By: Farmobile Editors

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With harvest on the horizon, many of us are about to embark on one of the most stressful and logistically-challenging times of the year, and the tools and equipment you have to power your operation are crucial. 

That’s why the 2020 Agricultural Equipment Technology Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, sponsored by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, put together a panel to help ag equipment engineers better understand what growers’ needs and challenges. The below is a summary of the panel as reported by Progressive Forage. You can read the full post here. 

As any grower knows, when it comes to harvest, efficiency is the name of the game. Small setbacks, added up across the duration of harvest can mean the difference between being in the red and the black. Here are a few of the pain points that members of the panel identified during harvest: 

Realizing the Full Power of Precision Data

“[Original equipment manufacturers] are not software companies, but with our dollars spent on equipment in the field, there’s got to be better software out there. “We’ve gone through multiple revisions of our software package, and we’re still not there yet. We only get 40 to 50 percent of the value from all of our precision farming data – meaning that current software shortcomings force us to leave a lot of potential on the table. It’s still a lot of mess running multiple machines in the same field.” – Jim Schmidt, Double KS Farms LLC

Many growers rely on precision data from their OEMs to improve yield and efficiency on the farm, especially during stressful times like planting and harvest. Unfortunately, many companies collecting and sharing this data have low-quality data, or share in different formats, making it hard for growers to realize the full value of their data. 

Quality Assurance of Autonomous Machinery 

“With fewer people, we have to cover more ground. I’m for automation, but there has to be some sort of quality control assurance. Does the autonomous machine provide the quality of work we want?”

Dan Byers, Ron and Dan Byers Forage LLC

As growers have more access to autonomous machinery on the farm, it’s paramount that the machines are performing in a way that brings the most value to the farmer. 

Tracking What Needs to be Tracked… Every Time 

“A lot of [crop data] is going to groups wanting to know what we’re doing on the food side – carbon footprints, what we’re doing sustainably. We get to choose who will see the data and what they use it for. As we’re getting into organics, you wouldn’t believe the tracking we have to do. My wife had to go back through years of data and prove what we had been doing on every acre for the last five years.”

– Kerry Knuth, Knuth Farms 

For those working to market their crops for sustainability or other certifications, like Organic, keeping track all of the information you need is easier said than done. Fortunately, the Knuth’s use Farmobile and are able to seamlessly collect their data, and easily choose whom to share it with, like certification organizations or CPG sustainability programs. 

No matter what, Harvest will also be a stressful time in the life of a grower, but there are tools to make it less so — like leveraging a Farmobile subscription to realize a full collect-share-monetize strategy for your farm data. What other pain points do you experience during harvest? 

Read the full post from Progressive Forage here.