they’ve been achieving and just being cognizant of what those levels are and how to address them, using the tools to basically fix or continue to keep them where t

hey’re at. They’ve done a lot of litter. A lot of chicken litter too, as well, to help source a lot of that stuff, and then the hog manure that Landon mentioned. So I’d say just really concentrate on those fertility levels to make sure to keep them up because that’s the thing that I think helped Landon’s grandpa, dad and then him, just having that good base. That foundation has really helped set the operation up for success.

KATIE DECKER: How does SciMax really help you get the most out of the data that you’re collecting?

LANDON ALDINGER: Like I said, I think in any system there isn’t always just one variable for success that you can tweak or fine-tune. It’s taking a part of the entire system, what your manure management practices are, what your fertility levels are that he’s talking about, how you’re placing the seed, where you’re placing the seed at what rates. Same with nitrogen. And I think the ability to dive into each one of those segments of that system and analyze this worked with this other combination but didn’t work so well over here, you almost get a blueprint for going forward. I think, as we’ve seen hybrids evolve or their genetics evolve over time, we can really start to tailor-make it to the hybrids. That’s where I see the biggest focus for me, I guess, being a seed dealer, and I carry that onto my customers, too.

PETER BIXEL: Yeah, I think that’s helped Landon, knowing his hybrids inside and then just kind of putting out the practice on his own acres and then seeing: “Okay, if we push it to 38 or 40,000 or something, does it pay?” Maybe it doesn’t because, again, back to the good fertility, everything else is set. So, now if you change that one variable, did it pay? And he can take that to others to help their operation if they’re similar.

LANDON ALDINGER: Or a combination of variables, too. Sometimes that data gets lost in the noise, and it’s hard to kind of separate it out and see. So, I think their services have helped us that way immensely.

PETER BIXEL: This year has just been a challenge because you don’t have Ethan and Tyson going through, each one of them, individually. Two people at Premier go through it all, and I know they have a lot. They go through each one, verify and then, if there’s a question, they send it to their in-house statistician. Then, they send those out, so it’s been taking like a month to get those reports back.

LANDON ALDINGER: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of stuff in there.

PETER BIXEL: Yeah, we just did it on population this year. That’s all that we looked at. We had two farms. Leto’s and Bradford, I think, were the two that we did.

KATIE DECKER: Can we talk a little bit more? Just go a little deeper into the decision making. How is Peter helping you make those decisions, both agronomically and economically, on your operation?

LANDON ALDINGER: I come from an angle of the seed perspective, being a seed salesman. I want to know everything I can about every hybrid and where it likes to live and how it likes to operate. We’ve done a lot. I think, probably, the bulk of the work that we’ve done with you is the variable-rate planting populations; that and the nitrogen piece for ourselves and customers. I mean, how many times do I call you and just on random stuff, too?

PETER BIXEL: Well, yeah, it’s not necessarily just about, I mean, from fungicide recommendations to product things. I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud here, but just anything in general. What do I use in my operation? I’ll tell him what I use, but it doesn’t mean he has to or, by any means, needs to. It’s just good, I think. It’s the same way back from him to me, not just me to him. It’s just a sound barrier or somebody to talk through things with and see if your plan or if your strategy makes sense.

LANDON ALDINGER: I think maybe more than one key aspect of that data-driven decision is just forcing operators to think in those terms: doing trials and setting them up and comparing products. I’m looking at two fungicides right behind you, and we had head-to-heads out there, and we learned. I mean, we’re going to look at the data, but I can look at it just visually and see that there was a difference. I think people are really good at just doing the visual 10,000-foot view, but you really have to dive into it and then start doing the whole, from the economics and the profitability side, which is where it really comes down to rubber meets the road.

KATIE DECKER: Can you tell me a little bit more about the trials that you’ve been doing? You don’t have to give me any specifics on certain products or varieties or anything, but maybe why you decided to do the trial and some things that you’ve learned.

LANDON ALDINGER: I’m just thinking in terms of this last year because we probably had a little bit more, but there’s always the fungicide head-to-head. There are always new products, comparing them to old standards and then running the cost analysis of how they compare versus yield. Standard stuff. Varieties. We do a lot of head-to-head populations within those varieties. At Leto’s, we had the high-yielding stuff.

PETER BIXEL: Landon was tissue sampling every week and then. He had a plan put together of what to apply and when. It’s different from what he was doing on other acres to see if he could push it or what we’d see.

LANDON ALDINGER: Correct.

KATIE DECKER: What do you think is the value of working with Peter and SciMax, in general? Why would you work with them over a competitor or someone else?

LANDON ALDINGER: Right now, I would put it mainly on trust. We talk, probably, I don’t even know how often but quite often. He’s just a trusted advisor, and I don’t really like that term, but it is. I know I’m getting the honest truth when I call him and he gives me his recommendation. And if it’s something different than what I see, then we try to dive into: “Why are my results different than what your results are?” But I think there’s just a trust factor right now, and that’s why we’ve continued to partner with them for the long term.

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Today we are talking with Dr. Jerry Hatfield on the topic of carbon sequestration. Also on the show are Dan Frieberg and Renee Hansen from Premier Crop.

DAN FRIEBERG: Great to have you with us, Jerry. It couldn’t be more timely to be talking to an expert. There’s just so much buzz right now about carbon credits in agriculture. Could you just give us any perspective you want to share? I know you probably have talked about this for decades. For everybody else, it’s kind of the latest buzz. There’s just a lot of attention to soil carbon or how we can sequester carbon.

JERRY HATFIELD: We kind of have this interesting view of carbon. We have all this carbon in the atmosphere. When people say we’re going to sequester it in the soil, I think they magically think it’s going to go from the atmosphere into the soil and be stored there. But you have to realize that in agriculture, we take carbon dioxide and we combine that with sunlight to create carbohydrates. This is where plant growth comes from. When we put it into the soil, it’s basically because we’ve transported it from the leaves down into the roots. Then we take those root exudates and feed the microbes that put that carbon into the soil.

