The most exciting thing about precision agriculture, says Satshot President Lanny Faleide, is seeing farmers adopt it.

That was Faleide’s goal in attending the Develop with Deere conference in Kansas City last week. For a smaller company like Satshot, coming on board with John Deere’s Operations Center is like being able to make an app for Apple, he says. They can now get their satellite imagery to 50 percent of the market, allowing growers to take information from their LandScout mobile app and download it right in the tractor. From there a grower can analyze the data, build zones, merge them, choose a rate for each zone and be ready to apply in about five minutes.

Getting precision tech into the hands of more growers will be key to surviving tough economic times, Faleide believes. In fact, he tells Chuck Zimmerman he knows he can save every grower money on their application. Today’s farmers are eager to “take the bull by the horns,” and they expect more and more from companies all the time, but the reality is there is still a small adoption curve overall. That’s why Satshot has gone even further and actually offered their product with a John Deere label, strictly for Deere dealers.

This creates a channel for getting to customers, with machinery becoming the center place.  Satshot can focus on dealers, equipping them to help famers. “Four or five years ago we were still developing the value of imagery,” Faleide says. Now it’s time for growers to see what it can do.

Learn more in Chuck’s interview: [wpaudio url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/zimmcomm/jd-develop-16-faleide.mp3″ text=”Lanny Faleide, Satshot President”]

Photos from this year’s conference can be found here: Develop with Deere Photo Album