What Type of Data should you Collect for Farm Analytics?

Do you ever feel like you are collecting loads of data but it’s just sitting on a flash drive or in a cloud storage system doing little more than building a pretty map? Organizing and analyzing that data can seem like such a daunting task. Before you even get to organizing the data you need to figure out what data is worth collecting. With the help of a Premier Crop Advisor we help you prioritize your data and use farm analytics to make more confident decisions using your data.

data storage

Farming includes many hours planning what seed to buy, how much fertilizer to apply, what rates to apply, and above all, you are playing a never-ending game of risk with mother nature. What if all that planning was paired with the confidence that you are making the best decisions with the right products and the right rates for your fields?

Throughout the season, when you are executing your meticulously thought out plan, you are often collecting valuable data that can be used to make decisions for next year. Layers and layers of data that can be used and analyzed. The piece that many growers miss is analysis–proving if your plan did or didn’t work. What type of data are we talking about?

Many base layers for analysis come from publicly available sources, such as the USDA soils database.  It’s a great start, but we move beyond the basics. Historical yield is a great way to visualize the performance of your field over the years. What has your equipment or the applicators’ equipment been tracking? Have you been soil sampling? What does your crop protection plan look like?

Use this list for a starting point of your valuable data:

  • Soil Samples
  • As-Applied (planting, nutrient and crop protection) Data
  • Harvest Files
  • Input Cost Data

Whether your data is stored in a cloud storage service, on your monitor, in your computer, or sitting with your local soil sampler, we make collecting your data easy and help you track it down. Once we have the data, our agronomic advisors analyze all the data layers to guide you to make confident decisions to maximize your profit. Without having to allocate extra time, you can take advantage of the many reports, analytics and visualizations that will help you take a deeper look at your operation.

breakeven cost per bushel price of corn

When your data is organized in our system it is ready to be analyzed and your reports are activated. An advisor will help you prioritize what aspects of your operation you should focus on. Depending on your operational goals, the data will help show you how you can achieve them. We know each operation is different and we work with you as a part of your team to help you reach the goals you’ve set. What sets us apart is that we are unbiased.  We offer a different perspective–it’s your bottom line we’re worried about. We help you find your breakeven cost per bushel and can also help you find your yield efficiency score so you can profit.

yield profitability and yield efficiency

 

Utilizing the correct data can help you determine if all those stressful choices were profitable and most importantly, if the data is telling you to change some practices to help achieve your goals. We understand that your goals and how you manage your operation are also constantly evolving.

dataview web

 

You can take all the data you’ve gathered and combine it with your economics to help you visualize where in your fields your decisions are profiting or not. By choosing to manage all of your data and allowing a Premier Advisor to stand by your side, you have the tools to make confident, agronomic and economic decisions that best fit your field, your operation and your future.

Managing your Fields for Success

As an avid baseball fan, I am yearning for the pre COVID-19 days of turning on a Royals game basically every night and watching the boys of summer duke it out. Every so often I don’t get the chance to actually watch or listen to the game and the next morning I am forced to look up the box score. If you’re like me and grew up looking for box scores in the paper (now we have the internet) you understand that it can be important information, but they fail to give you the entire picture of the game.

iStock-1130327685

For those of you too young to remember, picture this, you missed the big game and you scramble on your phone to see how your favorite player faired against the All-Star pitcher last night. You find that he went 1-4 with 0 runs and 1 RBI, at first glance you would think to yourself that it wasn’t a bad night but also nothing spectacular either. If you were able to watch the you would’ve known that your favorite ball player’s one hit was a single that advanced two runners into scoring position, both scoring later in the inning to tie the game. Also, hidden in the box score was the fact that later in the game your favorite player laid down a sacrifice bunt that scored a run to give your team the go ahead and eventual winning run. When you fully understand what happened that completely changes your perception of the game right? Your favorite player was the hero of the night!

A similar situation can happen in your fields. If we get to the end of the season and all we are looking for is what the field average was then we are missing the bigger picture. Chances are there were portions of the field that were 300+ bu and others that were 100 bu or less. Why? What can I do to capitalize on the high yielding acres? What can I do to minimize or even eliminate the impact on the low yielding acres? That’s where Premier Crop Systems and your Agronomic Information Adviser are here to help you walk though these complicated issues and see the whole picture.

When I start to analyze a field I am unfamiliar with, I walk into the process with the understanding that A) no two fields are alike and B) there WILL be variations across the field. Yield limiting variables can be one or several of hundreds of different factors, but it’s important to know that they exist and we need to start trying to understand what they are. Once I identify the areas in the field that have historically followed a yield pattern, I want to place them in zones so we can start to treat them appropriately. My A zone is my Cy Young winning pitcher, it traditionally delivers fantastic results and is proven to give me a great ROI on my input dollars. We, at PCS, understand that the grower has a limited budget to get a crop into this field and we want to stretch those input dollars as far as we can in a proven, data driven approach, to help the grower be as profitable as possible. So, back to my baseball analogy, if I am the General Manager of the Royals and I have a proven (former CY Young) that is still on the top of his game, I do not have a problem paying for the productivity because of what I am receiving in return. The same should be said for A Zones, we want to push them because we have proven with data that they give us a high ROI.

premiercropseedpopulation

B Zones are what we refer to as the “average acre” in the field, they do a good job, they are an everyday player, and can be productive but they won’t be going the All-Star Game anytime soon. Now, we ask ourselves can we turn the B Zone into and All-Star A Zone? The answer is sometimes, with proper fertilization, proper seed placement and rate, or one of any other factors that had been ignored before, but for the majority of these acres the answer will probably be that it doesn’t financially make sense to try to push them that far.

Now for the interesting part of the lineup, the C Zone. This is a guy on our roster that might be on the backside of his career. He for years was a part of a good team and, for that, had built a contract that was by far outpacing his production. Generally, we view C Zones as the poorer acre on the field and there isn’t much we can do about it. C Zones more than likely will never be an A Zone or probably even a B Zone. They bog down the payroll (input cost) and they might even have a negative ROI. So why are we putting a bunch of precious input dollars on our C Zones? We need to take a hard look here and identify what dollars we can pull out and position somewhere else that makes us more profitable while still working to maintain whatever production we can.

We also have the ability to identify other zones i.e. sandy spots, areas that are prone to being water logged, and just generally bad ground. For now, we will send those zones down to the minors and bring them back as needed.

As you can see, even the best fields (or teams) have a variety of All-Stars and simply role players. They are all important at the end of the year but they need to be managed differently to get the most out of them to maximize success. Treating the field the same across all the acres means you’re not maximizing the productivity and ROI of your All-Star acre and giving too much of the payroll to the role player and thus hurting your overall profitability.

