Farming Video | Real-Time Field Data with CropX at Matt Miles' Farm

00:00:00 Technology that brings the conditions happening in your fields in real time to your device. That's what we're talking about here at 00:00:08 Miles Farms Field Day. I've got Preston Martha with Crop X, that's the maker of this device right here. 00:00:13 I'm joined by Matt Miles, obviously proprietor to this farm and his agronomist with live Oak agronomy. 00:00:18 Jacob, apple, Berry, we talked about this at Commodity Classic. This big, silly looking screw goes down to the ground 00:00:24 and it keeps an eye on your moisture. It doesn't have to be integrated to this device that's right over here, but it can be Jacob, apple, 00:00:31 Berry gave me a really good tutorial showing me all the data then that's on his phone in real time. 00:00:36 We talked about the moisture level in the field and I said, but going back to this, what does this do? You said this 00:00:41 Particular device takes care of radiation, rainfall, temperature, and wind speed and direction. Obviously you're using wind speed 00:00:48 and direction early in the season. Whenever you're trying to spray to keep everything in check, you're looking at rainfall every day to make sure 00:00:54 that you either don't have to irrigate, which integrates with that, or you've got the right amount of rainfall 00:00:58 to get your crops up in the spring using radiation, looking at sunlight quality to give you better photos, census opportunities. Alright. 00:01:04 Preston, you corrected me when I called it a weather station or I called it something you said. Actually it is. What is this? Well, 00:01:12 I forget exactly what you used there whenever you were talking about it with the phone, but the main property, 00:01:16 what we're talking about here is using the hardware, all these pieces to come into a, an easy to use comprehensive platform that we've got 00:01:24 for your phone works, iPad and web based on your computers, How many of these do you Have? 00:01:28 Uh, we've got about 20 out right now. Okay. You're Kind of in the experimental phase. Obviously a lot of folks are gonna be questioning skeptical 00:01:35 coming from the old days when it was, uh, a wind sock and a rain gauge. Every farm you farmed, the data is now is 00:01:41 quite a bit more advanced. Oh, absolutely. And the, and the technology and what we're doing today. The weather station alone, there's so many different 00:01:48 herbicide tolerant crops out there now and they're all planted amongst each other. You know, wind's a big deal for spraying 00:01:54 and not get it on somebody else's crop. Well, you can go get the wind off the weather channel, but it might not be your wind where you're trying to spray. 00:02:00 So you may have an opportunity to get in the field and spray by having this in the field and know your correct wind 00:02:05 and be able to back up what you're doing. Rainfall, if you're, if you got a farm 30 miles away and you get a rain, you can go automatically go look at 00:02:12 that instead of driving 30 miles to look at your rain gauge. So President, what we're talking about, this is our rain. 00:02:17 I mean, this is a much more advanced rain gauge, right? Yes sir. And then that's my wind. Yes sir. And then what's happening here? 00:02:23 Uh, you've also got radiation, correct? Jacob? You've got radiation and then Yeah, your Solar panel. Make sure it keeps 00:02:29 Right. Trick charge. So am I able to measure my growing degree units based on that solar panel? 00:02:34 I mean, is it telling me actually, because you know, Matt has the 35 miles between one farm and the next you might have honestly a huge difference in 00:02:41 the growing degree units over here versus here because of cloud cover, because of systems that come through. 00:02:45 Is this gonna tell me that it's Gonna give you the tools to be able to figure it yourself? It's just a matter of how you wanna do it. 00:02:50 Whether you keep up with it yourself or you put it in a spreadsheet and let the spreadsheet figure it, 00:02:54 what you're talking about is coming. It's just gotta get integrated. This is kind of the first gen situation. 00:02:59 The next gen will, will be able to have that with the Software. Is this making you money already? 