Working side-by-side with farmers accelerates innovation and moves agriculture forward
Blog by: INTENT
The agriculture industry is moving faster than ever. With unprecedented advances in automation, data collection and connectivity, new innovations are emerging constantly. Many of these come with the promise of helping farmers overcome the challenges of feeding a growing global population while addressing consumer demands for sustainability.
Unfortunately, most new products fall short of delivering the value they were designed to provide, partly because it can be difficult to find the right fit for a product in a market with vast variability across farms, regions, and seasons. That’s why INTENT works side-by-side with farmers — to help ensure the practicality and relevancy of new technologies and solutions, while understanding real, tangible benefits for the farmers who would invest in them.
“At INTENT, we take a farmer-centric approach by engaging with and conducting field trials with farmers to fully understand what they need, what works and what doesn’t,” said INTENT Chief Executive Officer Randy Barker. “Everyone else is talking about the farmer, but they haven’t actually talked to a farmer. We help our clients connect to farmers in the real world.”
With a vision of helping farmers realize the full potential of agricultural innovation, INTENT conducts commercial-scale field trials with farmers on behalf of its agribusiness clients to see how new products work (or don’t work) in the field.
With advanced technology capabilities, INTENT collects, interprets and standardizes agronomic data to deliver powerful, actionable insights with scale, speed, and precision. These detailed insights help agribusiness clients make any necessary changes and find the best fit for a product before it hits the market, giving clients and farmers confidence in how it will perform.
“With the combined power of our team’s experience and our advanced technology capabilities, we are able to quickly and efficiently analyze field-level data and apply it to the right situations to ensure that new products and technologies will truly benefit farmers and the agriculture industry as a whole,” said Barker.
A farmer-centric innovation process
To accelerate the farmer-centric innovation process, INTENT will be expanding its technology solutions and capabilities with the launch of the new INvision Trials software platform. This expansion revolutionizes field data collection and helps ensure that INTENT will continue to deliver consistent, quality data and powerful, actionable insights to its agribusiness clients and network of over 1,000 FarmerTrials participants.
By testing leading-edge technology in real-world scenarios, the INTENT FarmerTrials Network of farmers across the United States, Canada, and South America accelerates the adoption of new innovations in the agriculture industry. FarmerTrials participants have the desire to help move agriculture forward and are on the leading edge of the industry as the first to field-test new innovations across multiple scenarios. With the assistance of the INTENT team, farmers also receive a detailed summary of the performance of the products they tested at year-end. This summary helps verify the benefits of each product and can be used to inform future decisions about which products and technologies they choose to adopt on their own operations.
“Farmers are trying to solve a problem on their farm. New innovations can help farmers solve their problems and overcome challenges,” said Barker. “Whether it’s to be more productive, more sustainable or something else entirely, the quantifiable feedback provided through INvision Trials helps farmers and agribusinesses know when and how to use an innovation. That’s what ultimately results in successful adoption.”
Backed by the power of the Apogee infrastructure, INvision Trials allows agribusiness clients to connect directly with farmers, not only making use of their field data but also gathering important feedback on perceptions and user experience. This information builds the understanding of how new products fit in with existing technologies and helps position the new products appropriately. Gathering data and feedback directly from farmers allows agribusinesses to make informed decisions about whether an innovation is viable for commercialization and how it may need to be adjusted before it is fully launched into the market.
Iowa Farmer, Ben Lehman inspects his corn field.
Planting in the dark, thanks to technology advancements.
Helping farmers understand and use their data
While most farm management systems offer a means of creating valuable data for an individual farm, the data needs to be cleaned and standardized before it can be combined in any meaningful way. Just like there is a standard way to interpret blood pressure readings from nurses who use different equipment, there also needs to be a way to collect and interpret field data from multiple farms, all with unique equipment and systems. That’s why INTENT created Apogee, a technology infrastructure designed to manage, process and standardize agronomic data at scale. It allows all farmers, no matter the system they are using, to submit their own performance data, including their operation into the innovation process.
“New technologies are starting to empower more of an understanding of what’s happened on the farm, and how that data can help us predict the future,” said Barker. “It will change decision-making at the farm level. Innovators need to be aware that farmers will be using data technology to make decisions more quickly and efficiently in the future.”
By partnering with INTENT, FarmerTrials Network participants are provided with data-backed insights to gain an educated understanding of new technologies and products before anyone else.
Data is the key to successful innovation
Farmers don’t just want to know why an innovation is beneficial, they want the data to back it up.
“Assessing and understanding data helps farmers feel confident in their decisions,” said Barker. “At a time where data-driven decision-making is commonplace, the more useful data you can provide to farmers, the more credible your innovation will be.”
By collecting geospatial data and offering a visualization of all aspects of a farmer’s production process, INvision Trials shows where, when and how new products and technologies will best fit across a widely diverse agriculture landscape. By including farmers in the innovation process, INTENT reduces the risks that come with investing in something new – for their clients, and the farmers their clients ultimately hope to serve. This scalable system delivers real and reliable in-field data and insights with speed and agility to help make data-driven decisions that lead not only to increased agriculture efficiency, improved yields and reduced production costs, but also a reduction of risk and clear profit opportunities.