Making Sense of Farm Data
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Farmers are, indeed, data driven, especially when it comes to reading the market and making business decisions. INTENT founder and CEO Randy Barker believes if the industry can better understand this relationship, it will lead to more actionableinsights in the future.
Barker… “They’re also trying to achieve other things, in terms of stability, convenience, sustainability, and sustainability meaning I can farm for the next 10 years and not go broke. Those things are equally important but not articulated the same way as return on investment. And I think farmers read data not only about their farm but it's within context and if you use that example they go, ‘Well my ROI is changing based on the future’s price of corn and how I’ve already marketed it or how much rainfall I’ve got so far this year and my GGDs are going to impact how I look at fungicides.’ So that perceptual relationship to data, they’re kind of their own supercomputer right, processing all the stuff that’s happening around them. They love data to support their world view but they’re computing at a high rate which always makes it important to understand that they’re data-driven, but most of the data is either latten or with maybe grain prices, future. They’re trying to compile and assess all the stuff real-time, and their index on adoption goes up and down.”
INTENT aims to help farmers make sense of field-level data and apply it to the right situations.