The Benefits of a Farm Plan

“The idea is to create a farm plan so the plant never has a bad day.
From start to finish, execute a farm plan,
and you will maximize yield and yield efficiency.”

premiercrop_averageproductioncosts_managementzone-1

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

DAN FRIEBERG: Part of what amazes me so much is how much the growers we work with plan. That’s what they do. They plan. There’s an old saying that says you plan your work and then you work your plan. To be successful, it’s all about getting organized ahead of time. For a lot of them, it starts really early. It’s really common. We are coming up on August of 2020, and, for a lot of growers, that’s when the 2021 plan details really start to take effect. It’s because they can’t do anything else. In August of 2020, in a whole bunch of the market, you can’t do anything to affect the 2020 crop. It’s done. The last fungicide treatment is done. Any kind of treatment is done. Then they turn their attention to 2021, and it really starts. For a lot of growers, it’s what fields are going to be rotated into what crop. They’re starting to make crop rotation decisions really early the year before. To your point, one of the big benefits of being a great planner is related to buying opportunities. You get out in front of everything, and that sets you up to figure out when to buy what during the year. Of course, the plan is not just what’s going to happen agronomically to set up for the next crop year. It’s also your budget. It’s having placeholders in your cash flow for those buying opportunities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAN FRIEBERG: Maybe the best way to explain it is to use an example. When you talk about planning with farmers, one of the things they’ll say is: “It’s all weather dependent, and I can’t plan. Nobody can forecast the weather. Nobody can predict the weather. I can’t plan because I don’t know what the weather is going to be.” And in their defense, it does seem like we are having bigger swings and weather events than we did before. It could be that we are coming into a period with more weather variability. What I find is that people can plan around weather. Think of nitrogen management. With nitrogen management, there are a lot of weather components to it, but a lot of these growers plan their nitrogen program to have handoffs during the year. Part of it is timeliness of field operations. A lot of growers in heavier soils want to do some nitrogen application early because it takes the workload off. Instead of applying nitrogen in the spring, they’re planting. If it’s fit enough to apply nitrogen in the spring, they want to be planting in the spring. So, they’ll do some nitrogen ahead of time. They’ll do some nitrogen at planting, somewhere close to planting, and the idea of that is to have something immediately available to the young plant, to feed the plant. That could be a starter. It could be a weed-and-feed application. They’ll plan a post-emerge application, and that could be anywhere from when the corn is really small to a Y-drop application later. At different places, you’re handing the crop off to different types of nitrogen applications. We have a partner, Central Advantage in southern Minnesota, that has a program called Nitrate Now that they branded. It’s a planned side dress program, where they’re doing spatial nitrate sampling in not quite 100,000 acres every year. It’s a planned handoff. They basically account for weather. If it’s a great mineralization spring, like this year, where everything warmed up great and we had adequate moisture and everything took off, they probably are saving growers a bundle. There’s probably a lot of planned side dress that didn’t happen because it wasn’t needed. What you don’t want to do is be reactive. There’s a lot of mentality around: “I’m going to take a picture of the field through an image, and I’m going to identify, through the image, the areas that need something.”

DARREN FEHR: Definitely.

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

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

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

 

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

DAN FRIEBERG: The difficulty is that’s what you pay an advisor to do, to make it not difficult, make “complex” easier. You can’t make “complex” simple, but you sure can make it easier. That’s the whole idea, just to make it easier. The outcome, by having a plan, is growers feel more in control. And when you feel more in control, you have more peace of mind. Right now, the world seems pretty darn out of control. We’re finding out just how much our food production system is a just-in-time delivery system. There’s a lot of just-in-time everything, and that’s all detailed planning and logistics. It’s an amazing system, but, right now, having a better plan in really tight financial times just gives you more control and more peace of mind. Darren, it’s amazing, over the years, how much I’ve witnessed, for example, growers who plan seed around the destination of the grain. They plan what they plant where, based on where the grain is going to go. They have fields that they know are going to be the last to be harvested, and they are picking hybrids that have terrific standability and retention, that can stand until very late in the fall. They have fields that are coming out early to fill the grain dryer, to get the grain system going. They’re chasing an early ethanol bid on some fields. Everything is planned for details that are very plannable, but it’s just thinking ahead. We have growers who plan manure applications two or three years ahead of time. They’ll contract with a turkey litter company way out. It’s their fertility plan. They know, every few years, they’re going to get access to so much litter or so much manure, and they plan that far out. They plan rotations around that. It’s impressive, just that ability to manage details and use your data to drive confident decision making.

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

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

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

DAN FRIEBERG: Awesome, thank you.

Farm Finance Featured on the Farm 4 Profit Podcast

“We have growers who tell us that we’re helping them with their economics, which helps convince their lender to give them the full operating line.”
Dan Frieberg

On this episode of the Premier Podcast, Dan Frieberg interviews the Farm 4 Profit show. Make sure to subscribe to their show at farm4profit.com. We hope you enjoy the conversation:

TANNER WINTERHOF: All right, welcome back to another Farm 4 Profit episode. This is Tanner Winterhof.

DAVID WHITAKER: And this is David Whitaker.

TANNER WINTERHOF: Dave, we got a little advice from a couple of peers as we put this podcast together that it would be helpful if we identified ourselves at the beginning of each episode. So, for a new listener, I’m Tanner. This is the voice of Tanner, and I’m a banker in central Iowa.

DAVID WHITAKER: And I’m David, and I am a farmland sales auctioneer and a real estate agent in central Iowa, as well.

TANNER WINTERHOF: So, thank you, new listeners, for joining us. We really appreciate you checking in. We’ve got a little bit of an interesting time this year. We started out with the coronavirus. We had some weather events. We’ve got inland hurricanes. We’ve got regular hurricanes. We’ve got droughts. Everything’s all storming together, but we’re going to focus on something a little bit more exciting today. We’re going to jump right into what’s working in ag. Don’t you think, Dave?

DAVID WHITAKER: I think so. We’ll just call it hashtag 2020.

TANNER WINTERHOF: That’s all we got.

Farm 4 profit podcast focus on farm finance

DAVID WHITAKER: That’s what we’ll call it. We have a guest today. Who is our guest, Tanner?

TANNER WINTERHOF: We’ve got Dan Frieberg, and he is here to share with us a little bit about what’s working for ag in his company. A really neat background. He grew up on a farm in Iowa, graduated from Iowa State University. His career includes wholesale fertilizer sales, retail management. He also served as the CEO of the Iowa Fertilizer and Chemical Association, later the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, and other business consulting. One of his favorite beverages, if not the favorite beverage of Dan, can you believe this, is Diet Pepsi.

DAVID WHITAKER: There you go.

TANNER WINTERHOF: But what does this have to do with farming? What do you think?

DAVID WHITAKER: I tell you it has a lot to do with farming. So, Dan, tell us. I’m glad to see you’re an Iowa State grad. I’m glad to see you’re from Iowa. Anything we missed there, other than a good hair day and the Diet Pepsi thing?

DAN FRIEBERG: I think you got it nailed.

DAVID WHITAKER: Okay, great. Well, welcome Dan. Do you live currently in Iowa, still?

DAN FRIEBERG: Yep, just south of Des Moines.

DAVID WHITAKER: I got ya. And so, tell me a little bit about your company. What exactly do you do?

DAN FRIEBERG: We take agronomic data, help growers with agronomic data that they’re collecting to provide analytics and economics with farm finance. Then, that analytics turns into advice and an action plan for the following year. Most of what we do ends up with a variable-rate prescription that goes in a piece of equipment, whether it’s the grower’s equipment or it could be a retailer’s equipment.

DAVID WHITAKER: So, you’re basically working with the farm data. “Farm Data is the currency of the internet” is what I always tell Tanner. And you are taking that farm data, and then you are helping the farmer probably spend less money by doing variable rate throughout the field or making tough decisions to plant or not plant or certain things. That’s what I’m gathering. Is that correct?

DAN FRIEBERG: I don’t think we ever save growers money. I think that’s one of the mistakes that a lot of people made in precision ag in the early years. We’re 20-some years into this, and a lot of the early messaging was around saving growers money. And I think that’s an unfulfilled promise. In the case of variable-rate lime, it is something that we do that saves the grower money on liming costs. But, most of the time, I think what we do is, rather than positioning it as saving the grower money, it’s about investing within parts of fields to get a higher return. So, instead of treating the whole field as though it’s the same, it’s about identifying areas that are capable of producing more and more efficiently. And then in other areas, it could be that that’s where you save them money because it just doesn’t make sense to continue to invest.

