The unpredictable nature of growing crops has always pushed farmers to try the latest technology. Once, that involved switching from horse-drawn plows to gasoline-powered engines in tractors and combines.
The setup provided accuracy within about a foot on the field. However, driving the combine past a metal barn would badly skew the location results, sometimes by miles. Today, the GPS he uses is accurate to the inch.
Likewise, the spreaders apply more fertilizer in areas that are measurably more productive, in hopes of boosting yields further. Because the data is stored in the cloud, he can access analyses from an iPad in the fields.
Sullivan is a very early adopter. Only a small number of farmers engage in similar precision agriculture. The USDA reports that in 2006, the most recent survey year, adoption of yield monitoring equipment was around 45 percent, but use of GPS and technology that applies fertilizer at variable rates was closer to 15 percent.
Even farmers who use that combination of technology rely on a thumb drive to transfer data from the combines to computers in their homes, where they use local software to develop prescriptions for their planter and fertilizer machines.
No one has a good count of how many farmers seed their fields from these cloud services, but many farmers are talking about it. The vendors say it can take some of the headache out of managing the technology required for the most sophisticated forms of precision agriculture.
Some farmers are worried about the implication of buying data services from a multinational that sells an array of farm inputs, which is the term farmers use to describe goods they have to buy, such as seed, fertilizer, and pest-control products.
That would allow the company to raise prices on inputs based on the data they’re seeing from farms. The farmers see things differently. They are prepared to share the data and see if the concept is feasible, but the first time they see a purposeful price increase around harvest time, they intend to bail.