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Kasey Bryant / Kasey_Bryant_Edit_1_Crop_Podcast.mp3
Kasey Bryant: Keith asked me to kind of speak about <inaudible> in agriculture, and GPS use on our farm and then also kind of how we're collecting all of this data, we're putting it to use, and we're starting to make new management decision. So, before I get started I kind of wanted to give a little bit of history about our operation, and what my role is there. So, like I said, we're a third generation farm Bryant Ag Enterprise. We actually operate as three different farming entities, but that's what we're now, the face of our farm is Bryant Ag Enterprise. My great-grandfather actually bought our home farm, during the great depression, and but he was never a producer. So, my grandfather graduated high school, he decided he wanted to be a grain producer and my grandfather, or my great-grandfather said to him "Well, you'll have to go work for somebody else first, before I rent this land to you." So my grandpa went and worked for another local farmer for a few years, while my great-grandfather rented the farm to somebody else. And, ever since then, he's kind of taken that mindset, when it's come to succession planning. And my father actually went and worked for a tomato farmer in Kentucky, when he was finished with high school. And then I worked actually for a large investor firm in Southern Ohio, before I came back to the farm. So, we all kind of brought back a different experience from other producers, or other people who had industries like ours, and I think that makes our family very special. So after my grandfather, my father, my uncle succeeded him, and then today, myself and then my older cousin, Keith, are the third generation partners in our farm. So, we're excited for the transition. I know that I am one of four girls, so when my dad had my last youngest sister, I think a little piece of him died inside knowing that he was building this operation and he had nobody to hand it off to. So, when I came to him, my job <inaudible> actually went in for a year, and a lot like Billy said, after the day, I just came home and I remember telling mom "Dad is superman, like he is the accountant, he runs the tractor, we worked-- we <inaudible> a piece in the shop, we did all these things, and I want to be him." So, my mom must have told my dad that night, because the next day, he came to me, I remember at breakfast before I went to school, he was like "So I heard you want to come back to the family operation?" I was like "Maybe." So, my first day on the farm after I came back full-time, I think mom said that, that was probably one of his most exciting days, because he realized he had a successor in the family. So, we work really well together. My role in the farm, I actually work directly underneath my father. I guess we consider him the CEO of our business. So, I work closely with him, when it comes to working the land partners. That's a really long process, to kind of transfer over those relationships, but that was one of the first things that we started when I came back to the operation. I do a lot of financial management, and then also, I'm in charge of all of our information technology. So, I deal pretty much on a daily basis with precision agriculture and collecting data and finding ways to put it to use, and make sure that we're managing our farm properly. This is <inaudible> a few ways that we do that, as far as GPS use. We obviously have auto steering on all of our equipment, that's kind of old news. My father's a very forward thinking man, so when that came out on the market, I think we were like the first ones in our area to use it. I remember people thinking like, "Your dad is crazy, how does he think that these tractors are going to steer themselves?" And, you know, now today, everybody's doing it. So pretty much how that works, if you're not familiar, you import a field boundary, they go out-- our employees and operators go out and they plant the <inaudible> and the set what's called an AB line. So, they have to go up and down the field one time, and then after that, it pretty much does its thing, and we don't overplant any of the area. This is really good for us, because we actually roll our equipment every single year with John Deere, so we're only allowed to have so many hours of each piece of equipment, so we know that we're being the most efficient with our equipment in the field. So this is a feature that we really like. Also, through Apex, John Deere's software program we're able to grab off of the pieces of equipment planting maps, which we use to report for insurance now, which has been really huge for us, we're required to report our planted acres. Because it's really hard to report, or plant the number of acres that FSA says are tillable acres in the filled, whether it's due to fence line, tree rows or whatever the reason is. A lot of times, we have a 100 acre field, we're not actually planting that total 100 acres. So since-- now with precision ag, since we're able to report the actual planned acres from the piece of equipment, it's a lot more precise and then we're only purchasing crop insurance on the acres that we've actually put in the ground. And, as an operation, we do purchase the highest levels of crop insurance, we're at 85 percent level. So this has kind of been, I guess if you want to think about it, a good risk management tool and cut the cost savings because you're not paying for something that you're not actually doing. I've had people ask "Do you want to be able to report your productivity reports from your harvest monitors, for the yield monitors in the combines," and actually we do not. The past year I've done some research comparing harvest monitors and the combine compared to grade scales monitors compared to truck scale tickets, and our