In the two years since it was founded, the Farmers Business Network, a network that allows farmers to share information between each other anonymously, has grown to include over 10 million acres in the U.S. That's nearly twice the size of New Jersey.

"In farming, there's the concept of 40 chances — the 40 seasons in your career you have to get it right," notes Charles Baron, co-founder and vice president of product at FBN. "In the last two years since we launched FBN, farmers have added 10,000 years' worth of crop information. Take those 40 years, and instead of getting one observation of your farm each year, you now have access to 10,000 years per year, and those just keep growing and growing."

At FBN's recent Farmer 2 Farmer conference in Omaha, FBN launched some new tools and capabilities to expand their current offerings.

New agronomic intelligence products. This includes updates to the FBN Seed Finder and Yield Potential seed selection tools. FBN Seed Finder identifies the highest-performing seeds on different soil types, while FBN Yield Potential tracks seed performance on each field on your farm. This allows the user to find exactly which seed will have the highest weighted average performance on any of their fields.

"You can see the complete performance profile of every seed — population, nitrogen analysis, planting date, temperature analysis," Baron says. "There are now seeds in FBN Seed Finder that have over 200,000 acres of data on them."

A new weather history feature has been added to FBN Yield Potential to monitor weather history and the impact of seasonal weather variation on each individual field, based on soil moisture, soil temperature, precipitation, wind speed and other factors.

The latest addition to FBN Seed Finder is a seed price transparency tool. Just type the seed variety into FBN's Seed Finder tool to compare price points of different seeds across the U.S.

Multiyear average map. FBN recently launched a new multiyear average map feature that recognizes your crop rotation, and averages out yields over the last several years.

"You can remove that year-over-year variability you might see in the field and really rapidly identify problem spots that need to be addressed," Baron says.

FBN OPS app update. Last year, FBN launched the FBN OPS app, a note-taking collaboration tool. Recently, FBN launched an update that automatically integrates all of your precision data into the FBN OPS app. You can open the app on your hand-held device and see a complete field history from all of your precision data.

FBN Price app. Using the FBN Chemical Price Transparency tool, growers have been able to save 20% to 30% on average with each chemical order by tapping into FBN's network of over 10,000 price records to identify cost-saving alternatives, or to negotiate purchases with retailers.

Now, growers can access actual market prices on over 750 chemical products through anonymized chemical price data on iOS and Android through the new FBN Price app.

FBN Direct. Formerly called the FBN Procurement program, the new FBN Direct program expands the distribution of inputs beyond chemicals to include seed treatments, seed, starter fertilizer, machinery and farm services. FBN typically delivers these products directly to the farm within one to three days.

"We're working directly with suppliers, so the savings we feel farmers are deserving of can come back to the actual farm," says FBN COO Larry Trebesch.

FBN membership also comes with some benefits through the FBN Direct program, including opportunities to save $10,000 on equipment purchases from Agco, discounts on starter fertilizer, a 1% discount off of chemical purchases in addition to financing available through FBN, and a $20 discount from Seitec Genetics off of every bag an FBN member purchases through FBN.

FBN Crop Marketing. FBN is also launching a crop marketing initiative to help it track real-time profitability. This includes the Dynamic P&L function, which tracks profitability in real time based on differences in local pricing, costs, expected yield, contracts and sales. Dynamic P&L provides regular updates to farmers through their hand-held devices.

FBN also enables farmers with information to go out and create contracts for premiums. Another aspect of this initiative is identity preservation and transferability, helping growers market their crop based on data from their individual fields.

FBN also launched the Farmers First marketing initiative to facilitate transactions between farmers and food companies who want their products. "We have a number of data programs that have been launched particularly around durum wheat and pulse crops, and the number of food companies that come to FBN looking for direct access to farmers and their products increases every month," Trebesch says.

To learn more, visit farmersbusinessnetwork.com.