A new benchmarking tool has been developed by FarmLink that can help farmers get the fullest potential from their operations.

“We’re helping a farmer identify where he should go find yield in a cost effective manner and other areas where he’s doing great,” says company president Scott Robinson about the tool they call TrueHarvest, which uses objective data to show a farm’s full range of performance potential, drilled down to a 150-square-foot area called a micro-field.

“The reason they’re 150 square feet is because our combine collection is done on a fleet of about 200 combines, the combine cutting head is about 30 feet wide, travels about 3.5 miles an hour and we collect data every second,” he said. “That data is used to correlate across the other 67 billion micro fields that we’ve developed across the United States that represents all corn, wheat and soybeans.”

According to TrueHarvest calculations, American farmers could have produced approximately 1.6 billion more bushels of corn and 250 million more bushels of soybeans in 2013, realizing approximately $11 billion in additional revenue. “If farmers increased their performance up to the 75th percentile on average for corn and soybeans, that’s how much money is on the table,” said Robinson.

FarmLink was at the recent Commodity Classic talking about TrueHarvest and getting good reception from farmers according to Robinson, who said they really appreciated that the service was independent and did not require them to provide the company with private data. “It’s really agronomic benchmarking that we’re doing, but it’s for the individual farmer,” he said.

Find out more in this interview with Robinson and in the video below from the MyTrueHarvest.com website. [wpaudio url=”http://zimmcomm.biz/machinerylink/farmlink-scott.mp3″ text=”Interview with Scott Robinson, FarmLink”]