Leading Indicators in Farming Metrics

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

It’s often easy to look back after a harvest and identify what didn’t work. But the real challenge is catching those problems before they happen. Patrick Smith, founder of Oxrow, says new evolutions of artificial intelligence can help growers shift their focus from being reactive to being proactive.

Smith… “ There's the old saying, like, "What gets measured gets managed," right? And so once we started measuring and reporting, it's not just measuring, it's reporting and talking about it. Then you start to get all the creativity from the team going, ‘Okay, well, what can we do differently? What are the changes that we need to make?’ We got really good at learning as a team the leading indicators of what generated an outcome that we didn't desire. And then we start focusing on the leading indicator versus the lagging indicator. So much of what we do in agriculture is after the fact, right? We spend the time to go back and debrief after, and I think the opportunity for us is to embed those learnings into our operating cycle more frequently. And so there's where that combination of tool and management process and change management and changing people's behaviors, where those have to come together.”

Once again, that’s Patrick Smith of Oxrow.ai.