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 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.

Does Carbon Sequestration Pay?

“I believe that if we really want soils to be that carbon sequestering part, we need to be explaining to agriculture and producers this whole dynamic of carbon and how it’s going to benefit them in ways that they really haven’t thought about very much.” Dr. Jerry Hatfield

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

JERRY HATFIELD: I mean, if you look at soil carbon and sequestration and all this, we kind of have this interesting view of carbon. We have all this carbon in the atmosphere. When people say we’re going to sequester it in the soil, I think they magically think it’s going to go from the atmosphere into the soil and be stored there. But you have to realize that in agriculture, we take carbon dioxide and we combine that with sunlight to create carbohydrates that are where plant growth comes from. When we put it into the soil, it’s basically because we’ve transported it from the leaves down into the roots, and then we take those root exudates and feed the microbes that put that carbon into the soil. So, it is a very active process and requires that we have a living plant to be able to do that. The only way in which we pump CO2 from the atmosphere is with deep wells where people actually just dump and pump air down into the deep earth, but in agriculture, it’s really a very active process. And because it is an active process, we have a combination of sequestration, as well as cycling, because a lot of it gets sequestered into soil organic matter. It gets built into those aggregates, but a lot of it is really recycled very, very quickly. We have microbes that chew it up, and they put it into aggregates, and then they decompose and it gets recycled. We have to realize that, in agriculture, we do build it up over time, but it’s a very dynamic process and has all these different implications for us in terms of improving our soil structure, improving nutrient cycling, improving all these other things. That really is where the value of carbon is coming from.

soilcarbonImage from reneweconomy.com.au

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

JERRY HATFIELD: If you look at this, just imagine that what we have going on in the soil is we take the roots. There’s an estimation that about 40% of that organic material is going out of the roots as root exudates, which is basically sugars that are feeding the microbes. Of that, a large percent is going into CO2 that’s trapped in that soil volume. So, when you till, all you’re doing is basically releasing a lot of that CO2 that’s been trapped in there, and then it goes right back to the atmosphere very quickly. The other part is that when we till, we expose a lot of that soil to the air. The microbes really begin to change that organic material and digest it very quickly, so we see another puff of CO2. We actually have two mechanisms when we till, but that immediate release is really, I think, just trapped CO2. Then, the longer term is the spring of activity of the biological community that respires, as well.

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

JERRY HATFIELD: I’m not sure I buy that it’s that impactful, and don’t get me wrong. I think that no-till is part of this, but if we think about no-tilling corn and soybeans across Iowa, we’ve still got a large part of that growing season in which nothing is happening. I mean, we may not be disturbing it, but we’re not feeding that microbe. When we really want to build organic material, we’ve got to capitalize on capturing solar radiation and CO2 and putting it in there. So, we need that extended crop rotation to be able to really change that. Personally, I don’t believe that no-till by itself is the path. I think it’s one component of the system, but I don’t think it is the panacea, saying that if we kept everything else and all we did is change tillage that we solve climate change. I don’t believe that’s really the case at that point.

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

JERRY HATFIELD: From the carbon capture perspective, just think about it this way. If we don’t have a growing crop out there, we’re not capturing sunlight. Just look at Iowa, from the time in which we plant that corn and soybeans in the spring until we harvest them. Then, if you look from last frost to when that corn plant really comes up, and then from maturity until it really freezes in spring, we actually have about a third of the solar radiation that’s available to grow something. So, a cover crop is really, thinking about it, all we’re doing is using that photosynthetic process to capture a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. In doing so, we obviously affect the nutrients. We affect the water, but I think we’ve got to start putting it into a much larger perspective of: “What are we doing in terms of the dynamics of carbon, nitrogen, water, all simultaneously?”

Screen Shot 2021-02-16 at 4.38.41 PMUpper Left: No-till; Lower Left: Cover Crop; Right: Row spacing

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

JERRY HATFIELD: We’ve had a soil carbon test. I mean, we look at organic material. You can look at soil organic matter. You can look at particulate organic matter. You’ve got a lot of this soil CO2, which a lot of the tests are based on. It’s basically, I believe, a surrogate for the amount of biological activity we have in the soil because those are respiring organisms that generate CO2. So, you’ve got all of these pieces coming together, and I don’t know. When we talk about soil health, I think we need to stand back a little bit because I think everybody says: “Here’s a soil health test.” Well, what do we want that test for? Because a lot of the components of soil health, I think, need to be much more related to soil function: supplying water, supplying nutrients, supplying support, lack of compaction within that. I think we need a much more holistic view of what we want our soils to do and not get hung up on saying: “What’s the perfect test?” I think that’s what confused a lot of people. “Oh, what’s the one test that I need to go out and run in my field to determine if I got soil health?” Well, you can look at how well that plant is growing. You could look at water infiltration. You could look at a number of different parameters. Just like in us, when we go to the doctor, he just doesn’t say: “Well, I’m going to look at your left earlobe, and that’s the indicator of health.” I mean, you look at the blood tests that they run. You look at the heart rate. You look at all these other things, and those give us a metric of health. I think it’s the same thing in soil. If we want to use that same analogy, it’s a suite of practices that give us a direction towards functionality. The other thing is that not every soil within the field is going to respond the same, just like every human doesn’t respond the same to what we do. Soils are going to respond. If we had a really sandy soil in that field compared to clay soil, and we do the same thing on top of them, we’re going to see different rates of response just because of the parent material that’s there. So, I think we need to get that understanding out there, that it’s a dynamic process. It’s also a process that has a lot of moving parts to it, and there are certain attributes that put us down that path, but there’s also going to be different rates of responses we go on, as well.

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

JERRY HATFIELD: I think that, as we understand more and more about spatial variation within fields, we are seeing parts of that field that are the consistent high-yielding zones of that field. I’m always intrigued by the consistent high-yielding parts of that field that are legacy barnyards, where the cattle lot was. People say: “Why, that was 50 years ago. That was there.” So, what changed in that and all of this? The other part of this is we have consistent low-yielding parts of the field, as well, and I think that we can learn a lot by probably looking at the outliers. Why are those high-yielding spots the way they are? Why are those low-yielding spots the way they are? Then, you’ve got the zone that Bruno Basso and the group at Michigan State have come up with. We’ve got low-yielding stable zones. You’ve got high-yielding stable zones, and then you have unstable zones that really are dependent upon what the weather is during the growing season. Some years they may be high. Some years they may be low, but I do think that one of the pieces in this, in terms of soil health and these high-yielding parts, is those also tend to be much more stable zones in terms of year to year. They don’t have those big fluctuations, and those low-yielding parts don’t have fluctuations either, but they’re really non-profitable zones. These unstable zones, I mean, they could be 280 bushels one year and 120 the next year, and you go: “What happened besides the weather? What’s in that buffering capacity in soils?” I think that we need to be back thinking about what triggers that soil to be able to do that because, sometimes, it’s raining basically the same across the field. How do we begin to tease that out? I think a lot of us are trying to figure out some of these dynamics. Is it all biological? Or is it physical? Or is it chemical? In reality, it’s all three of those things coming together, but I think that if we want to move agriculture forward, in terms of efficiency and profitability, that we need to start looking and maybe examining from different viewpoints of the system.

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

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

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

JERRY HATFIELD: I believe that no-till will be part of that process. I think it’s some of the work that Don Reicosky has done, and Morris showing that it’s basically the amount of tillage that you do. If we’re doing full-width tillage, we have a lot of CO2 going in. You’re doing strip-till. No-till is really pretty small. We’re going to have to have some tillage to magically get that seed and fertilizer into the soil. It’s a matter of the width of that and how we disturb it. In the soil, actually, the biology responds very quickly to a lot of the different things, but I do think that reduced tillage is part of this overall process. We see a lot of impacts when we till in the fall, CO2 being released into the atmosphere, that basically we release as much back as we stored the whole summer. We basically reset the counter to zero at every fall when we do intensive tillage. So, if we want to build it up, we’ve gotta get that piece out of the system. I think that will become part of it. I think that diversifying crops and getting more carbon from the atmosphere into the soil is another part of that. We could say, well, if it’s no-till, we just go to fallow without any tillage, and I guarantee you we won’t change the carbon any. We won’t release any, but we won’t store any because we need that biological system as part of it.

