Turning to Innovation When Commodities Aren't Profitable

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

In today’s farming environment and retail marketplace, simply producing high-quality commodities isn’t always profitable. Mark Munger of Ocean Mist Farms says one of the ways their company are staying ahead of the curve is by integrating technology and innovation into their daily operations. Munger says that’s how they stay competitive against similar companies in the Salinas valley.

Munger… “Just growing these commodities and being a great quality producer of them is not enough. That differentiation is not enough to really help us continue to stay profitable. And so the company has been implementing, you know, what we call innovation into our culture starting about 10 years ago. And innovation takes a long time if your company has been on a certain charted course for a hundred years. So first we had to really understand what it meant and where we wanted to implement innovation. And so it's being implemented in this company in a lot of ways. It really started first in our farming, our harvesting crews began to redesign our harvesting equipment so that you're doing more packing, more quality packing, finished packing, one touch packing at the field in the harvesting equipment, so that when it came into our cooler, it was ready to be cooled and shipped. We've been looking at the use of robotics for weeding, for soil testing, and so there's been a lot of that innovation.”

Again, that’s Mark Munger of Ocean Mist Farms.