TANNER WINTERHOF: I grabbed it right off the website that Premier Crop was established in 1999. And what it says right there is this: “They enable the growers to think deeper about their data.” So, what I grabbed from that is using that variable-rate technology. The way to make that pay is not necessarily saving money but maybe reallocating those input dollars to site-specific areas, to where you could probably get a better return on your investment than where they might’ve just been blanketly broadcasted.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yep, I think that’s exactly right. I think maybe the other thing that we do differently is we have the ability to combine agronomics and economics. Right now, it’s really difficult to make money in a lot of areas. If we’re spending more in one part of the field, we’re able to actually tie the cost, the added costs that we’re investing in that part of the field, to the analysis. So, at the end of the year, we’re able to really deliver what we’re branding as a yield efficiency score, which is just dollar-per-acre return to land and management. For us, it’s about what’s been missing. We think there’s too much focus on just agronomics and not economics. I think right now, especially growers, they appreciate the focus on economics to help with farm finance. We like to say everything agronomic is economic.

farm finance and profits

DAVID WHITAKER: Gotcha. So, that’s a new term for me, the yield efficiency score that you have. Tell me a little bit more. Is it 100 is the best and zero is the worst, or how does your scoring system work?

DAN FRIEBERG: No, it’s really just dollar-per-acre return to land and management.

DAVID WHITAKER: Okay.

DAN FRIEBERG: It’s yield, and yield is tracked, obviously, with the yield monitor, a calibrated yield monitor. So, it’s yield at a benchmark selling price that the grower gets to set minus what they spent on nutrients, seed, crop protection and field operations. It’s kind of what’s left over. When a grower sees a yield efficiency score of $400, and they know they got $275 in land cost, then they immediately understand what’s left, the return to them for farm management.

Premier Crop Yield efficiency score

TANNER WINTERHOF: So, if we’ve got a listener here who hasn’t been using variable-rate technology before as part of their operation, is that a large hurdle to overcome? Or do they pretty much have the technology on most of these farms to be able to implement that?

DAN FRIEBERG: Tanner, I think if $7 corn did anything for us, it was that there was a lot of investment in new technology in the cab. When we had that run-up in prices and in profitability, growers put a lot and they invested heavily in upgrading planters. In the process of what happened during that time period, there’s a lot of technology in the cab, but there’s a lot of growers who aren’t necessarily using farm data to the full advantage. They have the technology. They have the ability to do it. They haven’t started because they don’t know how, and they’re looking for solutions.

DAVID WHITAKER: You said $7 corn. A lot of people updated their equipment there. But, for our newbie farmer that’s out there, or even somebody that’s been doing it, if they’re in an older combine, whatever it may be, and they decide they want to upgrade and be able to use your systems, is there a minimum-like entry? Something that they’re going to need for farm equipment?

DAN FRIEBERG: For us, we use the yield monitor as a way of measuring, measuring whether what we did was the right thing.

DAVID WHITAKER: Do they have to have a WAAS GPS or a certain sub-inch or anything there?

DAN FRIEBERG: No, just a GPS, a yield monitor with a GPS receiver.

DAVID WHITAKER: Okay, fair enough.

TANNER WINTERHOF: Pretty simple to get in there. So, Premier Crop Systems really allows that farmer to really get the investment that they put into that technology and put it to work. You guys can really work with them to use the existing equipment that they have to their full potential. One of the other things that I had come across when I was reading is it really keeps that farmer from farming on averages. You really come down and do check blocks and break that field out into, I call them, profit zones, but maybe you have a different term. Could you explain what you do when you break a farm down?

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, a lot of times that is what we do. We just try to identify, whether it’s management zones. We’re bringing a new version of that, which is performance zones, but it’s really trying to identify like-agronomic environments or unique agronomic environments within fields. It’s very much not treating it all like it’s the same. Tanner, within every field, growers will tell you there’s a sweet spot.

TANNER WINTERHOF: Yeah.

DAN FRIEBERG: Every grower who’s had a yield monitor has seen 80-90 bushel beans. They’ve seen greater than 100 bushel beans, and they just wish they could figure out what it was about that spot that made it so great. And that’s kind of what we try to help them do, identify those really high-yielding sweet spots, and a lot of times those are the ones that will respond the most to additional input investment. And then, conversely, there are areas that just don’t yield as consistently, and we try to solve the problem of whatever it is. We try to use farm data to help coach them on whatever those areas are. You’re in Huxley, and there’s a lot of potholes. There’s that north-central Iowa area. There are low areas. In wet years, they drown out. In dry years, they’re the highest yielding. They tend to be organic matter rich and nutrient rich because of all the years that they didn’t produce a crop. So, they’ll do great. They’ll do great in a dry year, but a lot of times we don’t invest near as much in inputs in those areas.

TANNER WINTERHOF: Yeah, take advantage of the resources that we have there.

DAN FRIEBERG: Tanner, the time is right, but it is tight on the farm. It’s really difficult to make money. That’s why farm finance and combining agronomics and economics is so important.

TANNER WINTERHOF: Yeah, it is.

DAN FRIEBERG: We have growers who tell us that some of this economic stuff we’re helping them with is what’s helping them convince their lender to give them the full operating line. So, we’re all about helping growers step up their game, and we know how difficult it is on everybody’s part.

TANNER WINTERHOF: It is.

DAN FRIEBERG: You guys don’t remember. I lived through the farm crisis of the 80s, and I was helping growers get financing. It was a dark and ugly time.

TANNER WINTERHOF: One of the things that I’ve noticed in the financing industry is that we have had more people utilizing creative financing methods, combining the dealer financing on their seed, getting some chem finance through their supplier, rather than getting their full operating through the bank. And part of that is our fault. We do get a little bit more conservative if we don’t have accurate records. So, I could see where Premier Crop Systems is valuable. And the fact that you can show me that, “Hey, we’ve got a plan. If mother nature cooperates halfway, we’re going to be able to put this plan to work and get us at least a crop that we can sell.”

DAN FRIEBERG: You guys know it because you’re interacting with growers. It’s a really high-stress time. When you see the farm suicide rate spiking, it’s reminiscent of just all the stress that’s going on with a lot of operations.

TANNER WINTERHOF: So, have you been advising any of your clients on what to do after the crop insurance adjuster shows up? Are you able to kind of help with a profitability calculation based upon what they’re learning after the derecho?

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, I mean it’s going to be difficult, like Corey will tell you. It’s going to be really difficult to get great data when you’re harvesting down corn. It really makes it difficult to have as much confidence in the data. It’s a struggle that way. Tanner, we’re right in the middle of it already because we’re starting to get ready for fall fertilizer prescriptions. If you’re not harvesting a crop, you’ve got nutrients that are in that crop that are going to get returned. So, you’re factoring that into your nutrient investment for next year, and so people are going to spend less on nutrients probably. But you’re trying to make sure you don’t short yourself in an area where you really need fertilizer manure to make it pay. It’s already started.

TANNER WINTERHOF: I’ve already heard guys talking that they might not be able to do as much corn on corn as they wanted to for fear of a volunteer coming up. Yeah, a lot of things are up in the air. I just got off the phone with a commodities broker who stated he’s got clients that just don’t know what to do. They’re in a limbo, waiting for the adjuster to show up, waiting for crops to dry down, waiting to find out what their options are.

DAVID WHITAKER: It’s an emotional roller coaster.

