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Editor's Notes

• #3: World population is to expected to double by 2050. To meet the growing need for food, we’re going to have to double the amount of food produced today. There is also an expectation that the middle-class population will grow as well. Meaning even larger demand for higher quality food. All of this means that means that we’re going to have to do a better job of managing the land and the resources to meet the demand for food or we are in trouble in the future.
• #4: Many talk about how we’re going to use Space and Drone Imagery along with robots to automate the production of food in the future. However today, PrecisionAg is even more basic than that, it represents taking the tractor planting and harvest data, and using very simple and expensive sensors to make guesses of what is the best inputs (water and chemicals) and programming the auto steering our tractors to apply those to the fields to try to maximize the amount of food we can grow per square meter. Until the robot and drones make it so we don’t get our boots muddy the farmer is going to need tools like iCropTrak to help capture the state of the field at a very micro level, and to allow the farmer to understand how this square meter of land has been treated different than the ones next to it.
• #5: iCroptrak is a combination of a mobile platform, a cloud database, and a PC app. These tools allow farmers to display all of the precision information that is known about the field and to be able to walk around in the field and see the data layered on a mobile platform map. Using drone imagery, satellite imagery, soil lab results, overlaying weather, current real-time status of the sprinklers and sensors, along with the tractor information about planting, spraying, and harvesting from this year and the past. So why so much data and what you do with?
• #6: First, you have to be profitable to be able to feed the world. So you need to have data on what you planted, where you planted, cost, how long it took, and the result to determine how you did that season. Some seasons you do better, some seasons you do worse, the idea is to look to see how things changed to try and determine how repeat the good more often than doing worse. iCropTrak helps you document all your processes and costs to help you make that determination. Along the way with the help of Windward and Yellowfin it helps you fill out those pesky government forms needed to document what you done, track the real-time status of your teams, find patterns in your effort, and see if you meet your KPI performance goals.
• #7: Secondly, to help determine how to use the lest amount of chemicals, water, and other inputs on every part of the field individually, the farming industry calls this variable rate. It means creating a unique recipe for each part of a field that takes into account the land elevation, slope, and soil; the seed and how it performs on different land combinations; the major and minor nutrient that are holding back the plant; the weather that season; and the local infestation of the pest, weeds, and diseases. Put another way it means to turn up and down the control based on the very local area need, so we are saving the planet and at the same time also saving money.
• #9: iCropTrak’s role is to allow the farmer to carry operational information into the field since there is no way he can remember everything done to a specific spot without it. Allows them to use imagery and other sensor data to look at areas in the field under stress and determine why.
• #10: Capture that information (pictures, notes, sketches, and pick lists) and use it to modify the recipe to account for the variation. Feed that data back into the predictive models for finding the problem areas again over larger areas, telling other what you found, and with food safety in mind capture the data needed to generate the Global Gap and PRIMUS documentation.
• #11: iCropTrak collects this data by allow our users without programming to customize the data collection and survey forms to local farming practices and reporting requirements. It can do so in numerous different languages. Because the input is so flexible we had to find reporting solutions that allowed our clients to format the data they are collecting into local reports. iCropTrak does this in two ways:
• #12: One we have large clients who need to know how their workforce is performing throughout the day or answer questions about planned vs actual spending which is perfect for a dashboard. They need to be able to send alerts automatically during the day when problems are found like an invasive pest or weed to take immediate action. They also need to format the results of a day’s work into packages that are easily consumed by larger payroll, inventory, accounting, and ERP systems. iCropTrak uses the web based tool Yellowfin BI from Australia. It is an environment when integrated without iCropTrak that lets the customer build custom dashboard, custom reports, custom alerts, and custom exports entirely in-house.
• #13: Second we have clients who have the need for in-app embedded reporting that can be called with a click or two in the field or at a meeting. Many of these clients want the results to be personalized to represent their value added or pixel perfect to meet the most demanding government form requirements. iCropTrak has worked with Windward to allow our clients to create customer reports in Microsoft Word and Excel that can be embedded in the iCroptrak mobile platform or generated from a purpose built desktop app. Like iCropTrak the tools allow the client when they change the collected data, they can change the report format to include that data without programming and entirely in-house.
• #14: Together these tools are important to our clients who cover all aspects of farming and for almost every crop. With the changing landscape of consumers demanding to know where their food is grown, how it was grown, how the person growing it was treated, and if it meets some increasing reporting standard like organic, sustainable, non-gmo, vegan, and more. With governments worried about food supply safety with even more documentation. �� Even if robots and drones are able to handle the heavy lifting there will be a requirement for farmers to document, verify, and report to an ever increasing number of organizations and iCropTrak is ready to help them quickly meets those needs so they can get back to growing more food to supply the growing population of the world.