Partnerships between agriculture power houses like Land O’Lakes, Winfield United, Microsoft and The Climate Corporation are paying dividends in the field.
Brett Bruggeman, President of Winfield United, visited with Pam Jahnke and the Midwest Farm Report about how all these technology pieces come together to not only assist farmers, but their communities as well.
Bruggeman says the arrangement between Winfield United and The Climate Corporation show obvious benefits right away. Farmers can use technology to evaluate weather patterns over their fields and work with their agronomists on how to manage each field – in fact each piece of a field – according to the weather patterns over it. The other partnerships may be less revealing in how they help farms – as well as their surrounding communities.
Bruggeman says they were advancing these partnerships before Covid-19, but definitely accelerated some aspects when it became a reality. He says they’re ultimately aiming for three goals.
- Making sure they can evaluate what the return on investment is for each input in a field.
- Equipping retailers with the technology they need to “show up” at a farm and discuss a total farm approach to farming – not just a product approach.
- Finally Bruggeman says they’re hearing farms express how much they need digital technology to reduce risk and increase predictability.
Bruggeman says their partnerships are allowing them to address all those goals – plus the increased focus on soil conservation and carbon credits. As Bruggeman points out, we’re not sure where the carbon credit market is going, but for many farms and their good soil conservation plans – it could turn out to be their next “big crop”.
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