TANNER WINTERHOF: Yeah, any type of advice that they can get from a trusted advisor will go a long way.

DAVID WHITAKER: Yeah, it makes for an interesting year.

TANNER WINTERHOF: Well, Dan, I really thank you for joining us. I’m going to summarize real quick, and then let me know if we missed anything or if you want to share anything else. But we’ve got Dan Frieberg with Premier Crop Systems on the phone today, helping us out with our “What’s Working in Ag” segment. The company, started in 1999, enables growers to think deeper and utilize their data to make better agronomic decisions from that detailed data itself. They put the technology investments that you’ve already got on your farm to work for you. They want to make sure that you don’t think about farming on the average. Get down to a profit zone by profit zone analyst and management style, and then make sure that if you have a farm that is set up to where variable rate can pay, that it is not necessarily, Dave, the concept of saving you money. It’s more allocating those resources into a better part of the field that might make you more on the profit side. How did I do, Dan?

DAN FRIEBERG: You did perfect.

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.

Benefits to Using your Yield Monitor

“You’re capable of using your yield monitor to measure,
do trials and check if your plan actually worked.
It’s so much easier than it used to be.” – Dan Frieberg

RENEE HANSEN: Today, we’re talking with Dan Frieberg, and we’re talking about yield monitors and how Premier Crop can help support a grower while utilizing their yield monitor. Dan, can you just explain a little bit about how growers can notice differences in the field, whether it’s a good spot or a bad spot?

DAN FRIEBERG: What’s happened over the last 22 years, since we’ve been in business, is yield monitors have become really commonplace. Almost every combine now would have a yield monitor, but, Renee, a lot of growers don’t really use them very effectively. It’s almost like some people use it just as a way to measure moisture, to keep track of moisture and direct grain. It’s where the grain is going based on moisture. Somebody else described yield monitors as “Harvest TV.” It’s just something they look at as they go through the field. Renee, I would tell you that every grower has seen 90-bushel beans, and every grower has seen upward to 250-bushel to 300-bushel corn in some part of the field. They’ve seen those numbers flash in good years. They’ve seen those numbers flash on the yield monitor. And, for me, if I’m a grower, what I want to do is, if I had the time — I mean, if it weren’t so rushed in harvest — I would love to stop the combine and figure out what in the world is going on in that part of the field. What makes that part of the field so much more productive than the rest of the field?

When they go through the really low-yielding parts of the field, generally, they have an idea already. They remember the growing season. They saw that area. It had weed escapes, or it was moisture-stressed. So, a lot of times, they know because of soil differences. They know the lower-yielding areas. Sometimes, though, with the super high-yielding areas, they’re unsure. They know their sweet spots in the field, but they don’t know what makes them a sweet spot. So, one of the foundation pieces that we like to do with yield monitor data is just put that data file, the yield monitor data file, together with a whole bunch of other layers of data and really try to help the grower see the differences in the field beyond. The yield monitor tells a story, but you really don’t get the complete story until you combine it with the rest of the data. So, for us, it’s a big foundational piece, but a lot of growers aren’t using their yield data. I think it’s just because nobody’s ever led them to understand how they could use it, all the different ways they could use the yield data to their advantage.

RENEE HANSEN: I was riding in the tractor earlier this fall with my husband, and his dad was running the combine. His dad was seeing 90-bushel beans, and the field actually ended up doing record-high soybean yield in his lifetime. And he’s 73, and he’s never seen beans that high. And so, you mentioned you would want to stop. What would you do if you weren’t so rushed? What would you do to stop and look at, when seeing the yield monitor hit 90 in beans?

premiercrop in the tractor

DAN FRIEBERG: For me, Renee, a lot of times, it’s what’s below ground. I want to know what is different about that area. And, most of the time, that difference is underground. It’s a combination of what you might learn off of a soil test. It could be soil-type related. Sometimes, it’s really hard to understand. What we try to do, though, is identify those consistently high-yielding spots. Year after year, there’s something about that area. A lot of times, Renee, the topsoil is deep there. What’s called the A horizon, the very first layer of topsoil, that is really deep there. The reason I know that is because, in a dry year, they have enough topsoil that they have enough water holding capacity in that area of field to carry it through a dry year. They also tend to be well-drained because, in a wet year, the water is not going to stand there. So, they’re well-drained because of natural slope, or they’re well-drained because of soil structure. Or they could be well-drained because of tile, but they tend to be well-drained, as well. So, I automatically know those two pieces usually fit together. In those areas, you’re not hitting the clay layer right away. You have enough topsoil to carry it through the dry year.

For us, those areas just beg. They beg to be managed more aggressively. There’s a lot of growers who — just in general, we climb, in yield, a couple of bushels on corn, maybe a bushel on soybeans. Just nationally, we tend to be on this upward trend over the last 20 years. We try to talk to growers about how, if you’re going to take the next leap, if your farm average — let’s say your farm average on soybeans this year is 65, and you want to move your farm average to consistently above 70, don’t the best areas of your field have to get in the 90-bushel range? If you’re going to climb five bushel across your entire operation, I’m guessing the best areas have to do more than five bushel because the worst areas, they may be maxed out already. So, climbing up, being able to continue to climb overall yields, it probably means the best areas have to do even better. We just love to use the yield file as a way to quantify those areas. And then those become areas that we’re just much more aggressive, much more aggressive with everything, to try to take them to that next yield plateau.

RENEE HANSEN: You also mentioned utilizing more than just this year of yield files and using more historic yield to layer more years of yield and data. So, why would that be so beneficial to utilize your yield monitor, to continue to put in all these years of data? Because the grower already has it, they have years and years of data, probably on a jump drive or maybe in the monitor. What can they do to utilize all of those years, and how easy is it to get it into a system like Premier Crop?

DAN FRIEBERG: We try to make it as easy as possible. We love to grab that historic yield data. If there’s one piece of data that growers have a lot of, a lot of times, it’s historic yield data, and it’s exactly like you just described. It’s on thumb drives in a desk drawer. Who knows where it is, but the grower knows. It could be in a Ziploc bag, and it’s just a combination of all these different devices they’ve had over the years. But we just love to grab it because it starts to let you see spatial differences, differences within the field and consistent differences. If you have more than one year, the reason you want to look at more than one year is just to be able to see consistency over different weather patterns.

There are always outliers in data. Yield files aren’t perfect because there can be man-made differences in a yield file, meaning, for example, you could have a hybrid or variety change that creates an artificial. Like one variety fell out of bed and just didn’t do well, and that area of the field looks bad, but it had nothing to do with the area of the field. It had everything to do with the genetic issue. There’s always an outlier, so the more years of yield data, the more you can sort out the outliers. You can sort out the year that had the windstorm or the year that had the hail event or whatever. It lets you have more — the more years, the more confidence.

premier crop actual yield history

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, you make a great point, too, that it’s not only about the yield monitor, but it’s also about what you can visually see. Can you talk about a little bit of the myths of the yield monitor? I feel like some growers just may not trust what is coming off of their yield data.

DAN FRIEBERG: I say all the time, if I’m a grower, and I’m 10 years into this yield monitor thing, and I’ve never used my yield data to make a decision, pretty soon I quit caring. Why would I calibrate my yield monitor when I’ve never used it? I mean, I’ve never really used it.

RENEE HANSEN: It’s like not having a score at a sporting event, like who’s going to care who scores next if you can’t see the scoreboard? Nobody knows. You need that score.

