Walther Farms, a potato operation that covers more than 12,000 acres across the country, has been working with iCropTrak to develop a potato template for their farm management platform. Josh Reeves, with Walther Farms, worked with iCropTrak to develop the template and spoke with Chuck Zimmerman while at the Potato Expo.
With Walther Farms covering a large amount of acres across the country, Josh was tasked with finding a crop data management system for Walther Farms when he came on board. They sought a platform to connect all the different farms and employees across the countries in terms of reporting, results, and information distribution.
Walther Farms is helping iCropTrak develop a quick set of tools that other potato farmers can utilize on their operation. iCropTrak, with the experience that Walther Farms has had using their potato template, will be able to get the data management system onto a potato farm and have them up and running very quickly.
“There is a lot of opportunity, especially in potatoes, as there are a lot of systems that create things for corn and grain. We’re trying to help iCropTrak develop a quick set of tools to get into any potato growers hands. They can jump in and be doing things it took us a year to learn, they can be doing it right away.”
With potatoes being a subsurface crop, they’re managed very differently. “There are a lot of things with potatoes being a tuberous crop that were going to look at them a lot differently than you would soybeans and corn. [With iCropTrak] we’re able to look at the different ways we test the yield at different points throughout the year and we’re then able to use those as predictors for what the yield will be at harvest.
Putting the data collection throughout the year into the tool and being able to use the historical data to figure out what our results might be. That gets the information in the hands of the agronomist, the farm manager, and leadership earlier so we can plan ahead.”
The nature of the iCropTrak farm management app is that adjustments can be easily made. Walther Farms has found value in easily being able to adjust and adapt the tool for their operation and potatoes specifically. Developing the template for potato farmers still offers freedom and flexibility for what each individual grower is using and tracking.
For more information, head to the iCropTrak website.
Listen to the rest of Chuck’s interview with Josh here: [wpaudio url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/zimmcomm/josh-reeves.mp3″ text=”Josh Reeves, Walther Farms”]