It is a very active process. It requires that we have a living plant. The only way in which we pump CO2 from the atmosphere is with deep wells. People actually just dump and pump air down into the deep earth. In agriculture, it’s really a very active process. And because it is an active process, we have a combination of sequestration, as well as cycling. A lot of it gets sequestered into soil organic matter. It gets built into those aggregates, but a lot of it is really recycled very, very quickly. We have microbes that chew it up. They put it into aggregates, and then they decompose and it gets recycled.

We have to realize that, in agriculture, we do build it up over time. It’s a very dynamic process and has all these different implications for us in terms of improving our soil structure and nutrient cycling. That really is where the value of carbon is coming from.

Image from reneweconomy.com.au

DAN FRIEBERG: When we till soils, do we expose soil carbon to the atmosphere? It seems like a lot of the attention is obviously around not tilling. What’s the tillage relationship to sequestering carbon?

JERRY HATFIELD: There’s an estimation that about 40% of that organic material is going out of the roots as root exudates, which is basically sugars that are feeding the microbes. Of that, a large percent is going into CO2 that’s trapped in that soil volume. So, when you till, all you’re doing is basically releasing a lot of that CO2 that’s been trapped in there. Then it goes right back to the atmosphere very quickly.

The other part is that when we till, we expose a lot of that soil to the air. The microbes really begin to change that organic material and digest it very quickly, so we see another puff of CO2. We actually have two mechanisms when we till. That immediate release is really just trapped CO2. The longer term is the spring of activity of the biological community that respires, as well.

DAN FRIEBERG: Some extension person was saying that if we no-tilled, if every acre in the world was switched to no-till, we could reverse climate change. That’s obviously a huge advocate for no-till, but it was almost like this single change in practice could change climate. I mean, it’s that impactful.

JERRY HATFIELD: I’m not sure I buy that it’s that impactful, and don’t get me wrong. I think that no-till is part of this, but if we think about no-tilling corn and soybeans across Iowa, we’ve still got a large part of that growing season in which nothing is happening. I mean, we may not be disturbing it, but we’re not feeding that microbe. When we really want to build organic material, we’ve got to capitalize on capturing solar radiation and CO2 and putting it in there.

So, we need that extended crop rotation to be able to really change that. Personally, I don’t believe that no-till by itself is the path. I think it’s one component of the system, but I don’t think it is the panacea, saying that if we kept everything else and all we did is change tillage that we solve climate change. I don’t believe that’s really the case at that point.

DAN FRIEBERG: A lot of growers and advisors are familiar with cover crops from a nutrient perspective. Just having a growing plant to grab nitrate as part of a nutrient strategy in the upper Midwest is a way to make a leaky system less leaky, but what you’re talking about is the additional benefit of cover crops to the soil carbon.

JERRY HATFIELD: From the carbon capture perspective, just think about it this way. If we don’t have a growing crop out there, we’re not capturing sunlight. Just look at Iowa, from the time in which we plant that corn and soybeans in the spring until we harvest them. Then, if you look from last frost to when that corn plant really comes up, and then from maturity until it really freezes in spring, we actually have about a third of the solar radiation that’s available to grow something.

So, a cover crop is really, thinking about it, all we’re doing is using that photosynthetic process to capture a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. In doing so, we obviously affect the nutrients. We affect the water, but I think we’ve got to start putting it into a much larger perspective of: “What are we doing in terms of the dynamics of carbon, nitrogen, water, all simultaneously?”

Upper Left: No-till; Lower Left: Cover Crop; Right: Row spacing

DAN FRIEBERG: As we talk about this, people go to soil health. I mean, they talk about soil health. The frustration for me, sometimes, is soil health tends to be practice-defined, like what practices do you implement? I know there’s different tests. We’re trying to quantify soil health through a test, but when it comes to soil carbon, I know some of these programs are talking about soil testing as a part of that. They’re obviously talking about more than organic matter. So, there is a soil carbon test, right?

JERRY HATFIELD: We’ve had a soil carbon test. I mean, we look at organic material. You can look at soil organic matter. You can look at particulate organic matter. You’ve got a lot of this soil CO2, which a lot of the tests are based on. It’s basically, I believe, a surrogate for the amount of biological activity we have in the soil because those are respiring organisms that generate CO2. So, you’ve got all of these pieces coming together, and I don’t know. When we talk about soil health, I think we need to stand back a little bit because I think everybody says: “Here’s a soil health test.” Well, what do we want that test for? Because a lot of the components of soil health, I think, need to be much more related to soil function: supplying water, supplying nutrients, supplying support, lack of compaction within that.

I think we need a much more holistic view of what we want our soils to do and not get hung up on saying: “What’s the perfect test?” I think that’s what confused a lot of people. “Oh, what’s the one test that I need to go out and run in my field to determine if I got soil health?” Well, you can look at how well that plant is growing. You could look at water infiltration. You could look at a number of different parameters. Just like in us, when we go to the doctor, he just doesn’t say: “Well, I’m going to look at your left earlobe, and that’s the indicator of health.” You look at all these other things that give us a metric of health. I think it’s the same thing in soil. It’s a suite of practices that give us a direction towards functionality.

The other thing is that not every soil within the field is going to respond the same, just like every human doesn’t respond the same to what we do. Soils are going to respond. If we had a really sandy soil in that field compared to clay soil, and we do the same thing on top of them, we’re going to see different rates of response just because of the parent material that’s there. So, I think we need to get that understanding out there, that it’s a dynamic process. It’s also a process that has a lot of moving parts to it, and there are certain attributes that put us down that path, but there’s also going to be different rates of responses we go on, as well.

DAN FRIEBERG: I suggested one time that yield might be a surrogate for soil health, but it was really me trying to say there are areas of the field that just are so consistently high-yielding. To me, it’s probably how they mineralize nutrients and how they hold water and all that. It’s like some of these really consistent high-yield areas. Something is going on underground that is phenomenal, and it’s just “you’re in, you’re out,” and everything’s working.