DAN FRIEBERG: That’s where we’re at. What we find is that the same grower who hasn’t cared about calibrating their yield data, once we start working with them, and they actually start seeing why it matters, then, all of a sudden, they care a lot. And then they calibrate, and then they really do pay attention. Then, Renee, it almost is like the switch goes on, and then they want everything to be perfect. If the grain cart scale says that field did 83 bushels, they expect us to adjust the yield file to an average of 83 because that’s what the grain cart scale said. Once they start actually using the yield monitor to make decisions, then they care a lot about data quality, and data quality is a big deal to us. It’s just getting it right, getting all pieces of it right. Making sure that everything is right is a big deal. So, yield monitors, once they start understanding that, then one of the things that I love is, with yield monitors, we’ve entered this era. It’s no longer: “Trust me, this works.” If you’re a grower, you get sold a lot of stuff. Somebody is always driving up the driveway to sell you stuff. It’s different hybrids or varieties. It’s different crop protection plans. It’s nutrients. It’s additives. It’s micronutrients. It’s biologicals. It never ends. It’s always this one — here’s the next thing that’s going to be this magic bullet.

And now, because of a yield monitor, you don’t have to just trust that it works. You can actually do trials in your own fields. One of our sayings is: “Growers say local data is best, but you can’t get more local than my fields.” And that’s what you’re capable of doing now. You’re capable of using your yield monitor to measure, to do trials and measure whether each of those things actually worked. It’s so much easier than it used to be. I grew up in the day of weigh wagons, where you’d go measure out a strip in the field and grab a weigh wagon comparison. That was the early years, but now it’s just so easy to do the same thing at the speed of farming.

RENEE HANSEN: You said that was the early years of weigh wagons. I don’t feel like I’m that old, Dan, and I feel like we were just using them 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, hauling them around in the pickup. But you also talked about it with yield monitors. And, like I said, my husband, when we were farming his field, his overall field had a record soybean yield. But why is it so important to not look at the whole field average and look deeper? I mean, you talked about it a little bit before in those parts of the fields, and I feel like that’s where Premier Crop really differentiates itself.

DAN FRIEBERG: Growers are seeing really huge swings between fields, right? So, one field does really great, and another field doesn’t. You can start to use your data to sort out why, but, even within fields, within a field, most of the time, there are just pretty dramatic differences. Another way we use the yield file is we use the yield file as part of future nutrient applications. You can calculate nutrient removal off the yield file and build that in. It’s not the sole — we’re not talking about using the yield file as the only source of how you do nutrients, but it can be another layer of data. And growers are really in tune with this. You’re putting back what you took off, right? If you use the yield file, instead of treating the whole field — like if you know the field average was 85 bushel of soybeans, instead of just putting back removal for 85 bushels on every acre, using the yield file, some of the field will get 60-bushel removals, and another part of the field will get 100-bushel removals. That’s really important because those high-yielding areas are removing more nutrients. And so, you need to be able to capture that in some way to make sure that you keep pace with just how much they’re removing.

RENEE HANSEN: Because, ultimately, that helps them profit more because they’re applying nutrients in parts of the field where they need to apply them more and less, therefore, generating consistently higher yields. Like you said, what was the percentage year over year?

DAN FRIEBERG: What we try to do is we try to put people on a steeper curve, a steeper improvement curve. Across U.S. agriculture, we continually step up yields every year, on average, if you do a trend line, which is what economists do: the trend-line yield. There are ups and downs within the trend line, but the trend line might be two bushel per acre per year on corn, or three bushel per acre per year on corn. And we’re just trying to be on a steeper trend line. We’re trying to use data. Instead of two-and-a-half bushels per acre per year, can we make it a consistent six bushels per acre per year? And really, Renee, it’s not about higher yields. It’s about higher profit. Yields are a huge piece of that. It’s hard to improve profitability without doing better, yield-wise. It’s all with an eye for what you just said. It’s just about investing every input dollar within the field to try to get a higher return.

premier crop yield monitor

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, try to get a higher return with what they already have, with what growers already have. With what I have, I need to make more. I need to profit. I need to make more margin. Utilizing that yield monitor a little bit more than just, like you said, watching it throughout the field can really be beneficial to a grower’s operation.

DAN FRIEBERG: Renee, I know not everybody is wired the same, but I’m a big “why.” I always want to know “why.” Like when I see differences, I want to know what can explain the differences. For me, that “why” question is not — you can say, well, it’s mother nature, but it’s like, no. No, mother nature affected the entire field the same, but there’s some reason why parts of the field are better and parts of the field are worse. The quicker we can define “why,” or the better we can understand “why,” if we can, then that leads us to be able to develop a plan on how to do it better. We talk all the time about “we.” What we do is we analyze. We analyze data, and then we turn that into advice. And then we act on the advice the next crop year. It’s this constant cycle of driving for improvement.

RENEE HANSEN: Well, thanks, Dan. In closing, what would you say to a grower who isn’t utilizing some kind of system like Premier Crop with their yield data? What would you say to them?

DAN FRIEBERG: Don’t give up. I mean, some people, they literally are giving up, or they’re cynical or whatever. I would say it’s never too late to get started, obviously, and your yield files can be eye-opening in a way to do better. They’re a foundation piece to do better.

RENEE HANSEN: There’s always an entry point to get started and, sometimes, it’s just taking that first leap. 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.

Using Data for Hybrid and Variety Seed Selection

“Part of the value of what they get in the Premier Crop program is being able to see beyond their own operations. A lot of times, hybrid and variety is the very first thing they look for.”

– Dan Frieberg

 

 

DAN FRIEBERG: I always think, from a grower’s perspective, that the first analysis that you do is your own. It’s what your own results were from that crop year. What worked and what didn’t? It’s understanding analytics by hybrid or variety across their operation. The reason that it’s really great at a grower level is that, sometimes, a hybrid or variety in data shows up having done really poorly at a grower level, but the grower knows where it was planted. They have the benefit of knowing that the reason that number did badly, or looks bad, was because I planted it on my three worst fields. It may have been that they picked the number intentionally that had more defensive characteristics because those are really difficult fields. So, I think just looking at how your numbers did on your own operation is maybe a starting place.

TONY LICHT: Maybe to build off of that, Dan, from there, once I do the analysis on my own operation, then I want to think about: “How did it do for others around me in a like environment, somewhere pretty close to me?” Because if it happened to do poorly for me, but I find out it did well for others, where did it do well for others? How can I correct that?

use data to select seed hybrid

DAN FRIEBERG: Amen. Every grower in the system has the option of whether they want to be part of seeing anonymously beyond their own operation. Today, they all want that. Part of the value of what they get in the program is being able to see beyond their own operations. A lot of times, hybrid and variety is the very first thing they look for. They want to see beyond what their own experience was.

TONY LICHT: And depending on the number of hybrids or varieties they’re planting, sometimes if it’s planted on a small amount of acres, they completely forget about it. I mean, you think about the larger-acre hybrids, and it’s like: “Oh, I forgot about those new ones I planted. How did they shake up against the rest of my line?”

RENEE HANSEN: I mean, you’re talking about expanding beyond the operation, in a sense benchmarking against other areas or like areas. Can you explain or elaborate a little bit more about how Premier Crop utilizes the hybrid and variety selection with data? What does that potentially look like? Or what is the conversation with the grower?