combine monitors seem to be the most off. We found up to a five percent difference when it comes to those, and the reason of that is because the technology just isn't there yet. At least in John Deere, that's the only type of equipment that we run, that you have to recalibrate your equipment multiple times a day, or we found every time you change a corn variety, we're having to recalibrate those combines. And sometimes you just don't have that time in the day to do it. So since we have two other places to trace yield from, we just have kind of always used our scale tickets from <inaudible> as kind of the Bible, that's what we report from. As far as what else we do for precision agriculture, we do variable rate, our dry fertilizer. So we work with a company called Truepointe, and they come in and they grid soil sample of our field. So, they do each field every other year, but they're soil sampling of one of our fields every year. And, they come and they probe the field, they send off the soil sample to-- we get the results with the soil sample and yield history and then the aerial imagery, they come up with basically application rates on a map, and we <inaudible> our dry fertilizer. So they send us those map, we import it to our equipment, and then we spread all our dry fertilizer. So, as the equipment's going across the field, we're spreading that at an 80-foot width, they said we can do 90, but we don't want to push our limits. So we're doing an 80-foot width, that tracker's feeding the application rate to the spreader, and as it changes, the rate changes as it crosses the field, that spreader applies what that map says. So, as stewards of the land, we want to always make sure that we're putting back whatever we're taking out with the crop. So, this has been a really, really big tool for us, because obviously different areas of the field, you might be taking out more from the soil, and you want to make sure that we're always a the highest production level with that soil. So, being able to veritably <inaudible> the field has been really, really big for our operation. And we feel like our soil's at its optimal growing plant at the beginning of each growing season. So after this, the things that we're doing with precision agriculture GPS use, well probably the newest feature that we're excited about, when I returned to the farm after I worked for the large investor in Southern Ohio, basically what I did for him was kind of his right hand woman, and he would have me benchmark all his properties against each other. And so, after I'd spend days doing it, he'd say "Oh, I want to sell this-- I want to sell property for-- you know, another one for us to buy, but I need to move some money, so which one do I sell?" So, I would run numbers and benchmark and say "These are your lowest 10 percent, these are your highest 10 percent for profit margin." And then, that's how he'd make decisions. So when I came back to the farm, you know, my dad says "What do you have to offer that's new?" And I told him, I said "Why can't we benchmark our farms against each other, and really start managerial accounting down to a field level?" And like I said earlier, my father's-- I think he's a very forward thinking man, and he said "Kasey, I've been wanting do that, and we actually did that in-house, but it took so much time that the information we were receiving was already too late." I already had the conversations with our land partners, and we had kind of figured out what our rent prices were going to be that year, after the numbers came back from our accountant. So, we kind of did away with that. So, that's kind of what started us on our data capturing venture together. So, my whole first year, I kind of went all over, digging the different software programs, or companies that basically would say that they can help us capture our data, and put it to use. The big questions was is that, we had all these software companies that they can only do one thing, they could monitor the weather, or they could help us track our inventory, help us track our grain inventory, or they could, you know, use our equipment information. But we wanted everything in one place, because if we did all these different types of software, we were kind of back to square one already, where we're-- we have a billion Excel spreadsheets, that's kind of how my dad operated our farm. And then we would just go from all these different Excel spreadsheets, so all these different software programs. So, that's kind of how we came in contact with Granular Ag, which is our new software program that we use. It's basically a farm management program that came to us, in March of 2014. So, it was right before planting season, they flew in, they were located in San Francisco California. So, they flew in, and I remember they came in, and they obviously weren't farmers, they were programmers. And so I remember sitting down and they were all dressed really nice and we're all there in our flannel shirts and boots, and it was kind of a divide at the table. But the whole time, every time they said "What do you need? What do you need?" And the whole time we explained to them how we ran our organization, I mean they were all on their computers typing. And finally, my dad stopped in the middle of the conversation, and he said "Let me ask you a question," he says "How many of you have the experience in agriculture?" And none of them did. And then, their CEO of their company came back and said "Well, we don't want to have experience, we want to learn from you guys because you're the ones that are doing it." And so right there, when we were like "Sign us up." So basically what we did for all of 2014, we beta tested with Granular Ag, along with seven other farms across the United States, and we kind of helped them build their software. They had a harvest module done