Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/958929
Data Management Beyond the Spiral Notebook By Meryl Rygg McKenna farm406 42 n farming, as in any business, people strive to make a profit. Few can afford to farm solely for its lifestyle, and agricultural production in the U.S. requires very high capital investments in land, facilities, machinery, and inputs like fertilizer. Making a profit seems more and more challenging. Commodity prices that a generation ago changed by a penny or less per day now fluctuate easily 10-fold more than they did then. Markets have changed significantly even in the past five to 10 years. "Margins have become very tight. We're seeing a lot more volatility than we have historically, both on the input side, what it costs to grow the crop, and on the output side, in the pricing of our products," said Markus Braaten, a Certified Crop Adviser for a Kalispell-based company offering agricultural consulting services. Thin profit margins drive any business toward efficiency. In order for growers to know what is most efficient, we must have records where we can find them. Tough business decisions are usually best based on hard data. But we can't efficiently manage what we've never measured. Numbers, numbers What does it cost to produce a ton of alfalfa hay or a bushel of hard red winter wheat? How does our cost per bushel position our product in the market? We're in an environment that varies year to year as a function of weather, we have variability within each field, and so our yield is also variable. If we are to say with confidence that we know our cost per bushel or ton, we may need more data than we actually have. We need to know what we have into a crop, but the cost per unit is often a bit unclear. We might know fertilizer and herbicide costs, but not consider labor costs or depreciation. How would the cost per unit change if we get another inch of moisture, an inch less, or hail damage? Suppose I see stripe rust – shall I spray or not? Is this variety susceptible to this particular disease? How has this disease impacted past production? Can I afford to spray a fungicide? Can I afford not to spray a fungicide? A good data system will show the best course of action, based on the history of that particular field or sub-field. Therefore we want our data system to store information I Continued on page 44