JERRY HATFIELD: As we understand more and more about spatial variation within fields, we are seeing parts of that field that are the consistent high-yielding zones of that field. I’m always intrigued by the consistent high-yielding parts of that field that are legacy barnyards, where the cattle lot was. People say: “Why, that was 50 years ago. That was there.” So, what changed in that and all of this? The other part of this is we have consistent low-yielding parts of the field, as well, and I think that we can learn a lot by probably looking at the outliers. Why are those high-yielding spots the way they are? Why are those low-yielding spots the way they are? Then, you’ve got the zone that Bruno Basso and the group at Michigan State have come up with.

We’ve got low-yielding stable zones. You’ve got high-yielding stable zones, and then you have unstable zones that really are dependent upon what the weather is during the growing season. Some years they may be high. Some years they may be low, but I do think that one of the pieces in this, in terms of soil health and these high-yielding parts, is those also tend to be much more stable zones in terms of year to year. They don’t have those big fluctuations, and those low-yielding parts don’t have fluctuations either, but they’re really non-profitable zones. These unstable zones, I mean, they could be 280 bushels one year and 120 the next year, and you go: “What happened besides the weather? What’s in that buffering capacity in soils?”

I think that we need to be back thinking about what triggers that soil to be able to do that because, sometimes, it’s raining basically the same across the field. How do we begin to tease that out? I think a lot of us are trying to figure out some of these dynamics. Is it all biological? Or is it physical? Or is it chemical? In reality, it’s all three of those things coming together, but I think that if we want to move agriculture forward, in terms of efficiency and profitability, that we need to start looking and maybe examining from different viewpoints of the system.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, it’s every geography. As we grow as a company and we get in states we haven’t been in before, we just always know that agronomy is local. There’s not a one-size-fits-all, but north-central Iowa, Jerry, those zones, they flip back and forth a lot. A lot of times, they’re the potholes, so they tend to be low-lying areas. They’re organic matter rich. They’re nutrient rich because, seven years out of 10, they’ve got too much water. So, nutrients have built up, just from lack of crop removal. Then, you get a dry year, and they are off the chart. They have so much organic matter and so much water-holding capacity that they will be the best part of the field in a really dry year. They’re the unstable ones that flip back and forth.

JERRY HATFIELD: Well, and then we get them flipped back and forth. You mentioned the water and everything. You pick it up in the spring, and then you struggle getting a population in that part of the field. Sometimes it gets drowned out, but if we can get that crop to start growing, I mean, it has nutrient-cycling capacity and water-holding capacity that is right off the charts.

DAN FRIEBERG: Jerry, going back to the carbon credit thing, will no-till kind of be a foundation for somebody to get carbon credits?

JERRY HATFIELD: I believe that no-till will be part of that process. I think it’s some of the work that Don Reicosky has done, and Morris showing that it’s basically the amount of tillage that you do. If we’re doing full-width tillage, we have a lot of CO2 going in. You’re doing strip-till. No-till is really pretty small. We’re going to have to have some tillage to magically get that seed and fertilizer into the soil. It’s a matter of the width of that and how we disturb it. In the soil, actually, the biology responds very quickly to a lot of the different things, but I do think that reduced tillage is part of this overall process. We see a lot of impacts when we till in the fall, CO2 being released into the atmosphere, that basically we release as much back as we stored the whole summer.

We basically reset the counter to zero at every fall when we do intensive tillage. So, if we want to build it up, we’ve gotta get that piece out of the system. I think that will become part of it. I think that diversifying crops and getting more carbon from the atmosphere into the soil is another part of that. We could say, well, if it’s no-till, we just go to fallow without any tillage, and I guarantee you we won’t change the carbon any. We won’t release any, but we won’t store any because we need that biological system as part of it.

DAN FRIEBERG: Awesome. Is there any scientific debate about any of this? Is the science pretty locked down, as far as the carbon sequestration in farming systems?

JERRY HATFIELD: There is a great deal of debate, and I don’t think it’s going to go away. Part of this is people see different responses, and part of it’s climate-driven. If you think about that same practice that we have in Iowa and transport it to even southern Missouri, all we do is change the climate, and we won’t see near the response because we’ve had a temperature change. We have a lot more respiration going on and warmer soil temperatures. We have a different rainfall pattern, so we see all these different pieces. That’s one piece that adds variation to it, and then a lot of this goes back to these zones within fields.

We see different responses. We need to recognize that there are different soils instead of looking at the field average and saying: “What are those different pieces, and how are they responding?” Then the argument is over. “Are you accruing carbon in the upper six inches of the soil, in terms of that magic plow layer? Are you putting it down deep?” Then, what form of carbon are we measuring? Are we measuring soil organic matter?

A lot of this is in this particulate organic matter. It gets cycled very quickly, that a lot of people don’t measure. I think the scientific debate is going to continue along this path. We’re eventually going to settle in and say: “Here are some of the attributes around this, and let’s look at these attributes and not get hung up on saying that I use a red machine or a green machine to plant our crop.”

I would think that’s where a lot of this gets in, and the same thing in terms of measurements. Did you make this measurement? Did you make that measurement? I often tell producers. They ask what the perfect soil health test is. I say: “If you want to know if you’ve got soil health, just go out and look after your field after a two-inch heavy rain because if you can’t get two inches of rain into the soil, you don’t have soil health.” You’ve got all the aggregates that are stable. You’ve got infiltration going on, and everything else, and they go: “Well, yeah.” It’s kind of an aggregation of lots of different things that is there. It gets them to thinking about what they’re really looking at out there. Same thing in terms of yield that you mentioned.

When we improve our soil health, we see a lot more efficiency of nutrient supply and water supply late in that growing season. We see that plant maintain its green leaf area longer in the grain-filling period. I think there are things that we could get producers interested in just looking at. Asking the question, “What are some of the indications going on that you’re making a change in your system?”

DAN FRIEBERG: Do you see carbon credits as potentially a way to help pay and make the economics even for switching to cover crops and less tillage?