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

JERRY HATFIELD: There is a great deal of debate, and I don’t think it’s going to go away. Part of this is people see different responses, and part of it’s climate-driven. If you think about that same practice that we have in Iowa and transport it to even southern Missouri, all we do is change the climate, and we won’t see near the response because we’ve had a temperature change. We have a lot more respiration going on. We have warmer soil temperatures. We have a different rainfall pattern, so we see all these different pieces. That’s one piece that adds variation to it, and then a lot of this goes back to these zones within fields. I mean, we see different responses. So, I think in a lot of our monitoring and everything, we need to recognize that there are different soils instead of looking at the field average and saying: “What are those different pieces, and how are they responding?” Then the argument is over: “Are you accruing carbon in the upper six inches of the soil, in terms of that magic plow layer? Are you putting it down deep?” Then, what form of carbon are we measuring? Are we measuring soil organic matter? A lot of this is in this particulate organic matter, which gets cycled very quickly, that a lot of people don’t measure. I think the scientific debate is going to continue along this path, but I think that we’re eventually going to settle in and say: “Here are some of the attributes around this, and let’s look at these attributes and not get hung up on saying that I use a red machine or a green machine to plant our crop.” I would think that’s where a lot of this gets in, and the same thing in terms of measurements. Did you make this measurement? Did you make that measurement? I often tell producers. They ask what the perfect soil health test is, and I say: “If you want to know if you’ve got soil health, just go out and look after your field after a two-inch heavy rain because if you can’t get two inches of rain into the soil, you don’t have soil health.” You’ve got all the aggregates that are stable. You’ve got infiltration going on, and everything else, and they go: “Well, yeah.” It’s kind of an aggregation of lots of different things that is there, and so it gets them to thinking about what they’re really looking at out there. Same thing in terms of yield that you mentioned. One of the pieces that I think if you see soil health, and why yields are a pretty good surrogate for that, is that when we improve our soil health, we see a lot more efficiency of nutrient supply and water supply late in that growing season. So, we see that plant maintain its green leaf area longer in the grain-filling period, both for corn and beans, even for wheat, as we begin to look at it. I think there are things that we could get producers interested in just looking at, to say: “What are some of the indications going on that you’re making a change in your system?”

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

JERRY HATFIELD: If we can get the value of carbon credits up enough. I mean, I was just looking at some data the other day that were really good systems, maybe half to eight-tenths of a ton of this. If we’re only offering $15 a ton, that’s $12. It costs you $30 to put in a cover crop, so you’re still on the negative side of that, even though you can get the value over time. I think we’ve got to give back to producers. Again, back to your zoning question of saying, how do you really begin to look at profitability across the field, and saying, how do I look at increasing profitability in those poor parts of the field? Is that reducing fertilizer applications because you’re not getting return on doing other things? You could trade that input of fertilizers for the cover crop to be able to improve those. I think we need a different strategy about how we really go about implementing conservation practices across the field and accounting for the value of them and the potential impact, short-term and long-term. I think that therein lies some of the imagination that I think we ought to be using relative to farming systems. We tend to look at our conservation practices as kind of a generic sort of suite. We’ll just lay these on the field out there, but in reality, I think we need to be much more structured in thinking about how they’re going to work and how they could be implemented in much more of a dynamic way but also a way in which I think they would have much more of a lasting impact.

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

JERRY HATFIELD: If you look at carbon from a benefit perspective, I don’t think we’ve talked enough about the benefits of carbon. We talk about carbon relative to carbon markets. We talk about sequestration but the value of putting carbon back into the soil. I often use this analogy, that if you get into carbon for the carbon market perspective, it’s like new running board money for your pickup. But if you get into improving carbon for the agronomic and efficiency piece, it’s new pickup money. That’s the orders of magnitude that we’re talking about because we see that improvement in yield stability. We take those low-yielding parts of the field out. I don’t think we’ve explained to producers the real value of carbon and why that’s so critical as part of the field, in terms of nutrient cycling, water infiltration and storage, even overall vigor of the crop. I think when we put those metrics around it, producers begin to see that these real changes are out there, but often we just sell it from the standpoint of carbon sequestration. It’s going to do good for the climate, which it does, but for the producer, they don’t care a whole lot about that. So, when we put it into that perspective of what it means for them, then I think it really becomes an important part of their decision process, and I think it’s an educational effort, as well.

Screen Shot 2021-02-16 at 4.46.24 PM
RENEE HANSEN: Absolutely. I think that the value just hasn’t been seen or believed by them yet to understand. There’s so much talk about carbon credits that they’re questioning, “Is this for real? What do I need to do?” It’s just another payment back to the grower. What do they have to do to get it, and what do they have to do to achieve it?

JERRY HATFIELD: Well, I think that a lot of this, in terms of achieving it, is that we need to realize that there are a suite of practices. Just don’t say, well, as we’ve talked about that, the only way you can get there is no-till. That’s one component. Reduced tillage is one component of the system, crop diversity and putting more crop longer through the growing season there. Even adding bio-based fertilizers, manures, compost, things like this, do a major impact on this because, ultimately, what we’re talking about is allowing the biological system within the soil to do its thing, in terms of capturing carbon and putting it into soil aggregates, putting it into organic matter. All those are the things that go on, and it really becomes a very fascinating puzzle that we’re trying to put together. To me, there is no one thing that is the magic solution. This is a very complex problem that we need to look at, and as we’ve talked about, it’s not something that you can say, even across a given field, across a given 40-acre field, that you’re going to see the same result if you did the same thing. So, I think we need to think a lot more judiciously about how we go about achieving our goals and looking at how practices and pieces and responses fit together. I think that’s part of that whole maturity of really evaluating our system and figuring out where we want to go and how we want to get there.

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

JERRY HATFIELD: Well, we actually see changes in carbon within one growing season. Now, measurement-wise, it gets a little difficult to pick that up, but we can see it because of changes in color. We can see changes in aggregates near the surface. Those are kind of the unstable parts of this. The stable parts are really much more in that two-to-five year timeframe. We really want to see depth changes. With depth, we’re talking about plus-10, and I think we’ve got to realize this, but things occur quickly. I was looking at some of the dynamics on root exudates relative to microbial activity, and those often occur within minutes of changing this. So, you look at all this, and I think we’ve got to realize that we’re dealing in a set of different time constants all the way across our platform. It goes back to the thing on soil health. What parameters are really changing within that? Because we know some parameters are going to change a lot more quickly than others. We see aggregate changes within a growing season. They’re not very stable, but they are changing. So, it’s a matter of what’s that time cost to get it to be much more of a stable aggregate?

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

JERRY HATFIELD: No. I think when we go back, and we talk about why there’s so much controversy within the science community, it’s that there’s not a common set of practices. A lot of people, and this is one of my frustrations, really have not accounted for the fact of all the weather variation that occurred during their experiment. Sometimes, it’s the rainfall patterns that we talked about with the heavier soils, that we get these wet springs, and then we get dry summers. That really influences the response. Sometimes, we get dry springs, rarely, but we get wet summers, even more rare. I think that part of this is we’ve got to figure out how to start normalizing a lot of the different characteristics that are out there, and even in terms of cover crops. I mean, we talk about this. So, if you run a monoculture cover crop of rye, how large was that rye crop? People say: “Oh, I planted a rye cover crop.” Well, was it 3000 pounds of biomass? Or was it 500 pounds? Just because you had a cover crop doesn’t mean you all had the same efficacy. If you’ve got a cover crop cocktail with a small grain and a legume and a brassica mixture, what was the real biomass that was generated out of that? So, I think there needs to be a lot of normalization of, instead of just saying we did this, what was the real efficacy? Just going back to Dan’s comment in terms of yield, we need to look at the productivity of our cover crop system over time, and we have tools to be able to do that. I think that starts putting us on much more of an equal footing of saying: “Why do we see these responses across different places?” Well, it could be because we had different levels of input across that we didn’t even characterize.

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

JERRY HATFIELD: I think it does. I think it pays in lots of different ways. We start this path towards carbon sequestration. We change our infiltration rates. Let’s just start about: “What are we really trying to do in our agriculture across the Midwest?” It’s that we want to take as much precipitation and put it back through that crop to create yield. When we’ve got a soil that’s pretty fragile, and we have low infiltration rates of less than a half-inch per hour, if we can just improve the infiltration rate up to two inches per hour, then we get a lot more rain into that system. If I can get rain into the soil, I can store it, but if I can’t get it into the soil, it’s just runoff. So, I think we start with that, realizing that our whole goal in agriculture is to do two things. One is to capture sunlight, and one is to put as much water through that plant as possible. If we get our soil set up so that we’re doing those things, it’s going to pay dividends to us, so let’s think about that dynamic. Then, ultimately, you’ll end up saying: “Well, I’ll recycle more nutrients. I’ll do all these other things to kind of buffer against the weather variation that’s going on out there.” That’s the path that I think we need to be explaining to producers, of what carbon really is doing at various steps along the way. I believe that if we really want soils to be that carbon sequestering part, we need to be explaining to agriculture and producers this whole dynamic of carbon and how it’s going to benefit them in ways that they really haven’t thought about very much.

Yield Efficiency at a Year-End Grower Meeting with SciMax Solutions

“I think people are really good looking at a 10,000-foot view, but when you dive deeper into the economics and profitability, that’s where the rubber meets the road.”
– Landon Aldinger, Farmer, Iowa Falls, IA

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

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

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

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

KATIE DECKER: Do you still farm with your father?