DAN FRIEBERG: Renee, it’s kind of unlimited sorts. Initially, a lot of people might focus on soil types. If they have dominant soil types, it might be just hybrid and variety performance on different soil types. In some markets, for example, pH can be a huge driver on soybeans. High-pH areas or low-pH areas can have a huge swing, and varieties respond differently in those environments. Those would be two examples of how people get started, but they probably don’t stop there. They look at things like planting date or harvest date. So, if you’re a large operation, what inevitably happens is you end up with some fields that you know are going to be harvested last. So, for those numbers, Renee, they might drill down on late-harvest data. They’re trying to pick numbers that they know will stand and hold the ear late into harvest because some field has got to be harvested last, and a lot of growers literally plan. They plan their harvest by the way they plan their planting. There are certain fields that are always going to get planted first. In the case of harvest, there are certain fields that are going to be taken out first. It might be the ones that are closest to the bin site. They want to get the bins. They want to get the dryer going, and so there are certain fields that will come out early. A lot of times, those fields that come out early will probably get more of a racehorse number that doesn’t have to stand. It’s the highest yield potential because they know they’re going to get it before they get very far into harvest.

profitability by hybrid or variety

TONY LICHT: As-applied fertility can also be another environment they may want to look at, as well. How did I treat this group of corn hybrids differently on as-applied nitrogen, maybe split treatment or in-season treatment, versus just “all in the fall” kind of a concept? Are there differences amongst the hybrids and varieties now? How did they react to the environment they were in, whether it be as-applied fertility or soil test fertility?

DAN FRIEBERG: What we do is just adding another source of analysis to what a grower considers. A lot of times, their decision is if something did exceptional for them, they’re probably going to plant it again, obviously. They’ll look beyond their own operation to see and make sure it wasn’t a fluke or see how it held up in other environments. One of the advantages we have is that we can tend to see the hybrid and variety performance in different growing environments in the same year, meaning that you might’ve been in a really dry area, but you can go look and see how it did in a normal area. Or you happen to be unfortunate and you got hit by the wind, and so, sometimes, you want to jump out of your area because your own data isn’t as meaningful, just because you had something that happened that didn’t make your data quite as useful.

TONY LICHT: I was just going to say that’s a great point. Case in point: the wide area this year that got hit by the derecho. Those folks don’t lose data for a year. They still have the ability to build on data, albeit from a little bit further than their real local geography. It might be from 20 miles away in an area that was not hit. It could still be considered a like-agronomic environment.

DAN FRIEBERG: There are really big dollar swings because we’re measuring the economics and the agronomics. The reason people focus on it a lot is, at the end of the year, there are just really big dollar swings on a per-acre basis. It could easily be a 100 dollar-per-acre swing in return to land and management or what we call yield efficiency. You can just see really large swings. When you start analyzing that way, from my perspective, it probably leads to having a strategy where you call more aggressively. I grew up on a livestock farm and the term “cull,” “culling the herd.” In the livestock industry, you’re just constantly eliminating the low producers. When you’re making genetic selection, you’re eliminating the bottom 20 percent or whatever. In the case of hybrid and variety selection, I think, sometimes, we need to be more aggressive about calling some of the poor performers out if we’re really focused on trying to drive the highest returns.

Yield Efficiency Score

RENEE HANSEN: You both were talking about data. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the data features that Premier Crop measures hybrid variety with?

TONY LICHT: Everybody always thinks of just yield by hybrid and variety, but there are a lot of other attributes that come along with that hybrid: relative maturity on the chemical resistance or the seed disease resistance, as far as rootworm traits, non-rootworm traits. All those things come along with it. So, the conversation goes beyond not just a yield by hybrid, but maybe there was a specific trait that really helped drive yield, or a certain plant date helped drive yield. What are the trends I can see across my farm from a given year, and then also across a series of years, as well?

DAN FRIEBERG: Over the years, you’ve lived through some of the trait issues, just where we had areas where the rootworm trait wasn’t holding up. We ended up going through several years where needing a rootworm insecticide was a big part of the strategy and a big return for growers.

TONY LICHT: Absolutely. As a grower, do I need to do a double approach here? Not just the trait, but seed-applied insecticide, and where? And what can I expect from those people that have been utilizing that? What has the success rate been for them, to determine immediately, like: “Okay, well, here’s kind of a return on investment I can expect to get back out of this.”

DAN FRIEBERG: The trait thing probably also comes up as people shift in herbicide strategies. Renee, people would use the data to try to quantify differences in herbicide if they’re considering Liberty or if they’re needing to rotate strategies from any kind of a pest management or weed management strategy. That’s another piece where they drill down in data a lot, just to try to find the best performing genetics, as they’re switching strategies.

RENEE HANSEN: So, what would you say is the benefit to having all of this data to a grower who is utilizing Premier Crop Systems versus somebody who isn’t?

DAN FRIEBERG: It’s even the growers we work with, Renee. We are one part of how they make decisions in the seed world because, a lot of times, they have seed sellers who they really trust. They have long-time relationships in local communities with seed advisors. So, a lot of times, the seed advisor is there, too, and most growers will want to plant 20 percent of their acreage to something that’s new because every year there are new genetics coming out. Unless it’s been planted commercially, we don’t have any data on the new numbers. A lot of times, that’s what happens. Their local seed advisor or seed seller is positioning what they know about the new genetics from plots and what they’ve seen in small quantities as it got planted in the pre-commercial years.

TONY LICHT: A team can definitely help that grower out. We’ve always said that agronomy is local. So, that local knowledge with that seed advisor, combined with a lot of data points from a given area, can just help amplify the value proposition for the grower in getting the right seed on the right acres.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, and since we have a lot of data in our system, we clearly have seen. Over the years, with all of the data in our system, have you seen trends? And what are they?

TONY LICHT: There have definitely been trends in certain geographies of a stronger yield correlation by later maturing hybrid. But within that, there are all these “gotchas,” where there are a few early-season hybrids that perform within those environments very, very well — whether it be later maturing hybrids going further north or earlier maturing hybrids going south. So, definitely looking at not just a multi-year, but looking within and across those different years individually, trying to pull out those trends of what hybrids can be moved around either north to south to accommodate diversifying a grower’s portfolio.

DAN FRIEBERG: In the early years, you could literally see in the data. Sometimes, when companies had trouble with trait insertion, the non-traited versus the traited, you could actually see a yield decrease. I mean, companies are getting way better at that. I don’t think it’s as big an issue as it might’ve been in the early years.

TONY LICHT: When new traits come to the market, growers will definitely want to ask the question: “How do the new traits compare to my existing operation? Or how much more do they bring to the table for me?”

DAN FRIEBERG: Growers drill down on that really quick because what tends to happen is new traits come at a price. Usually, the company is wanting a premium for them. They’re trying to weigh that. Is that extra seed investment worth it? Am I actually getting a higher return?

RENEE HANSEN: Can you talk a little bit about yield efficiency — and Dan, you did elaborate on it a little bit — and how developing and making a selection for your hybrid or variety, how that can attribute to your yield efficiency score?

DAN FRIEBERG: Yield efficiency is just the dollar-per-acre return to land and management, meaning, after you’ve paid for the seed and nutrients and crop protection and field operations, what’s left. From a seed perspective, Renee, it comes down to: “What was the price point? How much did I have to pay for the seed?” And then, probably, the next piece is: “How could I manage the seed?” There are some numbers that just have a lot of flex, meaning they’ll flex ear size as based on population. So, in a highly variable field, that might be a great strategy, just something that will really change. In other words, you can plant at a lower population, and if it’s a good year, you won’t take a yield hit. Versus a fixed-ear number, they’re really responsive to populations. It’s just even a bigger factor. Some numbers just require more. In order to produce at the top end, in general, you need more. You need more plants, but some numbers seem to be able to flex more than others. So, that goes into yield efficiency because if you can plant a number at a lower rate and still achieve the same yield, you could potentially add 10 or 15 dollars an acre in return.

