
For New York farmers Heidi Lott and Kristen DeMarree, adopting technology has been essential to their businesses.
But Brett Chedzoy likes to keep technology at arm’s length. He realizes he’ll have to adapt his farm’s practices to attract the generation to take over some day, but he’s in no rush.
“I don’t consider myself ‘anti-tech’ as much as fortunate to be in a sector of farming [grazing] where eyeballs, experience and instincts still play a big role,” he said.
But data and how it’s used is still a big concern for these three farmers, who spoke at the recent New York Ag Forum in Syracuse.
Farmers have long been concerned about data privacy and how companies can potentially make money off a farmer’s data. There is also concern over the sheer amount of data generated on a farm and whether it will bog farmers down in too much of it.
According to the World Bank, the average farm will produce 4.1 million data points per day by 2050, a 200-fold increase from 2014. For Chedzoy, that’s a lot of risk he can’t overlook.
"I don't really want to trust my data to anybody else," he said. “It's my data. I want to have access to it. And I'm increasingly suspicious about sharing data, and then getting bombarded with spam, text messages and phone calls.”
Lott, the second generation on Lott Farm LLC in Waterloo, N.Y., a 2,600-acre crop farm, said do your homework before choosing a company to work with.
"I think you have to do your homework on what companies you're working with, that they're reliable and that they're not going to do something they should not be doing with your data,” she said. “We put a lot of money into using this technology, and for someone to just use our data and do something with it they shouldn't, they have to be very reliable for us.”
Lott’s farm has adapted quickly to technology. The farm has its own RTK bay station that runs all the GPS for its equipment, allowing them to create lines from the cab of the John Deere planter so it can essentially drive itself using autosteer. They use Climate Field View for planting and fertilizer recommendations.
Technology adoption on DeMarree’s farm — she is the farm manager of Donald DeMarree Fruit Farm in Williamson, N.Y., a 200-acre fresh fruit operation — has centered around improved labor efficiency and water use.
The farm hires 40 H-2A workers a year for harvest. They have gone from growing processing apples to all fresh fruit in high-density plantings. Labor accounts for between 50% and 60% of annual expenses. DeMarree said they use a system called AgriTrak that helps keep track of timekeeping and labor data.
"For that system, we'll track every single job on the farm throughout the season, and then also the employee will input what variety they're working in, what block they're working in,” she said. “That way, we have a giant data center that we're able to pull out information whenever we need it to evaluate how efficient our labor has been, or what job on the farm is costing us the most amount of money. This system has been invaluable for us because we've been able to try different techniques to become more labor efficient and the data is really an objective measure to tell us if we're succeeding or not.”
Chedzoy, a Cornell Extension forester, runs a 1,000-acre grass-fed beef operation near Watkins Glen, N.Y.
He has what can be described as a love-hate relationship with technology. He is trying to keep his children interested in the farm but has some real concerns about being too reliant on technology.
In his role as Extension agent, he has used lidar scanning in his farm’s silvopasture area, part of a larger project through Cornell’s digital forestry initiative that’s doing groundbreaking work on collecting data for landowners to better manage private woodlands and silvopastures.
"If you would have asked me five years ago, would we ever use something like this to go and collect that data, and get better data to be able to make better management decisions with it, you would have probably gotten … some sort of snarky response from me. I think foresters are on the verge of collecting data within minutes, usually something that took hours, right there on the spot,” Chedzoy said.
What’s worked and what hasn’t?
For Lott, having the ability to upload field data to the cloud for future use has been helpful.
For DeMarree, just having objective data to evaluate apple varieties is key.
"For us in the apple industry, apples are always coming in and out of favor. You have to at some point make the call on when do I get rid of an apple variety," she said. “With this system, we can analyze on a block-per-block basis and a variety basis what varieties are truly going to be returning us money, and adding the labor component, which ones cost too much. So, with that system, we can make those objective decisions."
Some things haven’t worked. Lott said she still hasn’t found any reliable weed or insect apps to go out in the field and identify something easily.
DeMarree said her farm has had issues matching Bluetooth valves to ones already in use on the farm.
And while Chedzoy likes the comfort and convenience of new modern tractors, he doesn’t like all the electronics and sensors on board.
"I think we all understand here, what happens if a piece of equipment blows an error code at 6 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, and it's going to be Monday morning until you can get ahold of the equipment dealer,” he said. “In our case, we're about an hour away from our closest equipment dealer, who then has to send a technician to resolve that. When you're in the middle of haying season, that can cause a lot of angst. I like the bells and whistles, but they also make the equipment more vulnerable to just things that happen to electronics, especially in field conditions.”
Risk vs. reward
When deciding on a technology to implement, these farmers agree: Evaluate potential risks vs. rewards.
“In some cases, I think that reward is so much higher that's it's definitely worth the risk, but you still have to think when you use this system, what are some risks that could happen, and what are ways I can safely use the system so I can avoid those risks," DeMarree said.
Lott said having yearly harvest data at her fingertips makes it easier to make decisions on grain marketing, crop insurance and variety selection. And having soil maps to evaluate what varieties did well and under what conditions is a great tool. But getting out and checking on things in a field is still important.
“There could be slug damage eating your soybeans, and you may not even know about it,” she said. "Even though we have the tech and it's great and everything, we still have to go back, and we need to walk the field. You need to be out in the field observing what's going on.”
Chedzoy said that any future adoption of technology will be guided more by time savings vs. data just for the sake of data. And you can’t replace years of experience and know-how with an app.
"It's great that I can bring young people onto the farm, and they can do marvelous things with technology,” he said. “But geez, I'd be happy if they just knew how to back a trailer up sometimes or fix the equipment they broke. Let's start with that.”
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