JERRY HATFIELD: If we can get the value of carbon credits up enough. I mean, I was just looking at some data the other day that were really good systems, maybe half to eight-tenths of a ton of this. If we’re only offering $15 a ton, that’s $12. It costs you $30 to put in a cover crop, so you’re still on the negative side of that, even though you can get the value over time. I think we’ve got to give back to producers.

Again, back to your zoning question of saying, how do you really begin to look at profitability across the field, and saying, how do I look at increasing profitability in those poor parts of the field? Is that reducing fertilizer applications because you’re not getting return on doing other things? You could trade that input of fertilizers for the cover crop to be able to improve those.

I think we need a different strategy about how we go about implementing conservation practices across the field. Or, accounting for the value of them and the potential impact, short-term and long-term. I think that therein lies some of the imagination that I think we ought to be using relative to farming systems. We tend to look at our conservation practices as kind of a generic sort of suite. We’ll just lay these on the field out there. But in reality, I think we need to be much more structured in thinking about how they’re going to work. Also how they could be implemented in much more of a dynamic way.

RENEE HANSEN: If a farmer is really skeptical of the whole carbon sequestration, what does he have to do? And is it going to benefit him?

JERRY HATFIELD: If you look at carbon from a benefit perspective, I don’t think we’ve talked enough about the benefits of carbon. We talk about carbon relative to carbon markets. We talk about sequestration but the value of putting carbon back into the soil. I often use this analogy, that if you get into carbon for the carbon market perspective, it’s like new running board money for your pickup. But if you get into improving carbon for the agronomic and efficiency piece, it’s new pickup money.

That’s the orders of magnitude that we’re talking about because we see that improvement in yield stability. We take those low-yielding parts of the field out. I don’t think we’ve explained to producers the real value of carbon and why that’s so critical as part of the field, in terms of nutrient cycling, water infiltration and storage, even overall vigor of the crop.

I think when we put those metrics around it, producers begin to see that these real changes are out there. Often we just sell it from the standpoint of carbon sequestration. It’s going to do good for the climate. But for the producer, they don’t care a whole lot about that. We must put it into that perspective of what it means for them. Then I think it becomes an important part of their decision process as well as an educational effort.

RENEE HANSEN: Absolutely. I think that the value just hasn’t been seen or believed by them yet to understand. There’s so much talk about carbon credits that they’re questioning, “Is this for real? What do I need to do?” It’s just another payment back to the grower. What do they have to do to get it, and what do they have to do to achieve it?

JERRY HATFIELD: We need to realize that there are a suite of practices. Just don’t say, well, as we’ve talked about that, the only way you can get there is no-till. That’s one component. Reduced tillage is one component of the system, crop diversity and putting more crop longer through the growing season there. Even adding bio-based fertilizers, manures, compost, things like this, do a major impact on this. Ultimately, we’re talking about allowing the biological system within the soil to do its thing. Capturing carbon and putting it into soil aggregates and organic matter.

This is a very complex problem that we need to look at. You’re going to see the same result if you did the same thing. I think we need to think a lot more judiciously about how we go about achieving our goals and looking at how practices and pieces and responses fit together. I think that’s part of that whole maturity of really evaluating our system and figuring out where we want to go and how we want to get there.

DAN FRIEBERG: Jerry, in order to change soil carbon, what’s a realistic timeframe? This is a long term. In the relative, it’s not something that changes very fast, right?

JERRY HATFIELD: Well, we actually see changes in carbon within one growing season. Now, measurement-wise, it gets a little difficult to pick that up, but we can see it because of changes in color. We can see changes in aggregates near the surface. Those are kind of the unstable parts of this. The stable parts are really much more in that two-to-five year timeframe. We really want to see depth changes. With depth, we’re talking about plus-10, and I think we’ve got to realize this, but things occur quickly. I was looking at some of the dynamics on root exudates relative to microbial activity, and those often occur within minutes of changing this.

So, you look at all this, and I think we’ve got to realize that we’re dealing in a set of different time constants all the way across our platform. It goes back to the thing on soil health. What parameters are really changing within that? Because we know some parameters are going to change a lot more quickly than others. We see aggregate changes within a growing season. They’re not very stable, but they are changing. So, it’s a matter of what’s that time cost to get it to be much more of a stable aggregate?

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, so if a grower wants to start implementing some of these, there’s nothing set in stone right now, of what management practices they should follow?

JERRY HATFIELD: No. We talk about why there’s so much controversy within the science community. It’s that there’s not a common set of practices. A lot of people have not accounted for the fact of all the weather variation that occurred during their experiment. Sometimes, it’s the rainfall patterns that we talked about with the heavier soils. We get these wet springs, and then we get dry summers. That really influences the response. Sometimes, we get dry springs, but we get wet summers. I think that part of this is we’ve got to figure out how to start normalizing a lot of the different characteristics that are out there, and even in terms of cover crops.

So, if you run a monoculture cover crop of rye, how large was that rye crop? People say: “Oh, I planted a rye cover crop.” Well, was it 3000 pounds of biomass? Or was it 500 pounds? Just because you had a cover crop doesn’t mean you all had the same efficacy. If you’ve got a cover crop cocktail with a small grain and a legume and a brassica mixture, what was the real biomass that was generated out of that? So, I think there needs to be a lot of normalization of, instead of just saying we did this, what was the real efficacy?

Just going back to Dan’s comment in terms of yield, we need to look at the productivity of our cover crop system over time, and we have tools to be able to do that. I think that starts putting us on much more of an equal footing of saying: “Why do we see these responses across different places?” Well, it could be because we had different levels of input across that we didn’t even characterize.

RENEE HANSEN: So, overall, when it comes to carbon sequestration, does it pay for the farmer? Should they start doing it today?

JERRY HATFIELD: I think it does. I think it pays in lots of different ways. We start this path towards carbon sequestration. We change our infiltration rates. Let’s just start about: “What are we really trying to do in our agriculture across the Midwest?” It’s that we want to take as much precipitation and put it back through that crop to create yield. When we’ve got a soil that’s pretty fragile. We have low infiltration rates of less than a half-inch per hour. When we can just improve the infiltration rate up to two inches per hour, then we get a lot more rain into that system. If I can get rain into the soil, I can store it. If I can’t get it into the soil, it’s just runoff.

