Paul Schrimpf's Page

I was enjoying a bowl of Total Raisin Bran on Wednesday morning at the Hampton Inn in Mitchell, SD when my email pinged with the news: Precision Planting had accepted an offer to be purchased by Monsanto for $210 million, with performance incentives that could take it up to a quarter million. The deal is expected to be completed this summer.

For the two of you who missed it, here's a link to the…

We've been covering the Lightsquared vs. GPS story since it broke in early 2011 when the FCC granted the company permission to begin testing its 4G LTE wireless internet service on a bandwidth precariously close to GPS. The threat to GPS integrity unleashed a torrent of objections from the GPS industry, as well as companies and governmental agencies that rely on GPS, against the Lightsquared system moving forward.

After government agency testing determined that the interference was…

I’ve been fascinated with the rapid adoption of mobile technology, most recently driven by the tablet computer, since last July during the InfoAg Conference. In 2009 the iPad was still coming off the drawing board when the previous InfoAg Conference was happening. But by the 2011 event it was everywhere, seemingly surpassing laptop use in almost no time at all.

More recently, I was bumping around some ag technology blogs and came across a piece on mobile technology by Steve Cubbage.…

Precision technology has revolutionized practices throughout agriculture, from field guidance to application to planting. But while electronic connectivity and overnight delivery improved the soil testing process, there hasn’t been a major challenge to the way soil tests have been conducted since the proliferation of the dry test in the late 1980s.

A young company called Solum, Inc. is aiming to change that in the very near future. Founded by a group of Stanford physicists with ties…

A few years ago, we wrote about the emergence or radio frequency identification, or RFID, for use in managing equipment location and movement. It seemed that rolling stock-intensive operations from high value crop growers to cooperatives and ag dealerships would find the technology useful for locating and tracking equipment, and might at last lead to some growth in this technology.

Intelleflex, the company that deployed the technology, continues to provide RFID for this purpose, but…