While Jason Urwin thinks the DuPont Pioneer Field 360 services are extremely valuable for field scouting, he thinks perhaps the Tools app is the coolest in the new suite of Pioneer software products for farmers and consultants.

The Pioneer Tools App is available for a download charge of about $10, and gives you information on weather, growing degree day accumulations and crop progress.

"What I like is it helps you know where you are on rainfall and other weather factors or the season," says Urwin, an accounts manager with Pioneer.

Likes data: Jason Urwin says the inexpensive Pioneer Field 360 Tools app can supply a lot of useful information to help you do a better job of crop scouting.

The Field 360 Tools app is one of three products in the Pioneer Field 360 suite of products now being introduced. These products were available this year. They include the notetaking app, available for free, and Field 350 Select, which costs $400 annually. It takes you much deeper into layering information and determining which hybrids fit in your field.

The Tools app includes a weather estimator which gives you a good approximation of rain in your area and tracks it for you, Urwin says. The second feature is a Growing Degree Days estimator. Growing Degree Days are based on average high and low daily temperatures. Corn growth is closely tied to growing degree days.

The crop progress estimator can tell you at what stage your corn should be, based on hybrid, without you ever leaving the office and going to the field. It uses information from the weather and GDD estimations and information about the hybrid to determine the growth stage that you can expect to find in the field. That makes it very valuable in planning scouting operations and even in pre-planning such things as fungicide applications, Urwin notes.