We start with realizing that our whole goal in agriculture is to do two things. One is to capture sunlight, and one is to put as much water through that plant as possible. If we get our soil set up so that we’re doing those things, it’s going to pay dividends to us. Then, you’ll end up saying: “Well, I’ll recycle more nutrients. I’ll do all these other things to kind of buffer against the weather variation that’s going on out there.” That’s the path that I think we need to be explaining to producers. What carbon really is doing at various steps along the way.

I believe that if we really want soils to be that carbon sequestering part, we need to be explaining to agriculture and producers. This includes the whole dynamic of carbon and how it’s going to benefit them in ways they haven’t thought about much.

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Dr. Jerry Hatfield Bio:

Dr. Jerry Hatfield received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 1975 in the area of Agricultural Climatology, M.S. in Agronomy from the University of Kentucky in 1972 and a B.S. in Agronomy from Kansas State University in 1971. He is the retired director of the USDA-ARS National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames, Iowa. Dr. Hatfield worked in California at the University of California, Davis from 1975 to 1983 as a bio-meteorologist working in a range of different crops.

He joined USDA-ARS in 1983 at the Plant Stress and Water Conservation unit in Lubbock, Texas, where he stayed until his transfer to Ames to develop the research program of the National Soil Tilth Laboratory. His research focused on the interactions among the components of the soil plant atmosphere continuum and our linkage to air, water and soil quality. His focus has been on the evaluation of farming systems and their response to water and nitrogen interactions across soils and remote sensing methods to qualify field variation. A platform for his research utilizes the “genetics times environment times management” concept as a framework to work with producers to demonstrate how they can increase their production efficiency, increase soil health and develop resilience to weather and climate variation as the foundation for food security.

His outreach efforts have included participation in the National Climate Assessment as the lead author for agriculture for the U.S. and on the IPCC effort on greenhouse gases and climate change. Dr. Hatfield is an accomplished author with 498 referred publications and eight monographs. He serves as the editor for numerous publications, and he also ranks in the top 2% of researchers in the world. His numerous awards include being inducted into the USDA-ARS Hall of Fame for his research impact and the Hugh Hammond Bennett Award, along with being a Fellow in the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America, and serving as President of the American Society of Agronomy in 2007. Please welcome Dr. Jerry Hatfield.

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Today we are talking with Lance Meyer, one of Premier Crop’s ag advisors in the Kansas region about the ‘why’ behind your field map.

About Lance: Lance is a Crop Advisor with Premier Crop, working with growers in Kansas on their operations. A K-State graduate and Kansas native, Lance enjoys helping those around him to improve their operation.

LANCE MEYER: Hi, guys. My name is Lance Meyer. I’m an advisor here in eastern Kansas, actually located in the little town of Wellsville, just southwest of Kansas City. I’ve been with Premier Crop for about a year and a half now. I work with growers kind of all over Kansas. I get out west and up north a little bit, so kind of all over.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, and Lance, where did you go to school?

LANCE MEYER: Of course, K-State. I mean, is there any other school? I’m the only K-State grad with Premier Crop right now, so it makes me feel pretty good. I went to K-State, did ag technology there, minored in agronomy and ag business. With Premier Crop, now I’m doing what I love and pretty much exactly what I went to school for. It’s going great.

RENEE HANSEN:  Today, we’re talking with Lance about the “why” behind your field map and how data and agronomic data can really help you move forward and help you be more profitable in the years to come. So, Lance, I’m just going to ask you some questions. Just tell me a little bit about what you have seen within the last year and a half while at Premier Crop, or even when you were in school, noticing different spots in the field through data. Can you explain that a little bit more?

LANCE MEYER: Well, first of all, it’s great that people are recognizing that there are these spots in the field. In precision ag, at Premier Crop, we call that variability, and that’s ultimately our main goal. It’s to manage that variability, and Premier Crop has a bunch of different tools. Some examples that a grower might see differences in soil fertility: that could be organic matter, pH or just your soil-supplied nutrients. That’s really different all over Kansas.

That’s one great thing about Kansas. You get kind of the whole diverse picture. So, in eastern Kansas, we could deal with some pretty acidic soils, and then, as you move farther west, you get into some really high-pH environments. So, there are a lot of different things there that are going on. Another thing here in Kansas: as you move farther west, you have historically high potassium in the soil. That’s a couple of things we deal with in Kansas, some other examples: weather also plays a big factor.

We have a lot of irrigation out west. There’s some surface water irrigation here in eastern Kansas. Then, you also get into those very drouthy environments out west and a lot of dry-land farming. That can play a big factor in it. Some other things: different genetics are used in hybrids, that sort of thing. Stuff that works here in eastern Kansas is not going to work in western Kansas, in most cases. There are some big differences also in crop protection products. Different hybrids respond to different fungicides. We noticed a lot about that this year, that some hybrids respond greatly to fungicides, and then some not so much. There’s a lot of variability across the state, and that’s one thing that I’m here to help manage and make the best decision for the grower.

RENEE HANSEN:  We say, within Premier Crop, that agronomy is local, but farmers say it too because we have this vast information of data within our system. Ranging from Canada, down south to Oklahoma, East to Ohio, all the way to Colorado. And it’s so important that looking at data locally, specifically in Kansas, is so significantly different. What would be the importance for a grower to start using their data when working with you?

LANCE MEYER: Like I talked about, there’s so much variability. Even across the state, but even in each county. Working with growers in eastern Kansas versus western Kansas, I mean, agronomy is completely different, and that’s really what I love about Premier Crop. You don’t have to be an expert on anything because we are using the data, and it’s pretty much screaming at us, telling us what we need to do. The Premier Crop software is really a big part of that, along with our industry agronomy experience. But the farm data really gives us the analytics and the insights, telling us what we need to be doing for each grower.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, so you talked a little bit about the software Premier Crop and, coupled with what you are able to offer, what tools does Premier Crop have to help a grower learn and why?

