Uncovering Your Farm’s Hidden Yield Potential

by Jeff Hinen, Indiana Farmer and Field Product Specialist, Climate LLC

December 10, 2019

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What are you missing in your harvest data? Across hundreds or even thousands of acres, it’s easy to get lost in this sea of data points. It’s simply too much for one person to calculate. That’s what makes a digital tool a powerful ally. It never gets tired or distracted and when provided the right data, it never puts a decimal in the wrong place. The yield analysis tool in FieldView™ allows you to easily review crop performance from your fields to make decisions for next spring and can uncover trends in your harvest data that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. 

See which hybrid is performing the best on your operation. See which hybrid is performing the best on your operation.

See What the Combine Sees

While sitting in the cab and looking at the yield monitor, you get a general idea of what's performing and what isn’t. This is a great start. And filters within FieldView™ Cab app allow you to take a deep dive into analyzing yield without crunching the numbers yourself. You can see precisely where a hybrid yielded above average and where it struggled. 

Test Plots For Your Ground

Commercial research plots are a vital part of pushing agriculture forward and show the potential of the seed. But many farmers want to know how that seed could perform in their ground under their own management practices. The yield analysis tool makes it easier to turn every field into a test plot. With just the touch of a finger, you can quickly see which hybrid or variety won. Even when you’re testing a dozen different seeds, the cream always rises to the top through yield analysis. 

Scrutinize Your Go-To Hybrid

It’s great to have a workhorse hybrid, one that always delivers. But if you’re like the farmers I work with, you want to double check every season and see if it’s still performing well. A farmer I know in Ohio used yield analysis in FieldView to see how this one hybrid he loved was producing. He pulled up the list of average yield for each of his hybrids and reviewed the results over the past few seasons. To his surprise, the data showed that he had been losing significant bushels on that favorite hybrid over the last couple of years. 

It’s only natural to form habits over time. What’s great about data is its objectivity. You can evaluate all of your tendencies and ensure you’re making the best decision possible. 

The data showed that he had been losing significant bushels over the last few years.

I recall another customer I was working with who was trying to decide between two different hybrids. Based on what he observed on his yield monitor, he thought it couldn’t be more than a three or four bushel difference between both hybrids. To find out for sure, we pulled up the data on FieldView and took a look at specific combine passes. And guess what? We discovered there was actually a 22 bushel difference! You need to go deep on your yield data to find those slight changes that can make a big difference. Luckily, with the yield analysis tool, you don’t need to be a statistician to do it. 

Evaluate Every Input

Adopting a new crop protection product or seed treatment is always a tough call. But yield analysis and the FieldView™ Drive can make testing a fungicide or another product much easier. You can create check/test strips or review seed treatments and go back to see how well something worked at the end of harvest. Instinct will always be an essential part of agriculture, but you don’t always need to rely on intuition. Yield analysis provides an impartial look at what works and what doesn’t.

Let Your Farm’s Data Do the Talking

How many times have you had disagreements over which seed to select? There are often different opinions within your operation or from your agronomist or your seed dealer. Yield analysis across your entire operation is great for those 49–51 percent decisions. When you have every performance metric across every acre in one place, it puts the best decision in plain sight.  

Select the Best Seed for Your Farm Faster and More Seamlessly

Yield analysis can make the seed buying process smarter, more data-driven and save you time. And if you opt to provide your dealer access, before you even pick up the phone, they could already know what hybrids are working this season. This is one of the many benefits of sharing your FieldView account with your dealer. Everyone in agriculture talks about forging a true partnership with growers. Yield analysis puts action to these words. Of course you have total control over your data sharing. And if you elect to do so, your dealer can analyze your yield data and become an extension of your operation, even if they aren’t present for the day-to-day.

If you’d like to find out more about analyzing your yield with FieldView, check out the Getting Started section on our website. The knowledge center on climate.com also has a handy library of tips, best practices and how-to’s on every FieldView feature. And as always, our customer support team is just a phone call away: (888) 924-7475. Good luck and here’s to learning something new.

 

About the Author
Jeff Hinen is a Field Product Specialist for Climate LLC, covering Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and the Northeast region. He has experience in corn breeding, forage nutrition and a background as a board certified agronomist and crop scout. Jeff also manages his family farm along with his three brothers in Fort Wayne, Indiana.