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

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KATIE DECKER: Talk through how you guys work together.

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

PETER BIXEL: It was that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LANDON ALDINGER: Correct.

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

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

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Managing Profitability with Ag View Solutions

“We’re all about tying the economics to the agronomics, which just means when we’re adjusting nutrient rates and plant seeding rates and decisions about what we spend in different parts of the field, we’re tying that out at the end of the year.
– Dan Frieberg

RENEE HANSEN: Welcome to the Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic. Today, we’re talking with Shay Foulk with Ag View Solutions on his Ag View Pitch podcast. We recommend that you go listen to the Ag View Pitch podcast and subscribe. They have numerous podcasts out there with lots of valuable information. Today, Shay is talking with Dan Frieberg and Brenton Rossman about the value of Premier Crop.

SHAY FOULK: Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today, you have Shay Foulk with some special guests from Premier Crop Systems. I appreciate everybody taking a little bit of time to join in. We have Dan Frieberg and Brenton Rossman, as well as Renee Hansen, tuning in. Dan and Brenton, I’m hoping here that we can get a good introduction from both of you and learn a little bit more about what Premier Crop Systems is. I’ll preface this by saying we really enjoy having this perspective and different conversations on what organizations can provide and what value they can bring to the farmers that are listening to this podcast. So, if we could just start with a quick introduction from each of you and get going from there.

DAN FRIEBERG: Sure, I’ll go first. Dan Frieberg, and I started the company in 1999. Really, Shay, it was kind of the advent of a lot of spatial files, meaning georeferenced files. So, if you think of a yield file, we were starting to be able to tie the yield monitor out to a GPS receiver. Then, soil sampling and variable-rate nutrient activity was going on. So, it was just all this agronomic data that now could be georeferenced to a spot in the world. It was just kind of born out of that idea of being able to tie it all out and build a database file that is a georeference for each field each year and be able to analyze the results and provide insights and turn that into action the next year. The company does just a lot of variable-rate activity. We just believe that the right rate changes within a field boundary. That’s how we got started, and I’ll let Brenton go from his perspective.

BRENTON ROSSMAN: Yeah, thanks. Brenton Rossman. I’ve been with Premier Crop Systems for five years now. Started with the company right after college. Primarily work with our retail partners in delivering our program through the retail channel. So, I live in northwest Iowa, which is where I grew up and have the opportunity to help on my family’s farm. I enjoy getting to utilize our tools and get firsthand use with them on our own operation, as well. Happy to be visiting with you today.

SHAY FOULK: Yeah, that’s great. When it comes to that georeferencing that you were talking about, Dan, I recently read a report that anywhere from 62 to 70% of farmers across the United States are utilizing some form of yield mapping systems or variable-rate applications. How have you seen the adoption of these technologies change over the last decade or so, in particular, I guess, through the Midwest here, where we’re generally located? What do you think that opportunity looks like in the future?

DAN FRIEBERG: I think we went through a period of high commodity prices the last time. The equipment companies, really, were one of the beneficiaries of high commodity prices. So, a whole bunch of people upgraded equipment, and every time that happens, they upgrade technology, as well. Then, that means that the technology they were using passes to the next buyer of that equipment. So, there’s kind of this ripple effect of more and more technology. That’s why surveys come back like that, but what we find is a lot of people aren’t really utilizing the data the way we think it’s possible. So, a yield monitor can become “Harvest TV,” where it’s almost like an expensive moisture sampler, which is great because you’re able to direct grain to the right spot for drying and things like that. But we think there’s so much more possibility to use your yield file as a way to measure agronomic and economic success.

SHAY FOULK: You better be careful, Dan. I might steal that “Harvest TV” and make a YouTube channel out of it. I like that term. Brenton, from your perspective as the farmer and the background that you’ve had with your family operation there, how long have you had some of this technology in the farm operation, and where do you see advancements from the farmer perspective moving forward?

BRENTON ROSSMAN: I would say my dad has been a fairly early adopter to the hardware side of the technology. Variable-rate drives on our planter probably the last 12 years, at least, I would say. Collecting yield since the nineties. So, we’ve been early adopters on that stage of the conversation, but as far as taking that information that we’ve been collecting, if you go into my dad’s office, he’s got notebooks and binders full of maps, all of this information, but now we’ll be able to use the data behind that information. So, where I see it going is just the ability to collect, analyze more of this machine data and information, have it stored in one location and then utilize the power of computers and software to, then, look at it in different ways so we can make decisions going forward.

SHAY FOULK: I think how you phrase that is a great segue into the next question that I have. I know some of what you deal with, with Premier Crop Systems, is looking at yield efficiency and how are we taking these variables and making really good decisions with it? So, Dan, I was wondering if you can kind of talk on some more specific things that Premier Crop offers to the farm operations that they’re working with. What does that look like today if someone was interested in finding out more about what you all do?

DAN FRIEBERG: Gladly. Shay, a lot of times, we use the phrase “everything agronomic is economic.” We’re all about tying the economics to the agronomics, which just means when we’re adjusting nutrient rates and plant seeding rates and decisions about what we spend in different parts of the field, we’re tying that out at the end of the year. So, we’re capturing that spatially. That cost is tied to the file. If we recommend and encourage you to plant more seeds in what we think is the best part of the field, we’re capturing that additional seed cost as an input cost. We can map it all the way to breakeven cost per bushel, and that would include land and management costs, but we describe yield efficiency as return to land and management at a benchmark selling price. The user interface lets the grower set their own selling price, so it’s calculating revenue minus what you invested in nutrients, crop protection, seed and field operations. Shay, we wanted a way to take land cost and management cost out of the benchmarking nature of it. We found that land cost can really be a real distortion when you’re trying to benchmark across operations. It’s really that same message. If we adjust inputs, we’re tracking the cost either up or down. So, we’re able, at the end of the year, to show whether that was the right decision or not.

SHAY FOULK: I was talking with a really good operation here in western Illinois, about 30 minutes before we were recording this podcast here. He made the comment that you kind of have to have three to four years of good information to make decisions off of it. And, of course, there’s low hanging fruit. Year one, you’re going to see some things that are pointed out: variable rates, quickly identify issues, particularly when it comes to soil sampling or plant tissue sampling, and learn more about your operation. You use the term benchmark there, and, with some of what we do, we’re very careful with benchmarking from a standpoint of no two operations are the same. But I think what, sometimes, people get confused with is benchmarking doesn’t have to be against other farm operations. Benchmarking against your own operation, and, like you said, that land cost can throw such a wrench in understanding how that ties into an overall system and what management decisions you can be making out of that. But I’m sure that information is extremely powerful once you have two, three, four years worth of information at your own benchmark and then making decisions for your operation moving forward. Do you have any comments on that?

DAN FRIEBERG: I think, for me, the internal benchmark, like you say, is by far the most powerful. Amazingly, the growers love to benchmark against each other. Sometimes, I don’t understand why, but they love to be able to see beyond their own operation. So, whenever they look beyond their own operation, it’s anonymous, and they don’t know who they’re benchmarking against, and it can be extremely local or regional or a fairly good-sized group. So, benchmarking, growers love that piece of it, and they love the economic piece too. Personally, I think the most powerful is within your own operation, just field by field and then drilling down within a field by management zones. Shay, the one thing I would tell you is we’ve come up with a way to start making decisions even quicker. In 2005, we started putting check blocks inside prescriptions, and we trademark that as learning blocks. A learning block is just a comparison area. It’s like introducing an experiment into the field, and we’ve just automated the process. That’s kind of what software is really good at, is automating processes. But what it does is it lets you, in a single year, it lets you go to school in areas of the field. It’s really, really popular. If I suggested you plant 39,000 in the best part of the field, you’d have anxiety about whether that was too much or not, or whether it was worth the seed investment. But you’d try an acre. You would try an acre of 39,000 in a heartbeat just to see if it worked or see if it paid. So, learning blocks, now we’ve added more to that where you can do replicated trials. You can do multiple rates and have it be replicated, but it’s really opened the door to how do I get there quicker? How do I get on that journey of making decisions and getting this constant feedback? Every year is different. So, what you said a little bit ago is exactly right. Three or four years of data is way better than one year, but you can get started really quick. We’ve had people start where, like on variable-rate soybeans, they were so unsure of what to do that they just seeded the field at the normal rate, and they put a bunch of learning blocks in just to experiment with different rates.

