Collaborating To Solve Farm Challenges

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

In today’s agriculture, technology needs to be developed based on sound science and commercial need. That’s why public-private collaborations make a lot of sense. Cory Willness of Croptimistic Technology says their goal over the years has been to use sound science and engineering to solve real problems on the farm.

Willness... "Someone needs to work with researchers usually, and you might spend 50 grand and get it matched with a grant to a university on a Ph.D. project or something, you know, so you're building capacity throughout the country with people, and you learn from them, you develop relationships. And maybe only 25 percent of these things turn into something where you say, this has big potential to solve this problem for either our software platform or a farmer, right? Or an agronomist, you know, a lot of the scalability that's coming doesn't necessarily mean it's like some tool farmers need. A lot of this is just, farmers want to become more efficient too, like a combine is a combine, your grain goes in the bin, like, you can still get it in the bin with an old combine, but if you get it done more efficiently, more productively with less labor and less fuel and makes you money, then you do it. So, yeah, I would say a lot of the projects we work on is just trying to get things better. That's kind of the direction a lot of our products head."

Croptimistic Technology is the maker of SWAT MAPS. Learn more at swatmaps.com.