• Jun 28, 2017

Help Farmers Implement a Whole Farm Tech Strategy

This is the fourth and final installment in a series about how Answer Tech® Data Silo™ can enable you to help farmers leverage the power of the data they collect. In the following post, Brittany Ullrich, ag technology operations specialist for WinField United, discusses how to align a farmer’s data across all aspects of the farming operation.
 
Answer Tech® Data Silo™ allows you to share data among the multiple ag technology tools you use in your retail business without having to input information into each tool individually. But how can you use Data Silo™ seamlessly to develop a unified, “whole farm” technology strategy? Here are some of the areas in which Data Silo™ can help give farmers a comprehensive picture of their operations and make fragmented decision-making a thing of the past.

“One source of truth”
You may be mapping a field for a farmer multiple times in one day, depending on how many different tools you are using in conjunction with yield data and sales data, to create prescriptions or to house all boundary management. After that information is loaded into Data Silo™, all subsequent information can be updated through  Data Silo™. This enables you to determine one source of truth for a particular field boundary, allowing you to map it in one tool and share it among all the tools you are using. This facilitates ease of use and data sharing, giving you more time to analyze a farmer’s data rather than uploading it separately and regenerating the same type of data over and over again.
 
Maintain regulatory compliance
With sustainable farming practices becoming increasingly important, farmers need to keep accurate records of what products they’ve applied, and when and where they applied them. As-applied information stored in Data Silo™ keeps farmers informed about what they might need to adjust if new rotational restrictions or fertilizer rates are implemented. Having this historical data can help them change up management practices, if necessary, to ensure they are compliant with the latest environmental regulations.
 
Aligned naming conventions
Having clean data is incredibly valuable to farmers, and accurately naming fields and files is crucial to achieving it. For example, in one tractor, a farmer’s home field is named “Home 40.” In another tractor, it’s named “Home.” In the combine, it’s named “Northwest Corner.” A technology service provider may be able to match the boundaries for this field, because they are similar; but the names are different. Ultimately, it takes someone who knows that field and knows the different names assigned to it to say, “I want this field to be named ‘Home 40’ across all the technology tools I am using.”
 
Talk with your WinField United representative about how Data Silo™ can give you flexibility in working with farmer data and ease the pain of doing multiple entries to connect all of a farmer’s systems.
 
Check out the rest of the series on Answer Tech® Data Silo™: Free Farmers from Data Duty, Connected Data Brings Dividends, Be the Hero with your Customers