Jon: 0:00

Welcome to Just Say hey, the podcast a podcast where we talk about the things that matter to small farms, whether it's marketing technology, business, agronomy, equipment. We talk about the things that matter to small farms and that help us as people and help us run our farms better. And today I'm going to talk about the hated word technology, because it's everywhere around us. It's everywhere and I've been in the technology, been in and out of the technology business as a software guy or some of the things that I've had to do in the marketing side of things using MarTech or marketing technology. I've been in and out of it my entire career. Some of my favorite days farming In fact my favorite days farming are the days where I don't have to deal with it, where I can just get in an old-fashioned tractor, get in a tractor with no technology and just go do a job for a day or go work cattle for a day, just pushing them from field to field, where I don't have to worry about the notifications and all of the things that come with the benefits of technology. So they call them. But there is a lot of the things that come with the benefits of technology, so they call them, but there is a lot of good that can come from it. The other day I was talking to a friend of mine. He's an older farmer, up in his I'd say he's in his late 60s, I don't know, but he was very tech-phobic, wanted nothing to do with it, didn't own a smartphone, doesn't own one Great man. He has no interest in it, doesn't want to do it, doesn't want to think about it, it's not part of his business and he's gotten to where he's gotten without it and that's the way he wants to run his business. However, for our business, we have to utilize the limited resources we have efficiently and in many cases we can become more efficient by utilizing a little bit of technology. Let's get into it. Welcome to Just Say hey, the podcast where we talk about what matters to small farms, whether it's business, marketing, agronomy, equipment, livestock, health. If it matters to small farms, we'll probably talk about it here, so let's get into it. So I was talking about my friend who's very tech phobic and he lives in his bubble and I love it. I'm so thankful that there are people that can still do it.

Jon: 2:16

We struggle with managing simple things like schedules or what equipment is where and what do we have to do. What's the list of the never ending list of tasks that we have to accomplish and did we get them done? And what fields are we working on and what farms are we working on and barns and cattle and hay and all of the things that we have to do and the people that we work with, and it's a very inefficient process most of the time, and so we have leaned on some technology to help us out and I'll talk about some of it as we go on. And, if you stick with me for a little bit, I'm going to talk about my favorite tech service that we use. We used it in all of 2024. I think we started with them in 2023. Not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure we started with them last year.

Jon: 3:08

If you break technology down into kind of its parts, right, there's ag tech and there are things like if you use John Deere, you use John Deere Operation Center, you can use software packages like CattleMax if you run a cattle farm, or FarmBrite if you run a small farm, or Climate's FieldView if you're a large row crop operation and all of these things help us manage different parts and some of them try to be all things to all people or they try to handle. You know they do one thing really well and they do other things not so well. With artificial intelligence, there's no regulations on what you can have it do and what you can't right now, and there needs to be some, whether it's an industry or God forbid. I'm not a fan of government regulation, but some sort of a regulation that's saying stopping the unethical things that can be done using artificial intelligence where they can impact the outcome of elections or impact business to conduct their business by putting out fake videos. You've heard of deep fake videos where they can take an image and make it look and sound like you're saying things you don't. It's a very scary part of artificial intelligence. There are some fantastic things coming out with artificial intelligence and one of them and I want to say it was John Deere.

Jon: 5:17

And then there was exactly what. It is Not really set up for farmers because it tells me how to grow it better, and I don't need to grow it better, I need to kill it and it doesn't give me that information. But this idea of a computer can look at a picture and determine what that plant is. If you can picture a sprayer that's 120 feet wide, running 15 miles an hour over a field, and there is a camera that is looking down at the ground, determining whether the plant it's driving over is a plant you're trying to grow or you're trying to get rid of, and then can turn a spray nozzle on and off as it drives over that plant at 15 miles an hour. 120 feet wide. 15 miles an hour that's really cool because think about the impact that that could have on chemical usage. Whether you think about it from an environmental impact or you think about it in a cost savings has the ability to do both and do them really well. Now, from a cost standpoint, it's not down to the point that a small guy like me can really take advantage of it, though I would like to. We still take our prescriptions and go to the field and we have to spray a broad coverage because that's just the only. That's the ability we have at this point.

Jon: 6:39

I think that will continue to get better and it's very exciting technology when we try to solve business issues for our farm. Some of these ag tech companies John Deere Op Center tries to do it. I don't think it does it very well. I think its software some of its software is really really well done. Some of it is an add-on and an afterthought and doesn't really integrate as well as it should, but they're trying. There are in a small farm operation like ours.

Jon: 7:15

We can look to other business sectors because we have a lot of the same challenges that most small business, medium-sized businesses have Scheduling, to-dos, assigning tasks, completing projects, communicating with employees and we're going to stay out of the marketing side of technology for right now, because that's not really what this is about. This is about using technology in our business to run our businesses, not so much the marketing side of our business. There is so much that we can look at as a farm where we have similar processes to just about every business. We have to schedule employees, we have to have tasks and to-dos, we have projects, we have communicate with each other internally so we're not doing the same job twice. So we can look at the general business. We can look for apps and services that accomplish our challenges, can look for apps and services that accomplish our challenges.

