Tom and his wife got into a big fight one night. As bedtime drew nearer, neither of them was speaking to the other.
This was normal; the couple frequently went two or three days in matrimonial silence. However, on this particular day, Tom needed help. He was supposed to leave early to catch an important flight for work. He needed to wake up at 4:30, and being a very heavy sleeper, he normally relied on his wife to wake him.
Cleverly, so he thought, while his wife was in the bathroom, Tom wrote on a piece of paper: 'Please wake me up at 4:30am - I have an important flight to catch'.
He put the note on his wife's pillow, then turned over and went to sleep.
Tom awoke the next morning and looked at the clock. It was 8:00am. Enraged that he'd missed his flight, he was about to search for his errant wife to give her a piece of his mind when he spotted a hand-written note on his bedside cabinet.
The note said: 'It's 4:30am - get up.'
There are two basic lessons you can pull from this story:
- If you're married, make up with your spouse before bed.
- Managing relationships requires that you do a lot more than just silently leave a note.
Most farm-based companies cite "relationships" as one of their primary points of differentiation, but very few technology companies are building tools to help facilitate these relationships.
Sure, there are certain farm management tools that claim to help you manage relationships better, but one quick look under the hood shows that most of these tools pass information just like Tom and his wife - there might be a note there, but it's not being used or adding any value.
- If relationships are so important in agriculture, why isn't there more technology being built to facilitate their creation and development?
- How can technology help farmers and their advisors manage processes and change? How can we bring customer, farm, or field information to the organizational level?
- Can we digitize generational farm knowledge to store it in an actionable location for the farmer, the advisor, and their downstream partners?
These were some of the questions we set out to answer when we built out our Signal suite of digital tools.
We built the Signal platform as a system that helps you monitor real-time success factors across your product supply chain to maximize yields, profitability, and sustainability. The technology works with existing tools to quickly gather data from our Beacon sensor, satellites, weather, soil, and field operations and integrates it with powerful models and near real-time field insights to help you optimize decisions and improve outcomes.
The result is an easy-to-use system you can deploy to present critical information in a simple way so you can make decisions quickly and get on with your day.
As farmers started to use this technology to manage their operations, we started to see a real need for tracking historical choices to help onboard new employees, expand relationships with advisors, and pass down critical information to the next generation. After a few of these conversations, we decided to build AcrePlaybook, an extension of our Signal platform that protects and integrates the history of your organizational decision-making on every acre you manage.
At the same time, some farmers and advisors we worked with wanted the ability to do more with their data, so we built Advanced Analytics. This tool is designed to take your experience to the next level, unlocking detailed insights through pinpointed analysis, enhanced charting, synthesized data, customizable dashboards, and more.
With this full suite of technology, we’re enabling more than just idle field notes that are made once and never seen again; we are building an ecosystem that allows farmers and their downstream partners to communicate more effectively, make real-time decisions, and create a flywheel of continuous improvement on the farm and throughout the agricultural product supply chain.
Learn more about how The Signal Platform, Acre Playbook, and Advanced Analytics from Soiltech Wireless can help you turn your farm data into doing today.