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SHAY FOULK: That’s great. One thing I want to go back to on the benchmarking, too, is a reason why a lot of farm operations that we work with like that exterior benchmarking. I’m not saying benchmarking is bad, so I don’t want that to be misconstrued here. But the reason they like that additional benchmarking is, sometimes, as farmers, we are the CEOs and the shareholders and the managers and the laborers all in one. Not every operation is a collaborative opportunity amongst different farmers. Not everybody has a community infrastructure where they can ask questions and look at economics in comparison, or maybe they don’t even have a family member to rely on, anywhere from first-generation farmers to someone that has just had to take on a lot of responsibility. So, I can see that benchmarking being a very valuable tool and then taking that information, like you said, with these learning blocks and applying that as quickly as possible. Brenton and I were talking here offline. One of the challenges with the learning process with some of this data is when it gets to variety or hybrid-specific crop analysis because in the industry, I mean, three to five years is about the lifetime that we’re seeing in these, and you can’t always make good decisions. About the time you learn what a hybrid does or how it responds, aside from the information that you’re getting from the seed companies, right when you get comfortable with it, there’s something else new out. And you have to take advantage of that because of the genetics and because of the advancements that we’re seeing in chemistry and herbicide resistance and things like that. So, I guess, Brenton, can you talk about that a little bit from a farmer perspective? It sounds like there are other things that we can quickly learn. Then, as we learn these products, the variety and hybrid-specific products, we can continue to make good decisions off of that, correct?

BRENTON ROSSMAN: Yeah, and that’s one thing. A passion of mine is on farm trialing and learning as much as I can, trying to put data into practice on our own farm to make the next step faster with a hybrid in year two or year three if this was its first year in season. What can we learn about all the different agronomic situations or scenarios on our own farm? How do hybrids perform differently? Lighter ground, heavier ground. High soil test P and K versus low soil test areas. We’ve done a lot of population trials on our farm, and it’s interesting. Definitely not bashing seed companies or anything, but we’ve done trials where we plant a certain hybrid at 35,000. That may be the suggested rate. On a certain soil type in a certain environment on my own fields, we see the highest return at 31,000 seeds per acre, so a lower seeding rate. Just having the ability to do some of this testing on our own farm, learning about the local environment, I’m going to trust the data from my own farm and use that for making decisions going forward.

SHAY FOULK: Well, and Dan, you said it really well at the beginning of this podcast. You have variability within your field boundaries. Whether it’s a 10-acre field, a 4,400-acre field, it doesn’t matter what size it is. There’s variability, and farmers know how to manage that instinctively, especially as you get time and experience in there. But if we can take that information from learning blocks or farm management zones and make better decisions off of it, hopefully we can learn quicker, and hopefully we can save money. Are you guys generating profit maps at this point?

DAN FRIEBERG: We do. Right now, it’s breakeven cost per bushel.

SHAY FOULK: Okay.

DAN FRIEBERG: So, we kind of focus that way, and it goes back to that we want to deliver the map the second yield file hits versus when the crop is marketed. A lot of growers sell over a 12-month period, so they don’t actually know their selling price, a lot of times, until months after harvest.

SHAY FOULK: That’s where the marketing decisions can be key, though, on knowing that cost of production and having it dialed in. Of course, that’s what we spend a lot of time working with growers on, and Chris and I will be the first ones to tell anybody out there. We run a system called Profit Manager, and you don’t have to use Profit Manager. You can use university systems. You can use any number of programs that are out there, but knowing that cost of production, and then how it ties back into the whole operation, is key and, I think, looking at it at a breakeven cost. If I know, as a farmer, instinctively, what my cost of production is, if I have that dialed into the penny, for me, let’s say it’s $3.72 or whatever it is on corn. If I’m looking at an area of the field that’s saying, hey, your breakeven is $5.43 here, that’s pretty eye-opening because we market in bushels. We’re not marketing off of dollars revenue per acre most of the time. Some operations do it that way, and they are successful at that, but it can be a pretty easy way to look at that. So, I think that’s interesting from the profit mapping perspective. How long have you been doing that?

DAN FRIEBERG: We actually started doing that in the very beginning. Almost killed the company in 1999 by doing it because what we ran into when we rolled it out is, first of all, back then, there was a lot of disorganization among growers. So, you would ask a grower for the cost information, and they would hand you a folder full of seed invoices and say, here, you sort it out. Back then, there were just a lot of growers who weren’t super organized. We’ve transitioned a lot in the last 20 years. But the second thing, Shay, is it really ratchets up the trust level between the grower. When you’re starting to track, when you really are getting to breakeven cost per bushel, that’s the most private information. If you put your actual land and management costs into it, too, that’s really private information. It’s the P and L for the field, so it’s super private. We kind of walked our way into it. Now, a lot of times, people start out, and it’s a faster transition now than it was back then. But they kind of have to get confidence before they’re really willing to share every detail about their operations.

SHAY FOULK: Yeah, and I understand that. I mean, farmers have a certain level of independence that they like, and there’s a reason, sometimes, that they’re in the industry because they’re their own boss. They can make the decisions. They can choose who they share the information with. So many operations we’ve seen have taken the understanding of, maybe, I can’t do all of this as effectively as someone else can by helping me. I talk with people all the time on that. When it comes to the reservation of sharing numbers, folks like us with the consulting side, or you all with the data management, we don’t care personally what John Farmer’s numbers are in north central Iowa or southwest Indiana. I mean, we don’t have the capacity to do anything with that information nor would we want to. We keep that wholly private, and having conversations with you all offline, too, I think, is one of the reasons I wanted to conduct this podcast. It’s just understanding that anytime you can get linked in with a company that really, truly values what the farmer is looking for and providing the value in that relationship and ensuring that they have that privacy and that the numbers aren’t going to be shared, and you’re just here as a provider to help them grow, that’s an excellent business model. I really appreciate it from that perspective. Go ahead, Dan.

DAN FRIEBERG: Shay, when you were talking about the high-cost areas of fields, you were talking about breakeven cost per bushel, and then you said, but what if I have an area that’s $5.42 or whatever. That happens. That’s real. We typically don’t tell any grower that we’re going to save them money because, a lot of times, if we save money on one part of the field, we invest it in another part of the field. But there are parts of fields where not investing as much is the only way you can lower your breakeven cost per bushel. You just can’t continue to invest the same in those parts of the field. You still have to farm them, but, for us, it’s all about making sure that the investment in crop protection and nutrients and seed is right for that area of the field. Sometimes, those are the best success stories, just learning to manage your investment in those poor-producing areas. Again, on a per-acre basis, you’re going to spend that money on the best part, but investing less in the worst part of the field, sometimes, is the only way to lower your breakeven.

SHAY FOULK: Brenton, I’m going to pick on you for a couple of minutes here. Dan, having tons, decades of experience here and starting the company, for you, with the — and I’m not saying Dan doesn’t — but having the real boots on the ground and talking with farmers all the time and having these conversations, what would you say makes Premier Crop Systems different from others in the industry that are doing some of this? What do you think the future of this type of business is? How do you see it continuing to provide value to farmers?

BRENTON ROSSMAN: I think the first thing that partners I work with, or growers I come into contact with, is they appreciate our independence as a company not tied to any input sales. We sell our service and our solutions. So, that’s important to me, and I think that’s important to a lot of our customers, as well, and also having a system that is not a canned output. Output from our system changes based on the grower’s goals. Advisors have the ability to customize their delivery, maybe, as Farmer John, for example, has a real interest in dialing in his fertility rates and maximizing his efficiency with that aspect of his operation. But Farmer Tom down the road is much more interested in the seed side of things, so just the ability to have a holistic solution that is completely customizable. I just think the business model, or that mentality, going forward will just continue to have success as the farmer of the future continues to evolve, and the younger generation, like myself, becomes more involved and wants to make decisions from data, has questions and really wants to dive into this information.

SHAY FOULK: One thing I would add to that is, you said it there in a little bit of a different way, but even though we’re moving towards making better management decisions, it doesn’t make things less complex necessarily. There are more and more high-management situations and high-management decisions to push the yield or to push the yield efficiency in some cases, too. I think, as we start experimenting and working with more of these things, whether you’re putting liquid in your planter, or you’re having a multipass nitrogen system, or you’re trying any number of biological products or a lot of the great programs that are out there right now, I think it gets even more important at that level of managing that information because, not only on a cost of production side, but from an information overload side. Is what I’m doing really working? Is what I’m doing really having the yield efficiency outlook that I want and providing the revenue back based on the time, effort, money in management that I’m putting into it? So, I think, as we gain the complexity in these operations, you have to have some sort of data management system that reports back to you or that you can take those numbers and do something with it because it has to be actionable. Dan, I think you hit on this early on. We’ve had this yield mapping information for 20 years or more at this point. We’ve had variable-rate planting information, and yet, today, I still get questions probably once a week on, well, where are your soybean planting rates at? Or what are other farm operations doing for nitrogen and fertility management? There’s nothing wrong with asking those questions, but in order to take that next step in the farming operation, we have to take actionable information and do something with it. So, Dan, I don’t know if you have any other comments on that.

