40 Chances

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

“40 chances” is a book by Howard Buffett that describes how most farmers have about 40 growing seasons to iterate what they want to do on their farms. This is one reason the risk of trying new approaches is so high in farming. Sean Blomgren is a farmer and ag retailer. He says this time of year there is a lot of interest in new ag technology, but it tends to fade by the time the growing season comes around.

Blomgren… “It's amazing the conversations that take place in November, December, January. You know, when your ag shows or when you're learning about things. And it's funny how eager people are during those months to say, 'Oh yeah, I'd love to try this product or learn more'. And then when you actually get into the execution phase, that becomes a lot more difficult.”

This one real challenge to incorporating more technology onto the farm.

Blomgren… “We've created an ag system that continues to move faster and faster and cover more acres in smaller windows of times that we're trying to execute these things. And so I think that actual process of saying, 'yes, we want to try this out'. But then the actual process of execution is often a lot more difficult than we maybe think it is. And those are hard lessons to learn. And they're very frustrating. And oftentimes in a cycle that only you only have one opportunity a year to do, it's amazing how you can burn an entire year and go, 'man there's really a lot of things I wanted to learn and I didn't take the time or put in the effort to build them in the right way to really get the information I was hoping for'."

Blomgren works with a company called In10t to get help with trialing and evaluating new technologies on the farm.