DATA DILEMMA How much data is too much? BY BETHANY BARATTA
Completing soybean harvest on the Ewoldt farm near Davenport.
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it in the driver’s seat during planting or harvest, and soon you’ll be inundated with data. You’ll not only see your speed across the field, but real-time planting or harvest conditions. “There’s a sensor for everything,” says Robb Ewoldt, a farmer near Davenport and a past Iowa Soybean Association (ISA) president. But what do farmers do with all that data? Probably not as much as they could, farmers say, because of the sheer amount of data to sift through. “We capture electronic data on our sprayer, our planters and our combine. We also capture it on our air seeder when we plant cover crops,” Ewoldt says.
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The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that the average farmer generates 500,000 data points every day. Real-time data like seeding rates, planting depth, grain moisture and yield are the most used instantaneously, Ewoldt says, but there is some information stored for potential use later. On the sprayer, for example, Ewoldt uses the time and date stamp to prove he’s applying at the correct rate and in the correct conditions. The data is stored electronically and can be pulled should he ever be audited. With harvest data, he can determine how products such as fungicides, fertilizers and microbials performed during trials.
“It’s easy for me to capture data when we’re putting the product on, and then overlay the yield data at the end,” Ewoldt says.
Crop insurance reporting Precision data from the planter and combine can also be used to streamline crop insurance, says Pat Swanson, ISA board director and co-owner of Son Risk Management, a crop insurance agency in Ottumwa. “We encourage our farmers to use precision planting and harvest data,” Swanson says. “By using precision technology, the data can be used to report acres planted and production harvested.” As long as the combine has been calibrated and the correct