DAN FRIEBERG: No, just everything you said is right on. It’s also like what you were talking about. Before the podcast, I was asking you about your experience with cover crops because that’s a big one we get. There are a lot of growers who have never done anything with cover crops, so they’re wanting insights or wanting to know the economics, and we’re constantly trying to figure out how we help prove it out quicker. That’s exactly why I was asking for your experience, because there’s just a lot of attention right now on cover crops.

SHAY FOULK: Absolutely. Is there anything that I’m not asking or anything that you’d want the listeners of this podcast to keep in mind as we move forward? The podcast is distributed all over the United States and Canada, farm operations of any shape and size. What message would you want to leave the listeners of this podcast with, as we wrap up here?

DAN FRIEBERG: Agronomy is local. What matters in one part of the country sure doesn’t in another part of the country, or it’s different. So, nitrogen management would be a great example, where what strategy you use really changes based on where you are. There are major east-west differences. There are big north-south differences. That agronomy local message is really a key. When you were talking about benchmarking, and we were talking about sharing data, it’s one of the reasons growers love these aggregated data sets that we talk about, where you’re anonymously comparing to other operations. It lets you see hybrids and varieties that you didn’t get to plant. You probably had 30 or 40 elite numbers pitched to you, and you might’ve planted 10 of them. But at the end of the year, you’d like to know how the other 30 that you passed on did. It’s just all part of that learning faster. How does everybody learn faster? Having a data platform to help growers learn faster is just a big piece of where our hearts are at and where we believe our future’s at.

SHAY FOULK: From your point there, Dan, too, I want to bring in a point from Brenton and I’s conversation here a week or week and a half ago, whenever it was, of that independence. You’re not tied to a seed company. You’re not tied to a chemical company. So, regardless of which of those top 40 hybrids did best or varieties, or maybe it wasn’t even one of those that was pitched to you that just had a fantastic year, being able to learn from that information and seeing it and having it available and understanding how it might fit into your management zones on the farm operation. It can make some of those decisions a little bit easier. The other thing that’s really unique about this is, not only with it being non-identifiable back to a particular operation or not being able to see anybody’s particular numbers, is when it comes to managing those decisions. If you have 40 products in front of you, it can be really overwhelming, but being able to take that and make those decisions faster, I really appreciate that perspective. I’m going to turn to you, Brenton, on this. If someone’s listening to this and wants to learn more about Premier Crop Systems, how do they get a hold of you guys? How do they ask some of these key questions and see what your services look like?

BRENTON ROSSMAN: I’d say the best way to get a hold of us would be to just visit our website. From the website premiercrop.com, there’ll be a link on there for contacting us. Then, we’ll get you in touch with the right person.

SHAY FOULK: Absolutely. Dan Frieberg and Brenton Rossman, I really appreciate the time today, guys. Hopefully, those listening to the podcast got some value out of this, whether you choose to talk to someone at Premier Crop Systems, or just taking the information that you’ve learned here and maybe thinking about it as a different way. We have an exciting, new 2021 season ahead of us, and we all get opportunities to make good decisions. And the farmer is the eternal optimist. So, getting linked in with some of these people that can help your operation and take it to the next level, I think, is so important to hear more about those of you in the industry who are doing some of these things. So, Dan and Brenton, I really appreciate the time.

DAN FRIEBERG: Thank you, great to be with you.

SHAY FOULK: Thanks to Renee and Molly for getting us linked in. Really glad that we can do this. And, most importantly, thank you to everyone on the Ag View Pitch for tuning into another podcast, and we will catch you next time.

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.

Six Frustrations with Precision ag

“Growers tell me they are frustrated with precision ag, they’ve invested in the technology. I tell them, ‘You just want to put the pieces of the puzzle together to see exactly what the picture is.’ And they are relieved when Premier Crop can help.”

– Katie McWhirter, Director of Training and Development

 

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

KATIE MCWHIRTER: I was born on your typical farm in southeast Iowa, livestock and row crop. My father’s just now retiring, but funny as he is, he is in his late sixties, and in 2013, he invested in electric drives to be able to variable-rate seed. He variable-rates his fertilizer. He does all that, which is so not what people think of that generation, embracing technology like that, but he knew that, working with me, he’d be able to make use of that equipment that he was investing in. Then, on the flip side, I have a brother who was, I guess for lack of better words, gifted or brought into the row crop world. He’s actually in the livestock industry and doesn’t have that technology, but we started talking one day, and he said: ‘I think I can use my data to do better. It’s not that good.’ So, talking with him, does he have the latest and greatest? No. But, again, his data is everywhere, and it’s just meeting him where he’s at to say, okay, I realize you don’t have this technology or this technology, but we can still use what you have to make a better decision. Even as recent as about an hour ago, I’m entering in some of his costs and his inputs to really make him see that there is variability within his operation even at a field level, which means profitability is variable at that field level. So, I’m excited to watch his journey as he gets more into this space.

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FRUSTRATION #1: CONNECTIVITY

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

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Well, those frustrations definitely vary in the different hats that I wear. Probably the biggest frustration is that these technologies, if you’re talking about in or on the equipment, would be that they don’t communicate together, especially if they’re not a solid color, meaning they’re not all the same brand of equipment. That is a frustration for growers. I would say, also, a very big frustration, and funny as I’ve been out here in the last couple weeks, growers don’t think that they could, I wouldn’t say, benefit from our services, but they’re very worried because they don’t think their data is good. So, it’s two combines, it’s three combines, it’s not calibrated. How can you change some of these frustrations? What we can do, is take that data, and as long as it’s capturing that variability and we have an end measurement, whether that’s going to be bushels or yield, we can post-calibrate or make that data usable within our system. I think even the simplest technologies really can benefit from what we do.

I think one of the things I’ve learned is that we really have to ask questions to these growers to find out, when they talk about ag technology, no different than what I did with you, to find out what exactly they’re frustrated with. If they’re frustrated with data, what do they mean by that? I mean, is it they’re frustrated because they’ve got two or three combines or two or three planters and it’s not all brought together? Is it because they don’t feel like they’re getting a complete picture? I met with a grower yesterday who said: ‘The soil sampling is here. We’ve got these spreadsheets on our computer. Their data’s all over the place.’ I smiled, and I said: ‘You just want to put the pieces of the puzzle together to see exactly what the picture is.’ They’re like: ‘Yes, that’s what we want because we’ve invested in it. We know that each of those separately has been bringing us value, but it’s also bringing us frustration as we know we should be bringing them all together to make an even better decision.’

FRUSTRATION #2: DATA ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

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

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Well, the yield monitor doesn’t have a card in it, so we haven’t been collecting yield data. So, I mean, the basics of what we’ve always said is a must. It’s really what we’re rooted in, but with our new planning tools, I immediately was like: ‘Okay, but there’s so much more we can do even by putting together, at the field level, his yield goals and his expected revenue and his variable-rated nutrients because he’s been grid sampling.’ Even though he doesn’t have what we, even a month ago, thought was an essential piece of what we had to have to be able to work with a grower, he’s going to test me on this one because he’ll get a yield monitor. That’s the agreement by fall, but I believe we can still provide him value being early enough and being able to identify his yield efficiency scores, his planned yield efficiency scores in each field, to be able to potentially identify profit robbers and how we could try to lessen that on his operation as a whole. Yeah, he definitely was hesitant until I showed him. I’m like: ‘Here’s what I need.’ And he immediately says to me, he’s pointing at the paper, and he’s like: ‘I’ve got this. I’ve got this. I’ve got this.’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, you’ve got the pieces. Let’s get them put together.’

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

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

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FRUSTRATION #3: DIFFERENT COLORS OF EQUIPMENT

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

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

FRUSTRATION #4: IS A PRECISION AG SERVICE PROFITABLE 

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

KATIE MCWHIRTER: What it gives the grower is a clear picture of their operation as far as profitability, that return to land and management. The numbers don’t lie. I mean, I’ve always said the numbers do not lie. Take the emotion out of it, but that’s not where it stops. Essentially, it’s a continuous cycle. Don’t give me a pretty map, and that’s great, right? Don’t give me that. I need you to be able to, and our growers need us to be able to, without any bias, to say: ‘Here’s what we could do with it.’ Ultimately, it’s going to be the grower’s decision, and that’s what I was telling the grower yesterday. We’re never going to do anything that you don’t want to do, but we will challenge you as far as this is what we’re seeing in the data, and if you’re wanting to improve, it really looks like this is an area that we could focus on.

