Supplywise Podcast Episode 57 - Taking Control of Your Crops from Your Phone
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Agricultural Farmers can rely on irrigation tech like AgSense and Valley 365. This gives them the ability to control their crops through an app on their phone, tablet, or computer. Through the click of a button, they now have the ability to power and monitor their assets that help them maintain a job and career. In this episode, we dive deeper into the hardships of farming crops to better understand just how vital this technology has been for farmers - the unsung heroes we call our customers. Every 2 weeks we will be posting a podcast to educate on various SupplyWise topics to help you with your next project. Be sure to check out the product demonstration at youtube.com/mountainlandsupply.
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Supplywise Podcast
Hello and welcome to Supplywise, the what and why for residential commercial and industrial building supply. I'm your host Andrew Stevens of Mountainland Supply. And today we're talking with Brandon Rowley, Agricultural Irrigation Director. How is it going?. Great. Awesome thanks for having me. Yeah we're glad to have you back you. We had you on a couple weeks ago to talk about the centre pivot irrigation, and the savings that you can have from that and the time savings the money and especially the cash money savings.
And so we're here to talk a little bit today about something else that's gonna help save you a lot of time and help with some convenience.
The AgSense app. So that's A-G-S-E-N-S-E correct? Yes.
Right. So this allows you to control centre pivots in your irrigation through one app on your phone ringing computer. Correct?
Yes. What is AgSense? AgSense is a combination of two pieces. There's the hardware piece that sits at the pivot, and there's the software piece that sits on your phone or on the Internet. From their you can log in and see your pivot, see what it's doing, and change almost anything.
Mm hmm. What kind of things can you control with the AgSense App?
Centre pivots are what you think of when you talk about AgSense because that's what everybody does. It can do endless possibilities! We have moisture sensors that we put in the soil that tell what the moisture is doing. We put pressure sensors on pipelines to tell the pressure. We put sensors on power. We turn power off and on to tell the voltage from the app. We can speed variable frequency drives up, slow them down for pumps. We can monitor water levels in ponds and reservoirs and wells. There's really limitless.
Anything that you need to do and you can do. We put weather stations on these so they can watch what the weather is at their pivot, even though they live you know 20 miles away or farther. hat is awesome. You can have all kinds of control over what you're working on or what you're doing right.
Absolutely.
Yeah allows you to just keep a nice focus on it. Why use the AgSense app instead of the panel for Centre Pivot Irrigation? You can still use the panel but it's so convenient to use the AgSense App.
Just one story quick I had a customer that lived probably an hour maybe a little more from this pivot and it was an older pair that had some mechanical problems. He would turn it on and leave for the night and go home and then he would get back the next morning in an irrigation when it's 110 degrees outside in the middle of August. You don't have an extra day or half a day, you've got to keep these things running all the time. And so he would get home from ann hour drive and worry all night and not sleep very well.
Wondering if his pivot was was on or if it had shut off the next morning when he pulled back up he would see it either running or shut off. Sometimes it had shut off five minutes after he pulled away. And so we installed the AgSense on there. Number one, the savings from just diesel, from driving back and forth everyday. That paid for this device and subscription very shortly after purchasing. But the peace of mind that if it did shut off, he could turn it back on from his device. whatever reason he knew that it wasn't running and he had to go back to that failed to call a neighbour and say Could you run over and check this just the peace of mind.
This was huge for him. Absolutely. You mentioned the diesel savings, the time savings, and just being able to really know. He can sit there after getting home after an hour's drive and , "Uh, it's already off!" or something like that here and now we're able to be able to manage those problems before they become huge problems.
Yeah. What kind of reporting does the AgSense App report? The other big part of that is the reporting/. With this app, there is all kinds of reports you can punch into the website and pull up. For instance, how much water you've used for the year, how much electricity, how much this has ran. A lot of these Agricultural farmer guys are on strict water requirements! They're metered and so they have to be able to show at the end of the year what they used. It makes that the reporting easy for them.
So as we are recording there is another app that's coming up. It's not out yet but by the time this is posted it may have already come out. But it is something that's going to integrate with AgSense, which is Valley 365.
AgSense works as the control for center pivots and your equipment but Valley 365 brings in two more aspects that will help farmers manage their workload a lot better. What are those other two.
What is Valley 365?
So there's three components to Valley 365. We've talked about the equipment the monitoring and the controlling of the equipment. There's two more. Environment is one. So knowing what's going on, where your crops are, and weather stations soil monitoring. So you can monitor that. And then the third side is the agronomy which is where the analysis comes into play. Whether it's an agronomist or a computer. The future of this is going into the artificial intelligence where the computer has alogarithms that tell you when to water, what's best for the cropm. It is just not quite there there yet, but that's where this is going. With agronomy, to determine from the data that you're getting what you need to do next to grow better crops and to make more money ultimately.
Right. Yeah. And it gives you statistics to help you figure out. "Oh I need to water here more, and here less." It can help you project and predict what would be coming up in the future for sure.
Yeah it's a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach to farming. Typically farmers say if a hay crop gets too much water it starts to turn yellow in the leaves. Well at that point it's already got too much water. It stunted its growth, possibly even damaged the crop. If it doesn't get enough water then the crop starts to wilt. And at that point it's too late. I mean you can still save the crop somewhat. But you've lost some of your major production time, due to that. So we're gonna be proactive instead of reactive.
Mm hmm. Yeah. That's awesome.
What is precision irrigation? Being able to maximize your yield every year as opposed to hoping that you maximize. Your taking more control over your crops through technology like AgSense and Valley 360.
That's awesome. I love that. I like that precision irrigation, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Being able to know what you're going to grow. This is all about kind of taking back control.
There's so much in farming that is left up to environment and all that kind of stuff. This is taking back control so you can have a better idea of what you're going to be giving. Absolutely. Which is pretty great. And like you said, time savings and money savings is what you can put back into your farms and everything.
It seems like a really valuable tool for farmers.
Why should I buy AgSense? It really is helps you mine that bottom dollar and actually have a better quality of life. Rather than that guy driving back and forth to his pivot, he gets to go to his kids baseball game and take his wife on that date that he hasn't done in 20 years. Score some points there.
There you go. Maybe be home in time for dinner, for once. Instead of reheating in the microwave and not worrying the whole time. Exactly.
Thanks for coming on and chatting with us. Yeah. No problem. When does Valley 365 come out? Valley 365 is set to come out in March of 2020.
I'm not sure when it's gonna be coming out but if this is podcast comes out in March make sure you check in with your Mountainland Supply Representative to see how the app is going and making sure that they can help you get that integrated into your farm as quickly as possible.
By all accounts, it sound like it is going to pretty great. So find your Mountainland Rep. You can find other products like this at mountainlandsupply.com. You can find this podcast at mountainlandsupply.com/supplywise or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Check out the video portion of this podcast at YouTube.com/mountainlandsupply and be sure to check in each week to find out more about the products and services that make you SUPPLYWISE.