Jon: 8:10

I want to talk for a second about my favorite technology, and it's a tech service that we have used for two years now and absolutely think the world of them. I think they so far. They're not a young company but they have been fantastic with us and we are a super small, small tater. They deal with people like the Major League, baseball and the Indy 500 and I mean all these cool, massive, massive organizations, and we're just a small farm and they do an absolutely brilliant job with us and that's a company called BAM Weather. Called BAM Weather. They are a service slash technology. They give you, you download an app and if you've ever used weather apps, I'm sure if you're a farmer, if you're farming, you use a weather app. And if you use something like the Weather Channel or NOAA Radar or Apple's Weather or the one that comes with your Google phone, they're good, they're perfectly, you know, good-ish, they're good, they're perfectly, you know, good-ish.

Jon: 9:09

The challenge is when you have to make weather-based decisions that cost money. I'll give you an example, perfect example. And this happened the first time we really put the guys at BAM to the test was we were harvesting a big field of alfalfa. We were in the process of, we had a lot of bales on the ground and we were focusing on some organizational things. And I still, even though I have their service they have a radar as part of their service. I have a different radar app that I use. I check it as real, fast and easy. And I looked at it and saw that, even though the television weather said no rain tomorrow, you know, don't forget it. And saw that even though the television weather said no rain tomorrow, you know, don't forget, it's going to be hot. Pack your sunscreen, have a great day. The challenge was we saw isolated pop-up showers. So we got with BAM and we said, hey, what's going on? Is this going to hit us or are we good? And within five minutes they came back and said you know what? You're going to have some rain coming your way. It's going to start. It looks like it's building from east to west. It's going to hit you in about two to three hours. Thank you very much.

Jon: 10:18

Stopped what we were doing, put all of our energies into picking bales up out of the field. Now, this was a prime grade outfit. I mean, this was some beautiful, beautiful stuff that we sell to our horse customers. We were able to get enough bales out of the field. That equaled about in the barn was about $20,000 worth of hay. That we were able to get in the barn Didn't look very pretty. Our stacks weren't perfect, but it was in the barn and undercover before the rain hit. That was a huge, huge thing for us that paid for the subscription for years to come, years and years to come.

Jon: 10:52

That service was kind of a combination of utilizing technology and them having a lot of technology to accurately predict weather for specific locations, and the service of having a human who is a meteorologist, an expert in that field, look at our specific situation, make a determination and give us actionable advice, give us advice that we could actually act on. And when you combine those two things it made for a wonderful. I mean we were thrilled. Did we still lose some hay? Yeah, but we saved so much money just in that one day. This has happened multiple, multiple times over the year. Or the value what a great value for service if your farm is very weather dependent, and I mean the accuracy, like for us, if that hay gets wet, gets rained on, the value of that hay plummets. We're constantly in contact with those guys. So check them out at bamwxcom, I think is their website.

Jon: 11:56

I'll try to put it in the description. You know I said I was going to give you kind of a quick way to solve problems on the farm. And here it is. It's real simple Look at your farm. Like we do every year At the end of the year, we look, we get everybody together and we say what did we do well? We spend just a couple minutes on saying, hey, we did a couple of things really well, but we focus on what did we do poorly, what did we fail at, where were our biggest hurdles? And because those are the things we need to fix, obviously you're going to repeat the things you did well, but we need to fix the things that we did not do well.

Jon: 12:32

For example, you may have problems scheduling For us. Our schedule is so chaotic because we don't know when we're going to bail until a day or so before, because we have to follow the weather, and especially in our area where we have unpredictable, very, very hard to predict weather. So we're waiting until days out and saying, okay, we think it's going to be here, we think it's going to be here and it might roll a couple of days either way, depending on precipitation, depending on other factors. So when we get a window where we think we're going to go in, we have to start calling the guys that are helping us in the field because they're not full-time employees. They're not full-time people, they're guys that just come out and they mow and they rake and they help us out. So I've got to start scheduling them.

Jon: 13:19

So I look at these challenges that we have, whatever they are, and I make a list of them and I try to fit them in kind of generalized categories, because these challenges are not generally the things, especially in a small farm. They're not generally the things that the big ag tech companies are going to solve, for these are things almost every business has, or you'll find that many, many businesses have these same challenges. We have a lot of small projects, a lot of little things that need to get done. You know what Most companies have lots of little things that need to get done, and so you can look at task management services. You can look at larger, more complex project management services. You can look at these things because they solve these same problems for thousands of businesses and they probably could be made to apply to our farm.