LANCE MEYER: For the businessman farmer of today, the guy that really enjoys using his data but might not necessarily have the time to do it. The operations that we work with are CEOs of their farm operation. Our advisors work with the grower to collect the farm data, manage the data, organize the data and make sense of the data, letting the farmer farm as they want to, without any time invested. We take care of everything, from variable-rate recommendations, cost tracking, to delivering the analysis in an easy way that the grower can understand, because we all know that looking at data can be pretty overwhelming and hard to make sense of. So, that’s a big piece of what we do, delivering farm data in a way that it’s easy to understand for the grower.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, I feel like some of the growers that I talk to in the field, just even around here in our area, even some of my friends that we’ve reached out to, I feel like they just don’t know where to get started. What would you say is the first thing? How easy can it be?  We take care of it, but what are some of the first steps that they need?

LANCE MEYER: Managing farm data is actually, really, pretty simple. The baseline of everything that we do is tied back to a yield file or the yield map. So, that’s essentially the only thing that we need to get started, that one or two years of historical yield data. I think there are some 80% of growers out there that are capable of collecting yield data or are collecting yield data. They just don’t actually know it. I would think that the number’s actually higher than that, given the amount of people that I talk to and the conversations I have with people. You just have to have some yield data to get started. There are also other layers that are great. Having soil data will give us more insights. The baseline is just yield data, and that’s the majority of growers out there.

RENEE HANSEN: And it can be so overwhelming because there are so many different layers of data, from soil sample data, yield data, planting data, as-applied data, and adding that all up yourself, the brainpower can be exhausting.

LANCE MEYER: You’re exactly right, and that’s our ultimate goal, to help take that lift off your shoulders. I tell growers all the time: “I’m sure the first thing they want to do after they get in from a long day is sit down at their computer and manage all this stuff.” And they’re like: “Yeah, no. That’s not what I want to be doing.” That’s just another little piece of the pie, I guess, the value that Premier Crop ultimately brings.

RENEE HANSEN: Especially when it’s “go time,” when it’s planting or harvest time. There’s probably something they need to be working on, rather than messing around with data.

LANCE MEYER: Yep, and helping with the monitor and all the technical stuff like that is big, too. Growers tell me all the time. When you get a problem in the monitor, and you’re sitting in the field for one or two minutes trying to fix something, that seems like an eternity for a grower sitting there, wanting to get going. I mean, that’s ultimately what they love doing, running the equipment. So, having a little bit of a setback due to the technical stuff can be a big deal.

RENEE HANSEN: When it’s “go time,” it is a race against the clock, no matter what is going on.

LANCE MEYER: That’s right. It doesn’t matter where you are. That’s everybody out there.

RENEE HANSEN: Another thing with the tools that Premier Crop is offering we’ve been talking a lot about yield efficiency. Lance, I want you to talk a little bit about yield efficiency. What does success look like when looking at all of these maps from historical yield, ultimately leading to yield efficiency?

LANCE MEYER: With the yield efficiency piece, we’re essentially redefining the success metric for today’s farmer. For so long, we’ve been focused on yield. Now, we bring this concept of yield efficiency that a lot of people might not understand. Yield efficiency is the amount of money returned from your crop that you have to pay land and management costs at the end of the day. Yield is the number-one driver of yield efficiency. As long as we can drive higher yields while still lowering our break-even cost per bushel, we’re becoming more profitable. Profitability, for me, is success with my growers.

These maps that Premier Crop gives us, they’re really our report card for the season, and that’s how I like to describe it with my growers. As long as we’re lowering that break-even cost per bushel and driving higher yields, I call it a successful season. Whether it’s $10 an acre or $100 an acre farm profitability. We know there are dollars left on the table on every acre. It’s just a matter of finding it with your farm data. Like I said, if it’s a smaller amount or larger amount, I consider that success with my growers.

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RENEE HANSEN: Do you have a specific example? Do you have a great success story that you saw this year?

LANCE MEYER: There’s actually one big takeaway that really stands out from 2020 and also in 2019. And that’s on the fertilizer side, and managing our fertilizer investment. Make sure that we’re taking into account our crop removals when we’re making fertilizer recommendations. It’s a simple concept, but it’s hard to get across. Every year we grow a crop on a piece of land, we’re taking off nutrients in the grain. The soil supplied nutrients through that crop, and we remove that off from the amount the plant took up.

As we stated above, our main goal is to manage our variability in yield. Within that variability in yield, we’re taking off different amounts of nutrients in different parts of the field. If we’re applying our fertilizer the next season to account for the field average and crop removal, we’re ultimately under-applying in a lot of the field and over-applying on a lot of the field, also. This is actually a conversation I had with a soil sampling company, SoilView, Craig Struve, yesterday. He had a slide from Colorado State that says: “95% of the time, you’re going to be over-applying or under-applying fertilizer on your removal if you’re just applying that field average.”

That’s why at Premier Crop, using the actual yield file, is exactly what we’ve taken off the field to replace it the next season. We use this equation so we’re not mining down these better areas of the field and then over-applying in the worst areas of our fields. That’s one big example, I guess. That could be, like I said, $50 to $100 an acre right there. That’s one big thing that I found for this season, anyway. Like we said, a lot of growers can do this with their variable-rate technology they have, but they just might not necessarily understand it or believe it pays at this point.

RENEE HANSEN: Thank you so much Lance. 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 our blog at premiercrop.com.

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Today on the Premier Podcast, we’re listening in to a year end grower meeting with one our partners, SciMax Solutions.

PETER BIXEL: I’m Peter Bixel, SciMax Team Leader, and today we’re working with two of our clients, down here close to Des Moines, Iowa: Dale Meyer and Michael Myers. And I’ve been looking at their information, reviewing 2020 data this year and planning for 2021.

MICHAEL MYERS: I’ve been working with Peter and SciMax for, I think, around seven years, something like that. Time flies. I work with SciMax to help push us to the next level. It’s a really good precision ag database that they have, and adding VRT into our operation was a big part of that, using our yield data and going into our management zones and pushing the best acres as far as we can. We haven’t pushed them as far as we can yet, and that’s the goal for the future. It’s to push everything we can in order to get the best ROI and try to do the best job that we can.