FRUSTRATION #5: FEAR OF CHANGING EVERYTHING AT ONCE

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

KATIE MCWHIRTER: Which is funny because, when I got back into working directly with growers, that was one of the questions that they asked me when we were first sitting down: ‘What do you think we’re going to learn this year?’ As I was getting all this data from him, and I’m like: ‘I don’t even want to take a guess.’ I have a suspicion, but I don’t want to say it out loud, but I think it was just their biggest ‘aha’ was I’ve never looked at my data like this before. I’ve seen it on the typical red, yellow, orange, three-shades-of-green map. Maybe I’ve done a little bit of comparison in some of these other platforms before, but never have I looked at it this way before. Whether that was in charts or in our data visualization tools and then, ultimately, to tie those costs back to it. Some of the things they thought, they were right, and some things they were kind of surprised, which has led to decisions. When I started with them in August, I mean, I told them I was not going to push them to anything that they didn’t want to do technology-wise. All of a sudden, we’re sitting down for our planning meeting in December. I’m like: ‘Oh my goodness. Four months ago, this is not where we were.’ I didn’t think this is where we were going, and now we’re jumping in the deep end of the pool. I don’t want you to do this and be uncomfortable. I want you very comfortable with the changes that you’re suggesting we make. That’s been fun, though, to lead people through because we all know that change is hard, and it’s very hard to get outside of our comfort zone. So, I actually start my sales training, my leadership training course, with: ‘Here’s your comfort zone, and outside of it, that’s where the magic happens.’ That’s so, so true with farmers.

premiercropyielddata_farmer

FRUSTRATION #6: DATA IS OVERWHELMING

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

KATIE MCWHIRTER: I don’t think they should wait. I think it could seem very overwhelming and don’t know where to start. It just takes that conversation to get them going. Really, I say, that’s why it’s so wonderful that we have the great group of advisors that we have to guide them through this process. We all like to be guided. We all like to know what’s next. I don’t care if it’s the program at church, the bulletin to what’s next. Or when you get on an airplane overseas, and it’s saying: ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. Then, this.’ That just puts everybody to ease and guide them along. Our advisors, it’s like we farm with them. I mean, I know I wasn’t going to go back and farm, but that love of agriculture and helping farmers, that’s our group of advisers. That’s their characteristics, their qualities. They genuinely want to help because it’s like they’re farming.

RENEE HANSEN: Thanks for listening to the Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so we can continue to provide the best precision ag and analytic results for you. To learn more about Premier Crop, visit our blog at premiercrop.com.

Learn more about the power of precision ag.

How Yield Efficiency Can Impact Your Operation

“It’s just putting data to work for you. You can drill down on which fields, and which parts of fields are most profitable, and which aren’t. I think the more you help growers know their costs, the better managers they are.” – Dan Frieberg

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

Don’t get me wrong. They can use data. They can use the analytics we provide to make land rent decisions, to make land purchase decisions. So, they always have. They use analytics to help them decide what to rent and what to buy and all that. On a yearly basis, we’re not impacting land cost, and management cost is another one where we probably don’t have as big an influence. So, there’s a lot rolled into management. For a lot of operations, it includes family living and health insurance and a whole bunch of other things that are really a key part of the operation but not something that we advise on. But we do advise on nutrients. We spend a lot of time helping growers manage their nutrient investment. We help them a lot with the seed investment, both what they choose to buy and where they plant it and at what rates. And we also help on crop protection decisions. Then, the fourth one is operations. We don’t advise on operations. We don’t get into what equipment they should buy. There are a lot of data analytics tied to operations. We can analyze no-till versus conventional till, and we can break down and analyze differences in cost associated with different tillage types. Yield efficiency, for us, is just about how do we drive higher return to land and management? We do that through how we advise growers, how we advise them to spend nutrients, seed and crop protection dollars.

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

DAN FRIEBERG: It has always been important.

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

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

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

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

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

DAN FRIEBERG: Sure. So, the gauge you’re referring to is what we call the Yield Efficiency Score. Really, it’s a fairly simple formula. It’s just a benchmark selling price that every user gets to set. We’re not benchmarking who sold the best, so it’s a benchmark selling price times your yield. So, Premier Crop, part of our analytics program is we’re using the yield file. So, we’re receiving all this yield data. It’s benchmark selling price times yield minus your investment in nutrients, seed, crop protection products and field operation. What’s left is return to land and management. How many dollars per acre do you have left to pay for your land cost and your management costs? So, what you referred to is part of what we’re able to do. Let growers benchmark themselves, their yield efficiency score versus other growers in their area anonymously. Growers like that. It’s just another way to make sure you’re on track or just see how you’re doing compared to others. So, that comparison, people like. They like to be able to anonymously compare with really quality data. That attention to getting the data right is really a big deal and having good quality data. So, that’s a big piece of it, but then the other part you referred to is being able to take it down to a field level. It’s not just benchmarking outside your operation. How do you compare to others? It’s within your operation. If you’re farming 50 fields, just being able to rank order those 50 fields from a yield efficiency standpoint, return to land and management, that’s a significant piece of analysis.

Renee, as soon as growers see those scores, trust me, they do the math so fast on land costs. They know exactly what their land cost is for each field. It’s not something they have to go look for. Then, the last one that you talked about is being able to do it spatially within a field, which means we can do it by management zone within a field. Which is really, by far, the most important to me because what we consistently do for our customers is we spend more in certain parts of the field. We know there are a lot of times, if you’re following our recommendations, it could be a $50-or-$80-an-acre higher input spend. In some parts of the field, we’re spending significantly more on nutrients, and we’re increasing the seed population. So, we could easily spend more in part of the field, and the reason it’s so important to be able to track yield efficiency spatially within the field is so that, at the end of the year, we can prove to the grower that extra $50 an acre in the best part of the field generated more, far more, than the $50 of additional input costs. For me, this is, just this yield efficiency thing, is what we should have done. 10 years ago, yeah, we probably should have pushed harder to do it then because I think growers always respond to anything if you can prove that something pays for a grower. They’ll respond to that. For a lot of new growers — we’re really blessed with a lot of growers who have been with us for decades, and the reason they have is we’ve convinced them over the years that it pays. They wouldn’t keep buying our service if they weren’t sure it was paying. But for a lot of new growers, this ability to tie economics and just have a report card every year that shows: where we spent more, we made more, or where we spent less, we made more. Throughout the entire field, being able to document that what we spent made them more in either higher input investment or lower input investment. Really, growers respond to profitability, but there are so many people who talk about it, and they have no way to prove it. Everybody that drives up the driveway talks that way, but they can’t prove it. They can’t. That’s kind of the magic of what we do. This is the grower’s data. We’re using all the grower’s data, and we’re proving it.

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

DAN FRIEBERG: Sure. So, when we talk about all the grower’s data, it starts with just naming the field and getting a field boundary. Once you get the field boundary, you can go get the soil’s data, and now you can get LIDAR data, which is elevation data. So, you can kind of have an idea of how water moves within the field, but then we just keep adding to it. Soil sample information is a big part of it, whether it’s zone or grid sample. A lot of our customers are grid samples, which means we’re measuring organic matter and pH and soil test nutrient levels within the field in small increments, like couple-acre blocks. So, we’re measuring all those layers of data, and then, when the planter makes a pass across the field, we’re grabbing planting date. We have row spacing and population and the hybrid and variety that got planted. And that hybrid and variety is not just the company and the number, but it’s also the trait package. We’re able to sort SmartStax versus VT PRO versus some other traits. So, it’s trait packages, and then, when it comes to nutrients, we’re grabbing the soil sample data. We’re getting what’s in the soil. But then, for us, it’s about what we add, whether we’re making the addition of nutrients through manure, or whether it’s with commercial fertilizer. So, we’re tracking the rate of the nutrient, the cost of the nutrient, the timing of the nutrient, if it’s fall versus spring versus side dress. We can track all those details. If the nutrient had an additive, we’re tracking that, and then you step into crop protection. Now, because of weed resistance, crop protection is, again, becoming much more complicated than it was for a decade when it was just how many ounces of Roundup people were using. Now, it’s a lot more. There are a lot more products being used. It could be 40 different combinations of additives and crop protection products. Each time, it’s the product, the rate, the source, timing, costs, so just terrific detail. Tillage, field operations, how many passes, what the passes were. Just try to incorporate as much detail as we can about what’s happening within the field so that we can do the best possible job of managing all those inputs.

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

DAN FRIEBERG: We can walk people through this really quick. Renee, there are a lot of growers who have data. They just don’t — it’s scattered. I mean, they have data in the Ops Center. They have it in Climate. They have it in some retailer’s software. I mean, it could be a retailer’s software. It could be on their own. I mean, it’s all over the place. Sometimes it’s not in a digital format. Sometimes it’s written down. It’s just all over the place. But a lot of growers have data, and part of it is how we pass down farm equipment. Every time somebody buys a new piece of equipment, they trade. So, it’s like existing farming operations. They trade, and as they trade, somebody else trades. And when they trade, they trade the technology with it.  They’re not stripping the monitors out of the cab each time they trade. A lot of times, they’re not. So, that technology is being passed down, meaning there are a whole bunch of growers who don’t operate new farm equipment, and they have the technology in the cab. There are just a lot of growers who have the capability. They have the capability of collecting data and capturing data, and they have a lot of variable-rate capability of which a lot of them aren’t using.