Jon: 14:29

Back to using it we stopped using it just recently just because it got too chaotic at the end of the year, but I think we're going to go back because it's a really simple, easy to use platform and that's called Todoist. I think to have a team version of it you have to have a paid account. I think there's a free version of it just to manage to do. But if you just need a simple to-do list that comes free with your phone, I'm pretty sure if you have a smartphone there's a list on there that you can make your list of things to do and check it off. The problem we had is we have, say we've got 50 tasks that need to get done, but we could also assign those to people.

Jon: 15:04

After every mowing well, mower needs to get cleaned. After every mowing well, mower needs to get cleaned. Blades need to be either flipped or changed. The rollers need to be cleaned out. We need to go out and kind of check the bearings real quick. Go through the simple, go through, check the oils, everything that gets done in servicing and prepping the mower or swather for another round of mowing. That guy has to know what to do. I'm not saying the job is simple, but it's prep mower. Assign the task to somebody. This helps you because now you've assigned it, now as a manager, you're still responsible to go out and make sure it gets done. If you can get your guy to look at it, he now knows what he has to do. He doesn't even have to bother you to do it. He says I know I need to do this, go do it To us. It doesn't matter when it gets done, so long as it's done before the next time we need it.

Jon: 15:51

Project management there's a lot of really good ones. There's a lot of really flexible project managements. In fact, we had a challenge we tried several ag tech companies to work, you know, to find an application to store because we wanted to have harvest and yield data for our fields. So we wanted to know how many bales equals how many tons of alfalfa or of hay, grass hay did we get off of a field. So then we can tie that back to how much fertilizer did we put on. We can do our soil samples and determine fertilizer, determine how much we took off, determine how much what that yielded in dollars. We can actually track down to the field of how many dollars we took off, determine how much what that yielded in dollars. We can actually track down to the field of how many dollars we made off of each field, based on yield tonnage and then quality and those type of things, and we can store all of that Ended up finding using a project management tool that also allows us to store data and display data in a way that is very, very easy to use, and it was simple.

Jon: 16:54

I was able to create lists of fields, lists of crops and then tie all of this together, and there's a couple of apps that can do this pretty easily, and they're you know of apps that can do this pretty easily and they're you know. I say they're cheap, nothing's cheap, but they are inexpensive for the value you can get out of them. In looking at them, you can determine, after you've made your simple list of what are the challenges you have. Is it task management? Is it data storage? Is it, you know, all of these things? Could it be done in a spreadsheet? Yeah, probably some of our data management could have been done in a spreadsheet and could have been done on something like a, you know, like a Google spreadsheet.

Jon: 17:36

But we wanted the ability to visualize this data differently because we wanted to be able to look at, tie this back to other systems that we use for sales, systems that we use for sales. So we spent this much money in fertilizer. We got this much yield off the crop. That crop was graded at a certain grade which equaled we had this many at this grade and this grade, which equaled so many dollars and then can tie it all back together was that fertilizer investment. Did it pay off? If we make changes to our fertilizer and nutrition plans, do they pay off? I mean, if you spend $100 on a fertilizer plant and it only gets you $50 in gain, well, you lost $50.

Jon: 18:20

So we wanted to be able to tie all of this data back together and we could not find an ag tech company, something that tied it all back together for us and did it in an easy, quick way, because one of the challenges when we're entering this data we're generally coming out of a field, I'm in a tractor, pulling my iPhone up and I'm typing in okay, we got 487 bales off of this field. So that ease of use is also a factor in here. You know, just to kind of wrap up here real quick, don't you know? There's a lot of technology out there and yes, it can be daunting and yes, it can be intrusive, but as a business in the business side of farming, data is important and being able to manage that data and, more importantly, solve problems that allow us to be more efficient. That's what technology should be used for. I would encourage you to not be afraid of it If it can help you grow your business.

Jon: 19:23

Make a decision, make your list of challenges that you're having scheduling, to-dos, project management, whatever that is and then go search software packages, services, technology apps they call them software as a service, so they're almost always subscription-based and find one that you think works for you or can be made to work for you, because a lot of these are customizable.

Jon: 19:49

You can set all the tabs and tables and stuff works for you or can be made to work for you, because a lot of these are customizable.

Jon: 19:54

You can set all the tabs and tables and stuff, take that and use it for a year, make a commitment to use it for a year and at the end of the year, make a decision Did it work for you or did it not?

Jon: 20:05

But having that data, I mean for us being able to look at an individual field and saying, yeah, rent was this, fertilizer was this seeding manpower to harvest it and haul it and stack it was, and be able to tie all of that data in to how much did we sell and did that field make us money? Did that fertilizer investment make us money? Did that fertilizer investment make us money? So, having all of that data in a place and using tools to do it, not being afraid of the data, not being afraid of the technology, can make your business easier to run. If you're like me, the most valuable asset that I have is my time, and if it can save me time and allow me to do a better job, be more efficient time, and if it can save me time and allow me to do a better job, be more efficient, man, that's a win. So check out some apps and check out some things to run your farm better. Have a great day, good luck and God bless.