TONY LICHT: To build off of just reallocating your rate around the field, as planters become more sophisticated, we can reallocate which hybrids go on which part of the field, assigning hybrids to zones or soil types and at different rates, as well. We’ve got a different cost point of the hybrid and a different rate to maximize the ROI.

DAN FRIEBERG: We have a lot of growers in the system that are doing multi-hybrid or multi-variety planting. Do you think that’ll continue to grow? Where do you see the trend on it?

TONY LICHT: We continue to be in a discovery phase with that, of trying to figure out the best placement of hybrids, the different rates of hybrids, like those treatment blocks behind you in your background, Dan. ELBs accelerating the learning of rate and also placement of hybrids helps us versus single-rate testing year over year. We definitely continue to try and find the bottom of the soybean population, but the issue with that is, all of a sudden, it becomes an unemotional decision. That’s at times looking at data points in January, February, March, but all of a sudden, sometimes, it becomes a little bit of an emotional decision in season. If I feel confident in the data in January that I can drill down a seeding-rate population to 120 or 110 or 100 thousand, and, all of a sudden, I might get cold feet in April. If it happens to be a really great spring, and we can get out and plant early and do everything we want to do early, all of a sudden, it may be an uncomfortable situation of: “Boy, I don’t know if I have enough. I don’t know if I have enough information on planting this lower rate this early. Maybe for safekeeping, I should just turn the population back up just a little bit.” So, it’s trying to balance the emotional decision versus the data decision back in the couple previous months to really drive and find the bottom of where we can go on populations. It’s just the same way in corn, in soybeans and corn. As far as wheat, how much we want to sow. I think everybody kind of knows where the optimal rates are, but where are the extreme rates, the highs and the lows that really maximize that yield efficiency?

seed yield efficiency

DAN FRIEBERG: I get copied in on a lot of the trial results. I’ve seen some 80,000 seed drops on soybeans that just did exceptional, and they were learning blocks or replicated trials. It really gets your attention because if you start trimming 50,000 seeds, and you get a higher yield, it really drives the dollars really fast.

TONY LICHT: Seed treatments and soybeans have really, really helped us drill down, I think, our populations, as well. We’re better protecting that seed to ensure that every one of them matters more to get up and out of the ground in a timely fashion.

RENEE HANSEN: Yeah, ultimately, driving up that yield efficiency score, helping growers profit more. Thank you guys for joining us today. So great to see you, so great to have you, and we’ll be back again. Thanks for listening to the Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic.

What Does a Year End Meeting Look Like with a Premier Crop Partner?

“We use SciMax Solutions, a Premier Crop partner,
to push everything we can
in order to get the best ROI
and try to do the best job that we can.”
– Mike Myers, Waukee, IA

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.

MIKE 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 MEYER: 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.

Farm data for ROI

MIKE 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 MEYER: 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.

MIKE MYERS: Yeah, I guess for me, as far as all this, it’s all that I mentioned a little bit. 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.

 

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.

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

PETER BIXEL: Yeah.

MIKE 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)

MIKE 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.

Using precision ag to look at tissue sample data

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.

MIKE 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. 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.

MIKE 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.

MIKE 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

MIKE 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 MEYER: Through May, three to four inches.

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

MIKE 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.

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

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

DALE MEYER: 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.

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

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

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

MIKE 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.

 

Make sure to listen 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.

What Can You Do With Your Farm Data?

“We know there are dollars left on the table on every acre, it’s just a matter of finding it with your farm data.” – Lance Meyer, Kansas

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, and I work with growers kind of all over Kansas. I’m mainly focused here in east-central Kansas, but 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 think 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.

farm data map layers

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. That is the hardest point, to just make that leap to get started with data. 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 that 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 don’t know the stats on that or whatnot, but 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, but 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.

yieldmonitor

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, here at Premier Crop, I mean, we’re essentially redefining the success metric for today’s farmer. For so long, we’ve been focused on yield, but now we bring this concept of yield efficiency that a lot of people might not understand, but we’re helping people get there. Yield efficiency is, essentially, the amount of money in return from your crop that you have to pay land and management costs at the end of the day. So, obviously, 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, and 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, like I just mentioned, I call it a successful season, whether it’s $10 an acre or $100 an acre farm profitability. We know that there are dollars left on the table on every acre, so 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.

Yield efficiency score showing profitability

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.

Three Steps to Combine Farm Agronomics and Economics

We often use the phrase, “Everything agronomic is economic.” What does that really mean?

First, let’s first define agronomics and economics. What is agronomics? That’s everything that we do in the field related to making good management decisions. It’s deciding how much fertilizer to apply and where to put it, planting rates, crop protection, tillage systems and how to incorporate all of this into the farm. Those all go into how we grow our crop. On the economics side, we’re talking about all of the money involved in farming. Farming is a business, and just like any other business, you need to make sure you have cash flow so you have the opportunity to farm again next year, and the year after that. So, how do we focus on agronomics and economics? We do that by analyzing growers’ data. We use that knowledge to help them make decisions on their farm.

Knowing what you’ve done on the farm in the last five, 10, or 20 years can provide valuable knowledge as you plan into the future. However, if you never take that data and don’t use it to make decisions, it’s not doing you any good. It’s important to invest time into collecting your farm data. We work with growers to analyze their collected field data. We add costs to the layers of data including product cost, operations cost, management cost if they have any land-specific cost, and tie that to the yield file so we can see what is making agronomic and economic sense on the farm.

It’s fairly easy to tell where there are higher yields, but it’s a lot harder to know if that yield increase also caused an increase in the pocket book. Did the decision pay for itself? Did you produce enough bushels to offset the cost of production? Every pass across the field matters agronomically, but it also has a cost associated with it. We give you three steps to help combine your farm agronomics and economics below.

1. PLANTING

When you’re preparing to plant, your seed has the highest yield potential it’s ever going to have. Everything we do at Premier Crop is aligned with protecting yield potential, and planting population is a big aspect of this. If you overcrowd the plants, you’re going to make them compete for resources, which will end up reducing your yields. On the flip side, if you have too low of a population, then you’re reducing your yield potential by not having enough in the first place. You can’t produce more bushels of corn if you never plant the seed to begin with.

Combining agronomics and economics is about finding the right rate for the right part of the field, which we accomplish with management zones. A management zone is not just a seeding rate like it is with many other precision ag companies. We manage the field and the operation off of the zones. We break fields into high-producing areas, which are A zones, average-producing areas, which are B zones, and lower-producing areas, which are C zones. The B zones are the types of areas that do pretty well year in and year out, but they don’t have the capability to be the highest producing areas of the field. Our C zones could look like a wet spot, an area shaded by trees, or a family of deer could live nearby and eat it all the time. We manage nearly everything based on these zones.

premiercroppbreakevencostperbushel

In the A zones, our high-producing areas, we push planting populations. We plant more seeds in these areas because these parts of the fields have the capability to produce more bushels. In the C zones, we’re going to pull back our population because we know those spots just simply don’t have the yield potential. By labeling it as a C zone and understanding that it is not going to produce as well, we can manage risk by lowering the planting population. This practice will save money on seed costs in this part of the field because by lowering the population, we have reduced seed cost, which helps the bottom line. However, if we can get part of the field from a C zone to a B zone, or from a B zone to an A zone with fertilizer or any management practice, we will go after that to increase our return to land and management, what we call yield efficiency.