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

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

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

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, you don’t. You literally don’t. So, I think that’s part of what happens. Another place I wanted to go, Renee, was people talk — I mean, when I talk about everybody that drives down the farmer’s driveway has a profitability message, a lot of times, they say return on investment. They wrap everything. So, the number of times people say ROI or return, it becomes a buzzword that nobody backs up. Nobody has. When they talk about backing up their ROI, they pull out some plot book. It’s some trial that happened someplace else. I think it’s one thing that we just really do a lot. You can’t really tell somebody the ROI unless you do an experiment in the field, and that’s really what we do all the time. We just do experiment after experiment, in volumes, in growers fields. It’s all in pursuit of having better recommendations. So, the reason we do experiments is so we can calculate ROI. It’s so that we do know whether that input paid or not. If I go out to a grower and I talk to them about nitrogen rate, and their total N rate is 200 pounds of actual N, and I think that they’re over-applying, the best possible way for me to have that discussion is just to suggest that we put a lower-rate experiment in their field. It doesn’t have to be a lot of acres, but if that works, then the grower saves money and gets higher yields or same yield. That’s a starting place and a discussion.

Same with everything. Every input decision can become an experiment. So, to me, the best way to get an ROI is to simply do a trial. And we’re not talking about — when I got in the business, a trial meant flags. It meant field flags, and it meant a ‘weigh wagon.’ That’s how you did trials. You just spent all your — like I spent all fall running around with a ‘weigh wagon.’ Literally, just day and night, running around with a ‘weigh wagon’ because that’s the only way you could do a field trial. And now, everybody’s got the ability to measure. The monitor in the cab is measuring. So, a little bit of help on calibration, making sure you’re calibrated, and you’re off and running. We can use the technology to execute field trials, and it’s just so much easier than it was years ago. And it really just opens the door. It opens the door to back up the ROI message over and over again. It doesn’t have to be results from somewhere else. We say growers love local data, and you can’t get more local than my fields. That’s who we are. It’s not: ‘How did it do somewhere? How did it do for your neighbor?’ It’s: ‘How did it do for you?’ And doing trials is a big piece of what we do.

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

DAN FRIEBERG: So, for me, they can be really similar. I mean, they can be part of the same discussion. So, for me, yield efficiency is just combining economics and agronomics, and it’s at every level. It’s sub-field, in a trial. It’s management zones, in a field. It’s this field compared to another field. Across your whole operation, how do my fields compare? Then, it’s being able to go beyond your own operation to: ‘How do I compare to peers in my neighborhood or my region?’ A lot of times, when I think of ROI, I tend to think of it as — so, yield efficiency is this all encompassing bucket of nutrients and seed and crop protection and field operations. But, for me, ROI is more about individual components that make up those buckets. If I’m a grower, it’s like: ‘What’s my ROI if I put 50 pounds of Y-DROP nitrogen on?’ So, later nitrogen. What’s my ROI if I do a fungicide? What’s my ROI if I do a biological? All those things, all those decisions roll up into yield efficiency because they’re all input costs. And, hopefully, they impact yield. So, all those things roll up into yield efficiency. But when I think of ROI, I’m thinking of individual decisions. I mean, decisions I’m making about input components of what goes into yield efficiency.

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

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

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

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

RENEE HANSEN: There’s no follow through.

DAN FRIEBERG: Yeah, so there are a lot of growers who, you meet with them, and they say: ‘Tried that 15 years ago. Didn’t work here. Doesn’t work here. Maybe it works where you’re at. It doesn’t work here.’ Then, you really start asking questions about: ‘What do you mean it didn’t work?’ And what you find out is they never compared. They never looked at the relationship of yield and the prescription, whatever it was. Nobody did the basic analytics for them or the classic one. The classic one, 20 years ago, was people would say: ‘I’m going to grid-sample your field. We’re going to variable-rate apply nutrients. And all these multi-colors, from high to low, on the map, we’re going to even all those out. We’re going to build up the low areas. We’re going to pull down the high areas, and your map will all be green. We’re going to make your field uniform.’ And 12 years later, the field is no more uniform than it was to start with. And my point is that should never have been the goal. You get paid on yield efficiency. You get paid on generating more return for every dollar you invest. You don’t get paid for making your fields uniform. The reason it didn’t work, Renee, is because the high-yielding areas tend to pull down nutrients because you’re consistently removing more nutrients from those areas. And even though the equation, the variable-rate equation, was supposed to be dealing with that, it never caught up. Those high-yield areas just kept producing more and more, removing more and more, and the reason the field wasn’t more uniform at the end of four years or 12 years was just they never kept up with that additional crop removal associated with really high yields.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RENEE HANSEN: Right.

DAN FRIEBERG: One thing that stands out to me is — it was from a winter grower meeting. And these growers were talking about how there was an area where there’s a lot of livestock also, and they were talking about how every pen of pigs or cattle that they sold, they knew the economics associated with that pen, meaning they tied it out economically. In livestock, it’s just such a part of the culture. Every unit of production gets tied out economically. So, sometimes, I’m so jealous of the livestock industry because I feel like: ‘Okay, you guys are way ahead, like we’re playing catch up.’ But that’s really what we’re trying to do. Tie out every unit of production economically. It’s not enough to know just what the total weight was. It’s converting the weight and the input cost into dollar returns. And that’s kind of what we’re focusing on.

RENEE HANSEN: Thanks for listening to the Premier Podcast, where everything agronomic is economic. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so we can continue to provide the best precision ag and analytic results for you. And to learn more about Premier Crop and farm efficiency, visit our blog at premiercrop.com.

farm efficiency

Get Started Using Your Farm Data

At Premier Crop, we say that agronomy is local. Farmers say it too, though, because we have such a vast amount of data within our system.

Working with Premier Crop doesn’t require a grower to be an expert on any one thing, because we’re using the data, along with our industry agronomy experience to deliver analytics and insights. We work with many business minded growers, people who really enjoy using data, but might not necessarily have the time to do it. The operations we work with are the CEOs of their farmings operations. Our advisors work with these growers to collect, manage, organize, 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 a way that a grower can easily understand. We all know that looking at data can be pretty overwhelming and hard to make sense of.

The baseline of everything we do is tied back to a yield file or yield map. So, one or two years of historical yield data is essentially the only thing we need to get started. There are roughly 80% of growers out there who are capable of collecting yield data, or maybe they already are collecting yield data, they just don’t know how to use it. Growers just need to have to have some yield data to get started. Another layer that’s helpful in providing more insights is soil data. However, the baseline to get started is yield data alone.

Precision ag can be overwhelming because there are so many different layers of data, from soil sample data, yield data, planting data, and as-applied data. The brainpower needed to add all of that up yourself can be exhausting.

Our ultimate goal is to help take that lift off of growers’ shoulders. The last thing many growers want to do after a long day is sit down at their computer and manage all of their data. That’s just another piece of the pie of the value that Premier Crop ultimately brings. Especially during busy seasons of the year, there are much more important tasks for them to focus on instead of messing around with data. That’s why our advisors help with the monitor and technical tasks. When it’s “go time,” it is a race against the clock, no matter what is going on.

Yield Efficiency is another tool that Premier Crop offers to help growers achieve success with their data.

By helping growers find their yield efficiency, we’re redefining the success metric for today’s farmer. For so long, growers have been solely focused on yield. Now, we have introduced the concept of yield efficiency and the conversation is shifting.

Yield efficiency is the amount of money in return from your crop that you have left over to pay land and management costs. Yield is the number-one driver of yield efficiency, but it also accounts for every other aspect of the farming operation as well. As long as we can drive higher yields while still lowering your break-even cost per bushel, we’re becoming more profitable. Profitability equals success with our growers. As long as we’re lowering that break-even cost per bushel and driving higher yields, we deem it as a successful season, whether it’s $10 an acre or $100 an acre farm profitability. We know there are dollars left on the table on every acre, so it’s just a matter of finding it with your farm data.

One big way to start improving your yield efficiency is by better managing your fertilizer investment. Make sure that you’re taking into account the crop removals when you’re making fertilizer recommendations.

Every year when you grow a crop on a piece of land, nutrients are taken off in the grain. As stated above, our main goal is to manage variability in yield. Within that variability in yield, you’re taking off different amounts of nutrients in different parts of the field. If you’re applying fertilizer the next season to account for the field average and crop removal, you’re ultimately under-applying in a lot of the field, but over-applying on a lot of the field, also.

