Value of Data: Guest Blog from Adam Gittins
A few months ago, we posted our first guest blog about the Value of Data from John McGuire. Today, Adam Gittins shares his thoughts on the topic.
Adam is a Precision Ag Sales Manager with HTS Precision Ag.
He developed a love for agriculture at an early age while helping out on the family farm in Neola. He attended Iowa State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Agricultural Business, with an area of emphasis in Farm Business Management. Working with GPS while crop scouting, Adam developed an interest in precision ag that eventually led to a position with Ag Leader Technology in Ames, IA. During his time with Ag Leader, Adam was still heavily involved in the family farm in southwest Iowa, helping to expand the operation in 2004. In the fall of 2005, Adam joined the then small Precision Ag team at HTS and relocated back near the family farm with his wife, Melissa. With his in-depth technical knowledge, he hit the ground running and has continued to assist in building the team at HTS. Adam has taken over the family farm from his dad, and extensively uses precision ag in his own operation to improve efficiency and add to the bottom line.
The post below was excerpted from Adam's post on the HTS blog (htsag.wordpress.com) – “The Value of Data”: Precision ag hardware has made tremendous strides in helping to increase efficiency and reduce costs and operator fatigue, and these things are all very valuable to any sustianable farm operation. But how are you using the data that is captured by all of this hardware? The data being captured could easily be argued as the most valuable part of the whole equation, offering the ability to be informed and make decisions with a large impact, such as seed selection, decisions about tile, in field comparisons of different products – the list goes on almost endlessly. Imagine improving your yields by as little as just 1% each year, and do it year after year – If you currently average 180 bushel per acre corn, at $5.50 per bushel, that is $990 in gross income. A 1% increase in your yields, 1.8 bushels per acre, would add $9.90 per acre to your bottom line. The next year, you could add an additional 1%, increasing average yields to 183.6 bushels per acre, with another 1.8 bushels more than the last year for you to sell. Your gross income would be $1009.80, adding $19.80 per acre to your farm. The bottom line? If you aren’t spending time analyzing your data, this is a place to be looking! If you don’t have the time or ability to do it yourself, hire someone that can. Check back next week when we share another blog from Adam about making your precision ag data pay.