2. FERTILIZER

When variable-rate technologies first came out, the discussion was: “It’s going to save you money and reduce your fertilizer usage.” We found that’s not always the case, though. Instead, grower’s are making better decisions with their planting or fertilizer dollars. They are putting those dollars in the areas of the field where it’s needed and where they can get a return on their investment. We are driving farming towards thinking more on the economic side of the business.

In general with farming, if you’re doing a straight rate across the field, you’re essentially treating every acre the same. We know that every acre is not the same because when you’re harvesting, even if you don’t use a yield monitor, you can see variation in the amount of loads you’re taking off. You can tell how good or bad the corn is as you’re driving across the field. So, why would you treat your inputs the same if you’re not taking the same amount off of it at the end of the day? That’s why it’s so important to tie the economics to planting, and fertilizer. That is where the real benefit lies.

Even if you are locked in on your planting populations, placing different checks in a field through different years allows you to gather historical data and be able to check and say: “In this year, if we’re looking at a cold, wet spring, this is the best population to go with.” Even if we don’t use that specific data in the next year, we are still collecting it for future years.

It is also important to factor in your planting population when you’re determining your nitrogen rates. We often use the example: If you invite more plants to dinner, you have to have enough food to feed them. We could apply a straight rate, but we’re going to be overfeeding the poor-production areas and underfeeding the high-production areas. So, if you have a higher population in the A zones, you need to account for the added food they’re going to need. We can also push the nitrogen rates a little higher in the A zones because we have the capability to produce more bushels, not just because of the higher population but just because the ground is better. By pushing that, you’re taking a little bit more risk, but it’s a smart risk.

3. ANALYTICS

To get started looking at a grower’s analytics, we first pull yield monitor data. Then we look at everything the grower has done throughout the year, whether it’s fertilizer, lime, planting, nutrients, or crop protection products. We dig in and see what the economic benefit was. When planting, did we build small test plots into the planting maps for our growers called Learning Blocks. We then use the information from our all of our data within a management zone to see if we have the right rate. Learning Blocks not only show us what produces the highest yield, but it also shows which population provides the greatest return on investment. Once the prescription is in a grower’s monitor, they can just focus on farming. It’s very little thinking on a grower’s part because we’re constantly constantly checking our work.  It is important that we prove what we’re doing is the best option possible.

premiercropgrowerseedingtrials

The analytics is where the magic happens. Not many companies look at what happened after harvest. Premier Crop uses our platform to make informed decisions based on what the growers data is proving through on-farm trials, Learning Blocks and Enhanced Learning Blocks to provide statical confidence to help the grower see their profit.

Not every operation has the same goals and not everyone sets out to produce the max amount of bushels. It’s a “do it and check” process. We go out and do something, we check our work, and then we make corrections for the next year. As a grower, you’re always busy. You are going from one thing to the next, and there’s always something to do. Going through the data can be a tedious task that leaves you feeling like your time would’ve been better spent elsewhere. The benefit of working with a Premier Crop Advisor is that we retrieve the data, clean it up, and enter it into the system. A grower just needs to hit “record” when they’re running through the field.

Want to learn how you can work with an Agronomic Advisor to start making agronomic decisions based on your economics? Contact us to schedule a demo today.

Learn more about the farm profitability.

Big Data With Local Context

Big data is a phrase that has integrated this world of technology across industries. It’s about capturing relevant data from a huge number of sources, and translating it into something that people can use. Big data provides actionable insights to solve problems at scale and at speed. In this world of ag, we have billions of dollars of venture capital funding pouring into agriculture through technology builds. Big data has been at the center of that.

There are several ways big data can be advantageous to agriculture. It depends on your goals. What do you want to accomplish with the data? Obviously, big data is enabled by computing power. We have much more capacity because of server farms and cloud computing. These let us collect more and crunch through more data.

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

There’s a ton of data being collected today in ag from many different sources. Much of it is public. It seems like there are newer companies trying to take advantage of public data and the complexity of sourcing it and putting it together into some usable format. Public data is not drilled down to a level where I think it’s all that helpful. If you’re a company selling an analytics package to a grain trading company, you don’t need it refined. With that type of data, you’re trying to understand global yield trends and how it will move the supply chain. So a lot of the public sources aren’t as valuable to a grower as they are to other stakeholders.

MYTHS OF BIG DATA

Let’s talk about some of the myths out there on big data. We often hear the words “weather modeling,” but what we’re talking about is predicting the future. It might be future weather or future performance.

All models are based on assumptions. It’s about understanding specific geographies within fields, and how they’re similar to geographies in other fields. It’s almost like the more data you get, the more it lets you break it apart into more meaningful insights. The power of what we have in ag is that you have different growing environments every year. As a company, we get to observe different growing environments within the same year. So, Nebraska or Minnesota can have a dramatically different growing environment than Indiana and Ohio. For example, you could see how a hybrid or variety performs in the same year in dramatically different growing environments because you’re seeing it across these big geographies. It’s highly dependent on believing in the idea that agronomy is local, that agronomy and geography have a really close relationship with each other. It relates to the idea of big data, and aggregating it across multiple different agronomic environments. So how do we give it enough credibility that people can make decisions?

Over the years, the ability to aggregate data geographically has been a big deal. The ultimate power of all this is at a subfield level because that’s where you drive change. Every farmer who works with us wants to see beyond their own operation. They want to see agronomic practices, trends and rates.

When a farmer starts working with us, they usually want to see the biggest data set possible, meaning they want to see data from a large geography. However, we believe that local data is king in agriculture. The bigger, richer data set from a local perspective is more powerful because there are more things that are relevant and stay the same. We almost went through a decade where it seemed like the whole seed industry on corn was going to fixed-year numbers. The only way you could drive yield was to drive population. No matter what size of database, we saw a trend. We were marching up 400 or 500 seeds per acre for a decade because that’s what it took in order to drive yields.

Now, we’ve gone through almost a decade where it seems like there’s more flex in numbers. We’re producing much higher yields at lower populations. However, when we were going through that match up in population, growers started looking at row width. We had this phenomenon where everybody was chasing 20-inch corn or even narrower corn. The plants were on top of each other, and needed to be more spaced out. In the data, 20-inch corn was a South Dakota and southern Minnesota phenomenon. That’s where we were seeing the most 20-inch corn. We had people outside of that area that wanted to drill down. They wanted to see data outside of their area because they were trying to make a decision about switching to a narrower row of corn. This was a way to space out the plants as they continue to drive the population.

Since we’re capturing data off the planter, as it goes across the field, we’ve been able to calculate planting speed. One of the very early signs was we had a report that showed the faster they planted the corn, the better and higher the yield. That’s an example where faster planting speed was correlated to higher yields, but when you actually interviewed the grower and talked to the grower about what happened in that field, parts of the field worked up rough. And so, they slowed down because they were trying to maintain seed-soil contact. As they went into those areas that worked up rough, they slowed the tractor down and slowed the planter down. In the part of the field that worked up great, they planted at normal speed or higher speed and, sure enough, that was where the higher yields were. The rougher areas worked up rough, so the real correlation was to field conditions of planting, but it showed up as planting speeds. So, it was an example where you can have correlation, but it doesn’t necessarily mean causation.

One of the many myths people believe about big data is that if you haven’t got involved already, you’re probably too late.

Many growers are sitting on data and no one has helped them put it to use. There are growers who quit caring about yield data because they haven’t been able to use it. One of our successes is that we grab that historic yield data and try to use it to capture the variability within fields. You can go from zero to big data really quick in farming. You can start at any time and begin creating value right away.