DALE MEYERS: Before that, we were doing zone management for fertility by soil type. I mean, there was soil sampling, but it was, more or less, by the lay of the land and soil type. With the local co-op, we went to larger five-to-seven acre grids. They would spread it by areas, more or less, not necessarily by GPS but by a map.

MICHAEL MYERS: Our precision ag and farm data was pretty rustic, overall. You just kind of guess where you were in the field. The biggest thing that helped us change was implementing yield data. As soon as we started picking that up, we needed something to do with it. Otherwise, what’s the point of getting it? Peter did a talk with Latham that made a lot of sense to us, that we could compile the yield data with our fertility, soil sampling, soil types, etc. And the biggest thing that he’s helped us with is to realize where we’re lacking, where we’re putting too much fertilizer on. I mean, it’s not a coincidence that our best yields have been over the past few years using SciMax’s precision ag tools.

Now, you have to have the weather to do that, but without SciMax’s help, we wouldn’t have averaged 240 as a farm average last year on corn. It probably would have been 210, 220, like your average farmer in the area would have been. But with us doing the extra things and managing better with their help, we were able to get more return. More or less, we’re not at the beginning of this, but we’re starting to take the steps that’ll start pushing us even higher, I think.

It’s not something in that we implemented everything right away, but we’re implementing some things more and more every year. We’re trying to build our soils on fertility-level more this year than we have in the past. And looking at the farm data he gave us today, I mean, if we continue the trend of what the farm data is saying, then that should pay off. Peter’s a really good guy to work with, too. There are other people that offer precision ag or something like it, but Peter’s the thing that kind of puts that all together, as far as SciMax marrying with Premier Crop and then bringing that to us. If he was a different person, I don’t know if we’d still be with them or not. I don’t know, but he’s keeping us for sure.

DALE MEYERS: I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the farmers of my generation operated on a status quo thing up to a point. Then, the yield monitors came in to where we could see: “Oh, wow. I never realized that the wet spot was affected so much by the excess water.” So, a lot of tiling has happened because of that, and then, also, the fertility side with different soil types. In parts of the field that are high yielding, we were pulling a lot more nutrients off than we thought. I guess, maybe, we just didn’t even think.

Precision ag kind of sharpened everything because you didn’t really know the advent of the yield monitor, as well as grid sampling and other things. Hybrids have improved, there’s no question about that, but, all in all, we’re doing a better job. We’re doing a better job of planting, as far as placement, depth and spacing, but particularly depth, or emergence at the same time. It’s easy for the seed companies to take a lot of credit, and they deserve a lot of credit, but the farm equipment’s and farm data management changed this picture a lot, too.

PETER BIXEL: Well, I think, studying the hybrids and placing them where they need to go makes a big difference, too. Before, maybe, if you were my partner, you just buy: “Yep, these three are good.” The dealer sold them to him. Where did you plant them? “It didn’t matter. You just plant them wherever you want.” No, there is a difference. You know that, Michael.

MICHAEL MYERS: Getting yield maps gives you a picture of what happened that year, and then making that into managing the zones, that shows us what has happened over many years. I mean we have a memory, but we don’t have a the farm data memory where we can go back and say: “Okay, this area of the field did this, and, on average, it’s kind of been a B area. Or it’s a C area or an A.” We can break that down, and then we can also look at the fact, and I mentioned it too, as far as fertilizer, where: “Okay, what did the field make? Did it do 200? Okay, we’ll put a flat rate of crop removal of 200 across the whole field.” Well, that’s not the truth.

The truth is that the poor areas did 160, the medium areas did 200 and the high areas did 240. I mean, it varies, right? But that’s kind of the idea. I, over the past several years, have really been putting a lot of thought to the fact that I would really like to see what our yields would be today if we would’ve started doing precision ag and variable-rate fertilizer five years ago because what we’ve been doing is taking off 240-bushel corn on a good area and putting 200 bushels of nutrients back on. So, we’re stealing away from our good areas and adding to our poor areas. In those poor areas, you’re never going to yield what the good areas are going to do.

So, we can better utilize our money as far as our investment into fertilizer, and then that should pay dividends in ROI and harvest time, too. That’s one of the biggest things, I would say.

PETER BIXEL: Their retailer in the past wasn’t able to really do the field history either, so now they’ve made a big change and adjusted things. Including adding strip-till.

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CREATING NEW MANAGEMENT PRACTICES FROM FARM DATA

PETER BIXEL: We’ve come up with tissue sample ranges by stage for corn and soybeans on each nutrient. So, this is that line, and then, basically, it’s just the group average zone, all we did overall here. You’ll get yours with this graph, and then we’ll always plot their individual data on here. It’s kind of interesting. I mean, we’re pretty close to the limit. We tracked pretty close on nitrogen. Really, we weren’t that far off comparatively.

MICHAEL MYERS: I’d like to see the guys that did the KTS. Can we group that data and look at it?

PETER BIXEL: Yeah.

MICHAEL MYERS: Our application was right at V5, V6. So, we gained more stalk, but where is manganese?

PETER BIXEL: Right here. (pointing to the field map on the computer)

MICHAEL MYERS: My manganese went through the roof, like right in there. I put it in with the KTS. Then I put that Versa Max, and that’s got manganese in it, and I took my manganese levels from like 80 to 100 clear up into 140s, and they stuck around until probably V10. I graphed it all out myself. Let me grab it. I think I got a pamphlet right here.

TISSUE SAMPLING

PETER BIXEL: Well, we’re trying to define trends for just seeing what the plants are telling us. It’s no different than a blood test, which you could say: “Well, that’s overkill.” Yeah, but the plants, the weather and everything change so much every stage, depending on the growing season.

