Dr. Terry Griffin is the Vice President of Applied Economics at CRESCO Ag. He’s also an impassioned advocate of the movement to stop “eyeballing” data maps gathered with precision agriculture tools. He educates producers about why it’s important to not only have your precision ag data professionally analyzed, it’s also valuable to pool data with the producers in your area.
If that’s an idea that sounds alarming to you, you certainly aren’t alone. But he has compelling reasoning behind his assertion.
Dr. Griffin believes that like any data, the more precision ag data that is amassed, the more value it holds. Data on one field is almost useless for making economic decisions. And the practice of “eyeballing” maps is misleading because it’s difficult to discern real patterns and important variations.
However, data from a thousand acres, five thousand, even an entire county holds tremendous value. The more acres evaluated, the more opportunities for benchmarking and operational
improvement – which is why a third party analyst would be in a perfect position to help farms get the information they need to make profitability decisions, while protecting the privacy of individual data contributors.
He likens data analysis by a qualified professional to using a CPA at tax time – it’s not cost or time efficient for most producers to attempt analysis on his own.
What are you doing with your precision ag data? Would you be willing to share it with a community of producers if it was pooled into useful information specific to your entire operation, but still “anonymous”?
