A Note from Owen

To our valued friends & customers...

For most of us, it’s been a long winter. Growing up in Minnesota, some days have felt like I’m back home, but the days are getting longer and the snow is slowly melting. Hopefully, the mountain snowpack continues to build so we have adequate irrigation water supplies this summer.

In my last flyer letter in December 2022, I noted, “Older approaches to increase production are no longer viable. In the past, to increase production, we could rely on planting more acres, increasing horsepower, building larger implements or applying more nutrients. In short, we could always do more with more. However, today in agriculture, we have to do more with less.”

In other words, what got us here today won’t take us where we need to go tomorrow. I’d like to expand those thoughts a little further.

In agriculture, we have a tradition of learning from each other, passing along knowledge gained over the years. We know the value of doing things a little bit better every growing season, and over time, those incremental improvements have turned into something big. But while we continue to build on those improvements, it’s not enough to propel agriculture into the future. We need more ideas, more energy and more passion about feeding a hungry world. After all, that’s our job - feeding and fueling the world.

On November 15, 2022, the world’s population clock struck 8 billion people. That’s 8 billion people relying on us to feed and nourish them. More importantly, the United Nations estimates that today’s food production will need to double by 2050 in order to feed an incredible world population of 9.8 billion people. Boosting productivity on our farms and ranches is essential, and we will have to do it with less land, less water, less inputs and more regulation.

Part of how we’re going to be able to produce more with less lies in the utilization of Precision Ag technology - not only utilizing technologies that are available today, but adopting exciting new technologies that are coming not that far down the road. I hope many of you were able to watch John Deere’s keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this past January. If you missed it, I encourage you to watch this presentation for great insight into Deere’s vision of how we can produce more with less. You can find this presentation at www.Deere.com/CES. I really hope you take the time to watch this video.

Finally, as I have said in previous letters, the key to doing more with less is data, and data is only useful if it can be managed and analyzed. John Deere’s Operations Center is an online tool that can help you manage your data. You can share that data with others, collaborating to make the best possible decisions for your farming operation. The Operations Center and its associated mobile apps also allow you to see what’s happening across your farm in real time and direct work plans to remote planting or harvesting equipment from your desktop or tablet. An Operations Center account is free. If you need help setting one up or a little training to get the most out of your account, please contact your sales professional or someone in our Precision Ag technology group here at 21st Century Equipment.

In closing, I want to thank you for your business and wish you a great start to the 2023 growing season.

Sincerely,

Owen P.

Owen Palm President/CEO