Like there in the middle of May, we didn’t hardly gain any GDUs for like two or three weeks because it was just cloudy and cool. Then, we took off, and we were growing like two stages from V4 to V6 in five days. The nutrients change by that stage. It’s kind of a way to gauge where the plants are at. Michael’s been pulling two different farms, and you pull in an A zone and just kind of track and see what they’re telling us. Not everybody, but the majority of us, will go, and apply what we feel the plant needs.

Then, like he’s looking now to see: “Okay, if we applied zinc and manganese right before this tissue sample, and we applied it and we came back a week later, did we see the uptake?” Did the plant tell us they got it? Like my zinc and manganese, I think it took like about two weeks, two sampling times, for it to really uptake. For my potassium, I’ve got to look back. I can’t remember this off the top of my head. I think it took about three weeks because potassium is mobile. It takes water to get it down the soil. We didn’t have a whole lot of moisture, obviously, but Michael and I Y-dropped to put it next to the row so it would hopefully get in faster.

MICHAEL MYERS: Yeah, I just remember on the home farm, on the treatment out here, that the manganese just went through the roof. So, I know I can raise those loads.

PETER BIXEL: Manganese has been one that we’ve kind of struggled with, especially later on, but this year. I think some of it was due to the dryness, too. We didn’t have as much water as the last two years. So, it wasn’t flushing it through this profile. We were able to keep reasonable. The black line is where we want to be at, and you can see that. You got the polynomial or you got just the average of the polynomial for our group, and so we were able to stay a little bit better on that.

The other thing, to me, that was pretty interesting was how boron’s been. If you look at the past years, we’ve been just horrible. We just tanked on boron. We would never come back up to where we’d like to be at but this year. Some of this, too, I believe, is we’re getting a lot more guys that are throwing boron in with their fungicide. Not everything, but some of that’s been helping bring those levels, I feel as a group, at least, up. We stayed pretty good, and the reason I think we stayed good on boron is that it’s mobile. We didn’t have rain, and we didn’t continuously keep flushing that deeper and deeper in the profile. I think we’ll talk and see what everybody thinks next week. We can quit at like V10, V12, just because nobody’s been significantly doing anything different after that point.

PETER BIXEL: I know it would have because look at what you did last year. So, Michael and Dale, they’ve been doing some different stuff last year. It definitely showed, I think, good stuff for all your treatment, boron and zinc already, and things like that. I guess it kind of tells me they weren’t, I wouldn’t say, normal conditions. They had more rain than you but not normal. I guess that just tells me that we’re still going to keep playing, but we also learned our normal standard practices. It’s probably still a benefit if you’ve got that one limiting factor, whatever that is. It’s potassium in their case. He said it was like 130 to 140 parts per million. Spend the money on it. Get the foundation built. Then, you can start to worry about wider operation or extra phosphorus.

MICHAEL MYERS: It just goes back to that. Every time we plant a seed, it’s got its maximum potential, and as the season goes on, that lowers, lowers and lowers. Well, with potassium, and I’ve thought about this a decent amount, it’s more important than about every of the other major ones earlier. Maybe phosphorus is there, too, but as far as potassium, most of its uptake is V6 to 12-ish. Phosphorus, sulfur and, obviously, nitrogen are all after that. So, which of the four biggest nutrients is going to pull our potential down the most in that first, until V8? Well, it’s probably potassium. So, if we don’t have potassium there, that potential is already capped.

PETER BIXEL: Correct. You can put on as much nitrogen as you want if you think it’s efficient, like you said. After that fact, it doesn’t matter because K has got to be there to move it up in the plant. When you grid sampled and then started doing the strip, I think it’s good, especially with what we’re doing and trying to build the 250 and stuff that we’re doing on the farms and using the management zones. I’m trying to continue to build that. On your beans this year, with new soil sample data, which is not the best year in yields and stuff like that, you were at 144 parts per million of potassium, and you went to 176. Pretty steady increase and a direct correlation. We saw that, yeah, you went from 27 bushels to 57, a 30-bushel acre advantage.

MICHAEL MYERS: On just a 30 parts per million difference.

PETER BIXEL: Correct. So, I think as we sample some other farms — I don’t think everything got sampled. I can’t remember the majority of stuff, but as we get the new stuff on the rest of the farms, it’ll be interesting to see. That was something I pointed out where, like you said, potassium, and we see this with a lot of clients, at 22 to 26. Not really a huge correlation.

CORN ON CORN FARM DATA

MICHAEL MYERS: I was really impressed with how I did this fall corn on corn over here, and we vertical tilled at first. Well, we did that, so we could put anhydrous on.

PETER BIXEL: How deep did you do the vertical till?

DALE MEYERS: Through May, three to four inches.

PETER BIXEL: How deep was the strip-till in?

MICHAEL MYERS: About four to five. It can go six, just depends.

PETER BIXEL: That’s why I don’t think our lows aren’t as low. Maybe that’s some of the genetics or fertility, things like that, too.

MICHAEL MYERS: We’ve mentioned we have more potential on all of our corn going into July, except our corn-on-corn. It’s awful. Yeah, there’s a pond right there.

PETER BIXEL: Our corn-on-corn, for the group, averaged 165. Our first-year corn was 190. So, that tells you that we haven’t seen that big of a spread between those two for a lot of years.

DALE MEYERS: We’ve not had this consistent-looking crop at harvest time on corn-on-corn ever, that I can remember.

MICHAEL MYERS: As far as spacing and the beans being there.

DALE MEYERS: We had a good growing season, but that all started when it came up.

PETER BIXEL: Well, we didn’t have a lot of wet feet in great conditions, like you said, to come out on soil. You only had nine inches. With the weather Premier grabs, nine inches of rain is all I had. This area is definitely the lowest.

MICHAEL MYERS: Probably over half of that came before July 1st.

PETER BIXEL: It came before June. He keeps track of some calendars. He’d have every rainfall.

DALE MEYERS: The people that run the auction over here at Guthrie Center, what did he tell him?

MICHAEL MYERS: He was worse yet. What was it?

DALE MEYERS: They only had a couple of inches all summer.

MICHAEL MYERS: We had about an inch, an inch and a quarter in July, and then about the same in June. They didn’t even get an inch in either of them.

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