SureTrack Senior Vice President, Neal Dilawri, joined the CoffeeTalk line-up to discuss his role in leading the SureTrack team to deliver technology a farmer can use in every facet of their operation. “My position, and the mission of SureTrack, is to develop a connected farm on one independent platform,” Dilawri said, “Within our organization we have agronomists, developers, engineers working on one common platform to provide a tool that allows a farmer to operate on one independent plaftform. And the opportunity to deliver this platform to a grower, allowing them to get all functionality from seed to harvest and even financials in one place, is a huge opportunity and something that we haven’t really seen executed in the agriculture industry today.”
Today, SureTrack provides a traceability and management solution for around 90% of farm operations and is in the midst of capturing more facets of ag industry opportunities, such as imagery, Dilawri says.
“For us, when we integrate another tool or look at capturing another data set on the farm, we are looking at the best partnership opportunities to make that happen so that we can deliver the best value and functionality to a the grower,” he says.
Knowing breakeven numbers on the farm has never been more important than it is today, and as Dilawri shares, the industry is no longer positioned for pen-and-paper record keeping to be successful. Flexibility, the ability to pivot on the fly, is what the industry demands today and SureTrack offers that opportunity, noting the conversations US growers engaged in this summer when dicamba was pulled as a weed control solution.
“Farming today is big business, breakeven and return-on-investment (ROI) are key to any business and we have had technology to capture that information in-place for decades within other business verticals,” says Dilawri. “Today’s agriculture is seeing narrower margins and variability in all of the inputs relevant to an operation’s business plan: chemical, seed, fertilizer costs; labor—everything that an operation needs to be competitive—can be captured, stored and reported on through SureTrack. More than capturing information, this platform puts numbers behind different management options to give a grower a real-time cost analysis of going with a different product.”
The key drivers behind the platform’s on-farm functionality and adoption are simplicity and ease of use. SureTrack realizes the value of a full system of support to help a grower get started, transfer data and input information. Growers learn the SureTrack platform and how to leverage the system to make management decisions through the guidance of a SureTrack Customer Support Coach. By the time the first year’s crop plan is entered, a grower has the knowledge base needed to build out additional plans and manipulate input information for real-time cost and application comparison analysis. If not, a Coach is always only a phone call away to provide free and reliable guidance.
Additional to the use of the full system, Dilawri says that some growers join the SureTrack family for specific functionalities offered within the system.
“We have a lot of growers who come onboard for one portion of the SureTrack platform and then expand out over time. It’s really common to see a grower come onboard for the agronomy tool to use the scouting tool, upload georeferenced points for weed identification and control. You don’t have to use anything else on the platform if you don’t want to. SureTrack lets them use what they wish to use at the time the wish to use it without being obligated to input information into the other pillars,” he says. “And as with everything we do at SureTrack, all of the information a grower inputs as well as the data that information generates is owned and controlled by them.”
For more on the SureTrack platform and how the tools move a grower away from “ballparking” breakeven numbers to knowing exact breakeven and ROI, watch the Knowing Breakeven Numbers CoffeeTalk webinar here.
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