already, but then after that they kind of had a two-year timeline of what they wanted to do, and they said, "You know we're working with farms all across the US, who all operate differently with different crops, who have different workflows. But we want the information from you, and we want to produce something that is usable to a lot of different producers across the United States." It's kind of taken us from a-- it's completely changed our workflow, so now all of our operators work off of an app on their iPhones, so everybody has an iPhone in our operation. All of our managers of our different divisions, they all had an iPad and that's how they send their work orders. Whenever you're in a piece of equipment, so for example right now if they're harvesting the field, the person in the combine, the person in the grain cart, and all of the semis, drivers will have a work order. And then they basically complete the work order and transfer all the information that they see either on their monitor, or normally how they fill out truck scale ticket, and they put it into the work order on the phone. And then that transfers over to the desktop version, where then it's all in one place, it's field level data, and then I sit and make sure it's all correct, and pretty much spend my day analyzing and seeing how the fields are produced. This really helped our office, I would say we're almost paperless now. We still do keep track of all our scale tickets, and information like that, just for the sense that it's a new program, and if an auditor were to come in and they wanted to see traceability, we have both. But we did have a claim in wheat this summer, and to however we want to report by. So we normally just report by the truck scale tickets, and then it's going to-- just because we feel like that that's the most accurate yield. So then it filters down, and when we had our claim, and I had to send all these truck scale tickets, normally I'd have to go to my box, and dig out the field, and dig out all the tickets back, <inaudible> that field and then he would either have to come pick them up, or I'd have to go drop them off and it's a really long process. But, this year I was able to copy the <inaudible> report, send it in an email, and I was done. And, my life has just been a hundred times easier. So everybody is happy, in the organization. Basically, like I said, it's capturing all of our data. They just recently came out with a new release, where they do do the field level profitability report. They are able to through managerial accounting, come up with profitability reports for each field, so we're able to budget based off of our enterprise level and then, energy level and then now farm level, and field level. So this has been really big to our land owners. We do a lot of flex leases. I know we talked about the two different type of leases that we do, yesterday was cash rents and crop shares. Basically flex leasing, if you're not familiar with it, it's a lot like a cash rent, you have a base rent price, and then depending on how the field performs, that land partner will receive a bonus at the end of the year, which this has been really beneficial to us going into hard times, because we're not really having to change our rents, or having to have those hard conversations with our land partners. But, for the most part, they want us to farm their ground, they want to see us succeed. So, if I'm able tom come to them and say "Hey, <inaudible> who's always been in the bottom two percent of our total numbers of fields, what can we do to kind of adjust this to make sure that we're still going to be able to be profitable in farming the grounds, for a few years to come?" And I've showed this to almost all of our landowners, we have a landowner appreciation dinner every year, that we just hosted in September and this was pretty much the biggest thing that we went over. And afterwards, I probably had a line of people that were like "Can we see our field?" There's level data that's connected to every single field, the guys can take notes or pictures in the field. So we have a field management crew that geos in after we harvest the ground and cleans it up if there's any rocks or things that need to be removed, trees that need turned back so all that's logged. So this year, when I send our bonuses out, I'm going to be able to send a field level report of everything from roadside mowing, to planting dates, to harvest records, to anything that we've done on their property and give that to them, so that they can see exactly what's been done throughout the year. The data is huge when it comes to our operation, we use it every single day, and I think it became even more important when I-- like I said, when I came back to the farm, because I think my dad had been looking for something like this, but it's a great way to transfer knowledge. Producing is really-- you know, things only happen one time a year. So, I said to my dad one day, because he was frustrated with me, during harvest I was out running com, and he said "I thought you could slash rates?" "Well, dad I've only done it 30 time." And he said "Well, I've only done 28," or whatever the-- and I was like "Well you're right." So this is a great way to capture data, and to be able to look back and see you know, "Why are we making these decision?" "Well, five years ago, this is what happened, this is the cause and effects, so this is how we're going to do it this year." So, as Keith and I start to take over some of the roles, I'm super excited about this, because it's--our operating has grown, compared to when my father first took over and it's going to take a lot longer for me to learn all areas, but I think that with Granular, with software partners like this, it's going to allow me to know a little bit about everything, but not be an expert at all of this.