All Blog Posts (95)

Received the following from the Coalition To Save Our GPS looking for individuals and businesses to send in comments during the latest FCC comment period regarding the Lightsquared situation. Here is the communique and call to action:

HELP SAVE OUR GPS!  Please Submit your Comments to the FCC by March 1

Background: We have very important, and encouraging, news to report on the LightSquared saga. On February 15, the Federal…

http://www.ideaggroup.com/blog/10613901/do-you-have-an-ideal-crop-production-planning-software-package-heres-what-mine-would-do

We recently conducted a survey of ag retailers on their use of mobile technology (smartphones and tablets). One of the questions we asked retailers is what type of ag-related apps they use for business purposes. Not surprisingly, weather was the clear-cut No. 1 choice of app, with 80% of respondents indicating they use a weather-related app.

Fourth on the list (after agronomic and commodity pricing) of ag-related apps used was precision agriculture. Nearly 20% of ag retailers said…

In a blog post last year, I talked about Kinze's autonomy project and shared the company's view that as autonomy technology moves toward commercialization, we would see equipment get smaller in a way that takes full advantage of an autonomous fleet of vehicles.

This may be some years away, but the influence of autonomous (unmanned and remotely monitored) equipment technology development is…

At the recent Precision Agriculture Summit in Jamestown ND, I got to spend time with a number of folks in the area championing precision technology in the state ... and some even agreed to submit to a video recording. Melinda Martin was one of the good sports who shared her knowledge and perspective on "film," and it was great to finally meet someone who I met first here on the Network.

We first chatted over a topic which is a particular passion for Melinda -- the creation of…

I recently got the opportunity to attend a Precision Agriculture Summit in North Dakota, and it was really a tremendous experience. The inaugural event, hosted by North Dakota Farmers Union and the Red River Valley Research Corridor, drew more than 150 attendees and by all accounts, they were attentive and eager to learn. My friend Dr. Terry Griffin, who  just announced that he was leaving the University of Arkansas to take a senior position at CrescoAg, a Tennessee-based ag consulting…

There were a number of interesting technology tidbits that crossed my desk this week, so rather than hitting on just one I decided to cover a few of them. Here they are, in no particular order:

LightSquared Update:

On the political side, Sen. Charles Grassley is continuing to reconstruct the events surrounding the granting of a conditional waiver by FCC to LightSquared to begin building out and testing its system. By most accounts, the waiver was…

I had the opportunity to sit in the afternoon sessions of the cotton precision researcher meeting while here at the Beltwide Cotton Conferences in Orlando. When I first started covering precision agriculture 13 years ago as a relative newby to agriculture in general, it was puzzling to me that a complex and input-rich crop like cotton would lag in technology adoption. And while I came to understand some of the reasons why the uptake of technology would be a slower build than the Midwest, I…

The week between Christmas and New Year is usually great opportunity to review plans and travel during the first quarter of the year ahead. And by the looks of things, the "PrecisionAg Express" will be making a number of stops this year. Myself and my team, along with Elliott Nowels, director of the PrecisionAg Institute, hope to be seeing many of you at an event sometime before the first seed hits the ground this spring.

Next week, Elliott and I will be attending the…

Last week was a very active week in the battle between Lightsquared and GPS companies over what to do about interference issues with Lightsquared's proposed deployment of a wireless high-speed Internet service. We provided the 60-second update in this space last Thursday, which ended with the government stating that Lightsquared's broadcast indeed does cause significant…

Well, we continue to monitor the Lightsquared vs. GPS situation very closely on the Network, and it was a busy couple of weeks in the continuing regulatory saga that’s been keeping all of us in agriculture (and every other industry that utilizes high accuracy GPS) in suspense.

Fortunately, there have been several well written stories providing all of the torrid details. So in an effort to present this in a format that fits both the busy precision ag practitioner and the folks who…

On Dec. 5, I grabbed a rental car and headed south from our home office in Cleveland to the Columbus suburb of Reynoldsburg to sit in on a governmental working group meeting. Normally I wouldn’t be looking forward to something like this, but this meeting was different.

Hosted by Ohio’s Department of Agriculture (ODA), Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA), and Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), the Directors’ Agricultural Nutrients and Water Quality Working Group was formed in…

New technology is often surrounded by hype and misperceptions that make it harder for us to use effortlessly. I know this from experience. I've spent the better part of 2011 helping our business team implement a new Web content management system. The entire process has been so long and drawn out it has tested my patience and mettle, but the vast majority of it has been rewarding. Ultimately, we hope to provide you with richer, more relevant content on our Web sites, while at the same time…

After two full days here in frigid Las Vegas at the AgGateway Annual Meeting and Conference, I’ve pretty much had my fill trying to absorb all the conversations and share some measure of what I learned. Frankly, that will take some time and mental digestion … more than I can present here. But I thought I should comment on a couple of things I observed:

Attendance at the conference topped 225, a new record for the fifth consecutive year. This was only my second year of attending and…

When it comes to the development of precision agriculture data standards, John Mann has been through the mill on more than one occasion and come up empty. But a pilot project funded by his current employer, John Deere, and supported by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, and AGCO, could be his best last chance to move the industry in that direction.

Deere has invested $225,000 on the six-month development project using ag software developer ZedX, Inc. as the contractor. The first version…

Dan Frieberg, president of Premier Crop Systems LLC, can be best described as an advocate for data in agriculture.  They’ve built their business over 14 years on helping growers to understand and unlock the power of the data they collect. And while they’ve got some terrific case studies among their own clients, there are still many growers who haven’t even taken the first step.

I caught up with Dan and chatted with him about their business, the state of data in agriculture, and what…

After 25 years of service at the University of Kentucky, Dr. Scott Shearer is back home again. On July 1, Scott returned to The Ohio State University, the institution where he earned all three of his degrees, leaving behind a department chairmanship and a highly regarded body of work and research at UK.

Now nearly four months into his new job as professor and chair of the department of Food, Agriculture and Biological Engineering at OSU, I thought it would be a good time to check in…

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from Rick Greene, the precision agriculture manager at Missouri cooperative MFA, Inc. I had just completed an article that we used as the cover story for CropLife magazine that featured MFA’s precision program, so I thought he might be following up with me on something in the story.

I was disappointed that conflicting travel kept me from getting to Josh McGrath’s Mid-Atlantic field day this past summer. Josh works at the University of Maryland, and he and his team have become the de facto precision agriculture coordinators for the region, which includes the closely watched and highly regulated Chesapeake Bay area.

When I called this week, Josh talked about the locals being immersed in a difficult harvest. “The hurricane knocked corn down virtually flat, and it’s…