That’s why at Premier Crop, we use the actual yield file to see exactly what we’ve taken off the field to replace it the next season. We use an equation so we’re not mining down the better areas of the field, and then over-applying in the worst areas of the fields. This practice could result in an extra $50 to $100 an acre for the grower. Many growers can do this with the variable-rate technology they have, they just need to put it to use and believe the fact that it pays off. Visit www.premiercrop.com for more information on farm efficiency.

farm efficiency

Understand Your Field Profitability

Now is always a good time to start managing your farm decisions at a finer scale.  If someone were to ask you if you know your cost of production, you’d likely have an idea.  But, when I say it’s time to manage at a ‘finer scale,’ the question that precedes it is, “Do you know how much it costs you to raise a bushel of grain in each unique part of your field—that is—as your productivity changes across the field?”

Most growers focus on understanding their costs and profitability based on assumed averages with an understanding that some ground is subsidizing other ground.  Growers understand diversification and spreading risk.

How could your management decisions change if you started to understand your field profitability based on actual field performance? While knowing field averages is important for marketing decisions in season, layering your costs with your actual yield data tells a different story.

Not all fields are created equal, we know that.  But how does it change our farming practices?  Understanding breakeven cost per bushel at a finer scale compared to the overall operation can change how you manage those fields.  Here are our 4 key takeaways that drive how we help growers understand their profitability and plan for the next year.

  1. There is drastic variability within each field
  2. Higher yields are key to success
  3. It’s important to know the ‘why’ behind profitability
  4. Look deeper into average production costs across your operation

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THERE IS DRASTIC VARIABILITY IN EACH FIELD

There are certain parts of your field that consistently outperform the field average. On the other end of the spectrum, there are parts of the field that produce well below the field average year after year. This shows that variability in your fields is real, so how are you going to manage this variability? We do this by using variable rate prescriptions to drive down your breakeven cost/bushel at the sub-field level. Below you will see an example of a field that had variable rate fertilizer and planting applied to it using our Management Zone method. As you can see, this grower invested $33.24/acre more into the A zone of the field versus the C zone of the field, but he was still able to lower the breakeven cost/bushel by $0.37/bushel.

One grower we’ll use as an example had not yet invested in variable rate seeding. He was variable rate spreading fertilizer based on actual yield combined with soil test data, but his seed costs were not always being covered by the bushels raised. He ran the numbers on how he could use technology to adapt his seed costs to the productivity of his fields, and decided to put electric drives on his planter for the next year.

HIGHER YIELDS ARE KEY TO SUCCESS

You can’t save your way to prosperity.  Choosing to cut costs in a way that is contrary to what is agronomically correct will not gain you bushels. Without bushels to cover your costs–ultimately you will not be profitable. Lenders can be quick to encourage cost-cutting. But cutting nutrient, plant health and pest management investments can cut yields and profitability.

We frequently lead our customers to spend more input dollars only on the best field zones creating higher margins. That is possible when you can track and record those cost/investment differences, then share a profitability analysis (see graphic above) at the end of the growing season.

In corn and soybean production, you can spend your way poor but you can’t save your way into prosperity. Frequently, the only way to lower your cost per bushel and increase profits is to produce higher yields.

FIGURE OUT THE ‘WHY’ BEHIND PROFITABILITY

Here is an example of a time where soybeans cost the grower more to raise than the grower had planned. Even when the average yield was 60 bu rather than the 50 bu estimate the banker used, the actual costs ended up just over $12/bu. We needed to figure out why, and what could be done differently to be profitable on soybeans. By looking at each breakeven cost per bushel map, the grower found some major problem areas in a few fields, mostly related to weed pressure and sandy soil. While he knew there were some issues in weedy areas, he could now visualize what it was truly costing –upwards of $19 per bushel on over 7 acres.  Contrast that with an adjacent high yielding area that only cost $7-10 per bushel of beans–it got their attention.

LOOK AT AVERAGE PRODUCTION COSTS ACROSS YOUR OPERATION

Using the same grower from above, his owned acres were covering high costs on their rented acres in a bigger way than he realized.  By looking at each fields’ cost per bushel map alongside a rank of their fields’ average production costs against each other, he found that his rented land was costing them $.50 more per bushel for corn and $.71 more per bushel on beans (when still assigning some value to the cost of owned land).

average production costs

Through transparency with multiple landowners and sharing of information, they had productive conversations. While rent was not lowered, it wasn’t raised on any of his acres. They also were able to show specific areas of fields that needed tile and could articulate what it was costing them.  One landowner signed a new flex lease agreement including execution of cost sharing for tiling.

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If you’re a grower reading this, you might be comparing your own breakeven costs to this example and thinking “I’m doing better than that.”  Our question to you would be—do you know that for sure?  Have you analyzed it to this degree?  You might still be leaving dollars on the table that could be in your pocket.

One of our biggest takeaways for understanding your field profitability is the understanding that managing differences in productivity is key. You need to increase profitability on every acre.  The best parts of the field can’t be relied on to cover the costs for the rest. Using technology and data analytics to prove what works in each unique environment so that it can be managed will be critical to your successes. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it!

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Response to Fungicide: It Varies

You don’t have to look very hard to find chemical manufacturers’ advertisements claiming a significant positive yield response (15, 20, 25+ bu./ac) to using one of their fungicide products. There are many effective products on the market that provide good control and protection against fungal pathogens, but advertisement claims based on ‘average trial data’ aren’t guarantees for your fields. Three critical components (a host, favorable environment, and pathogen) must come together at the same time for a plant disease to thrive. These three components are commonly referred to as the Plant Disease Triangle. Management or alteration of just one of these components prevents or reduces disease severity.

 

diseaseHost

It’s important to refer back to the Plant Disease Triangle when gauging the need for fungicide application, as well as past local trial results and current crop economic conditions. How do environmental conditions within the field (soil pH, fertility levels, applied nutrients, etc.) affect the vulnerability of the host (corn or soybean plant) as it relates to disease pressures? Is a pH imbalance affecting nutrient uptake, which in turn makes this specific hybrid more susceptible to fungal disease pressure? Does it make sense, economically, to apply fungicide to lower productivity areas within fields? Variability exists in all fields and managing the yield-limiting factors is what will show a yield response come harvest. Agronomy is complex and agronomy is local. Yield response to fungicide fluctuates within each field based on the interactions of many variables, which are all part of the disease triangle. Conducting on-farm fungicide trials generates more agronomic knowledge related to this complex interaction, which improves decision making for future applications.

Being able to use my family’s farm as a ‘testing ground’ makes working with the solutions Premier Crop provides to our partners even more enjoyable. I am able to experience first-hand what many of our partners and advisors put into practice each and every day. Last year I placed a few fungicide Enhanced Learning Blocks (ELBs) in one of our fields to test the effectiveness of a popular fungicide product. An Enhanced Learning Block is a randomized, replicated trial of different rates, products or application timings. ELBs provide a formal testing environment within a field to determine whether or not the treatment had a statistically significant impact on yield.

Trials were setup to be an on/off scenario – 20 gal/ac and 0 gal/ac each replicated 6 times within the trial area (ELB). Two of the ELBs were placed within the same hybrid – one on heavier soil and the other about 800 feet away in lighter soil on a hill. The product was applied at R1 with a Hagie sprayer. Prior to application we had been receiving ample rainfall, so we anticipated potentially higher fungal disease pressure, however that was not the case.

The image below was taken with a drone about one month after application. You can easily see the replicates in the trial area that did not receive any product. Based on the image what do you estimate the yield difference to be between the treated and non-treated rates? What would an imagery solution come up with for a yield difference based off their algorithm calculating yield from NDVI?

fungicide_ELB

As we were harvesting this field we could see the location of the fungicide trials as we worked towards them. While combining in the trials the difference in plant structure was obvious – the tops of the corn plants in the untreated replicates had all broken off. Both the drone image and visual observations at harvest pointed to a significant yield response to fungicide in both trials.

When I received the Enhanced Learning Block trial report I was a bit surprised with the actual results – visual observations are deceiving! One trial had a 1 bu/a yield response and the other was 8 bu/a. I was expecting at least a 15 bushel difference.

#1 – lower ground, heavier soil.

#2 – higher ground, lighter soil.

Why did the trial results end up this way? I have some ideas, but no definite answers. Likely the yield response shown in the trial on lighter soil was due to the treated plants’ improved ability to withstand late-season moisture stress, which wasn’t a yield-limiting factor in the heavier soil environment. What I do know is that a 1 bu/a response didn’t come close to paying for the product and application costs, and an 8 bu/a response was likely a little better than break-even. Understanding when, where, and to what degree these products work will allow for better utilization (spatial application), ultimately increasing ROI.

Are we going to spatially apply our fungicide next year? Probably not. Are we going to continue to conduct on-farm trials and Enhanced Learning Blocks to learn more about when, where, and how well fungicides work? Definitely. With the power of local agronomic knowledge, I don’t think it will be too long before spatial application of fungicide becomes a normal practice in crop production.