Tapping Into Farm Data

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Younger generations of agriculturalists are often more apt to challenge “the way we’ve always done it” mentality. Washington farmer Patrick Smith is a prime example of this, deciding to explore how data-driven business decisions could benefit his family’s hop and apple farm.

Ag Innovators Clips 4: What I saw was that my skillset was reaching its limit, and so that’s where I decided to go back to school again and go outside of agriculture into business analytics at NYU, and I was the only person in our cohort of 72 students that was in agriculture. And I just think about the complexity of our systems at the farm and of agriculture and think, if you could measure everything that's out there, what would you uncover, what would you discover about your farm, about your crop, about that plant, that you didn’t know, and the data set would be massive. And so, it was mostly this curiosity of mine to just understand what I had been doing, what my family had been doing for four generations, better, and wanting to look outside of farming and outside of hops and apples for some guidance.

Smith says finding ways to work smarter and not harder is what inspired him to start a business to help farmers and other businesses do the same.