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Iowa Farm Bureau - Revolutionizing Farming

Iowa Farm Bureau - Revolutionizing Farming
With all this technology coming into play, it's just all little pieces of the puzzle that help move us forward to make sure that there is something here for the next generation to farm and be successful with. The most rewarding part about being a farmer to me would be probably the fact that I'm still able to be at home, work with the family, watch the farm change for the better over the years, and how it's expanded, even since I've been a little kid and it's a wide open door as to where the farm will be when I'm towards retirement age and the younger generation takes over. Brass Farms here we’re using, first of all, guidance technology on the tractors where the tractor is able to go drive itself, turn around on the ends, run the implement up and down as we set it up. That way, we're maximizing our efficiency on there, not wasting any time, not wasting any fuel in our operation. We're running filter strips. We got waterways, that's all to carry the water, filter the water that way, when it goes into our streams, it's not full of chemicals, fertilizers. And, you know, nitrogen is a big one that's been talked about, making sure that the dirt is staying in the field not going with the water into the creek, down to the Gulf. This is one of my main screens on the tractor itself. So, starting up at the top, I can see that I have GPS signal. So I'm able to go and use my autosteer to drive the tractor straight back and forth. Then right next to it I have the one for my telematics, which is saying that I'm connected to the cloud and sending in information back and forth so that we're able to see on my iPad, on my phone, at my desktop, what's actually going on in the field. live time. That's kind of a win win for us that you’re minimizing what you're putting out there, but yet placing it exactly where it needed to be, burning less fuel, taking less time to do stuff. So you have the impact there. All of our equipment here is also running an emissions technology on it as well. So then we have better air quality coming out of the machines than what they would have had before that and then not over apply in spots where there's already plenty out there. So we used to milk in a parlor, we had weight jars so I could see every cow, every milking, and how much milk she gave. Was I really capable of remembering 60 cows worth of milk weights day in and day out for a whole month? Almost...almost! That would be amazing. But no, no way. Where now I could just pull out my smartphone pull up the app that manages all the information from the milking robot and see all that data is right at my fingertips. Within the robot, there's so many pieces to that. So, there's technology in the way that that robot attaches the milking cups to the actual cow. And then there's all the data that that robot collects. So, technology is a tool in our toolbox to say, “what didn’t we see?” “What did we miss?” Or, you know, maybe we can see it a little bit earlier than we otherwise might see it. Variable rate technology is key to sustainability and agriculture. Being able to know the levels of nutrients every individual acre or individual group of acres that you take a soil sample on being able to treat that different than the 100 other spots that you've taken across the field, it's leaps and bounds ahead of where we were 30, 40 years ago. With fewer farmers here in the United States, technology helps us be able to take care of more animals and take care of more land because the technology is helping us be more efficient with our time. Technology is that extra set of eyes and it remembers that data. So everything is data driven these days. It reminds you, okay, what happened last year, what happened two years ago, what happened three years ago? And without that data, our minds fail us. So having all those technology pieces and then being able to record it gives us an extra set of eyes and also extra memory that we otherwise wouldn't be able to do really on our own.
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Iowa Farm Bureau - Revolutionizing Farming
Explore the many ways that farmers in Iowa are using technology to be more productive and sustainable.Learn More: https://www.iowafarmbureau.com/

Explore the many ways that farmers in Iowa are using technology to be more productive and sustainable.

Learn More: https://www.iowafarmbureau.com/

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