00:03:03 I mean, can you see this now you say you got 20 of these deployed. You're, you're digging into this, you're an early adopter, 00:03:09 you're also smart about your money. Are we going to go full tilt on this or are we still saying maybe next year it becomes 00:03:15 a, a couple more? Well, We, we started playing with water sensors in the past and they were bulky. They were hard to install. That would almost keep you from 00:03:23 wanting to do 'em because they're so hard to install and monitoring that brake, you try to pull 'em outta the ground, the, 00:03:28 the sensor would come loose. That route there is a game changer. You just drill that in the ground and one man can do it. 00:03:34 Yep. If you don't like it there, you can pick it up, move it somewhere else. It don't take an hour to get all 00:03:38 that picked back up tpo. This, Honestly, the integration is this goes to this or my iPad or my home or my office computer and so does that 00:03:45 and then I'm fusing that Information and it will save us an irrigation. I mean, does that, yes, that saves us money, 00:03:50 but it also saves the water for the environment. It does a lot of sustainable things. This is one of the sustainable practices I feel like 00:03:56 that we can go forward with in the future that will make us money and help the environment. Couple of Skeptical questions. Preston, 00:04:03 I don't irrigate in northeast Indiana. Why do I need a moisture sensor? You Use it to tell you exactly what your temperature is. 00:04:09 Pre-plant, where your volumetric water content is pre-plant. You can make decisions as to whether you even wanna plant 00:04:15 or not, based on how much soil moisture that you have at that point in time. This Is going down Jacob to, 00:04:21 It depends on what your offsets are. If depending on your crop, obviously in beans, you're probably gonna use a little bit more 00:04:26 of the two inch offset and rice. We have it at a four inch offset, which is moving your sensors up in the ground 00:04:31 to better accommodate the root zone that you're working with in that particular crop. So I need this maybe more than that. 00:04:37 Or do I need that more than this? Or do I need both? I believe you need 'em both. But that's because we just talked about 00:04:43 what preseason portion for your part of the world. The, the next part of it is, is that we're making decisions based on the nutrition 00:04:49 monitoring that we have within the platform mentioned earlier, and we also have disease management. So you could make a decision, you know how much, you know 00:04:57 how much water you have in the soil. You know, you've got some disease pressure coming down. If you don't have enough water in there and you're, 00:05:03 and you're stressing the plant already, are you gonna go ahead and make that? Are you gonna go ahead and do any 00:05:07 applications at that point? Probably not. There you go. So, So I've saved myself some money. 00:05:12 Talk about money. When can I get a payback on this? It's neat to talk about technology. Commodity prices are depressed. 00:05:17 What do you think when, when can I justify this? Or am I, am I already costing myself money by not having it? What's the numbers? 00:05:24 I think with that, if you save yourself watering either in the front end or in the back end of, 00:05:30 of the irrigation cycle, yeah, you have, you have saved yourself money enough to pay for that. In another instance, if you get a rain 00:05:36 and you go, everybody else is gonna the lake and you're thinking, no, I don't need it because I have this sensor in the ground and you keep water 00:05:42 and everybody else gets behind, then you've made money up there with that system being a 365 system. 00:05:47 And that can be a 365 system if you want it to be, to look at, at your wintertime and your early spring planning. 00:05:53 But that being up all the time, giving you information every day to where you can, can look at historical patterns 00:05:58 that's gonna help you make decisions in the future. Like he was talking about, looked at the past and saw this happened two years ago, 00:06:04 I don't need to do something this year. Correct. I'm gonna go back to it again. You're, if you were a dry land farmer, would you invest in these? 00:06:09 Uh, I would invest in some, I definitely would wanna weather station. Yeah. You know, because just tracking your rain amounts. 00:06:15 Yeah. I would have a few of those, just like Preston said to look at your soil temperature, you know, 00:06:20 'cause you'll know by that when you need to be planting, every crop has a different soil 00:06:24 temperature that you planted in. And Sometimes every field. Yeah, Every field. That's right 00:06:27 on soil. But I mean, if I was a dry land farmer, I probably wouldn't have as many as I do as an irrigated farmer. 00:06:31 Yeah. But I would have a, I would have some of 'em. And you'd Agree with that? Absolutely. I 00:06:35 a hundred percent agree with that. It's Preston. Martha, if you wanna learn more about this, where do they go? 00:06:38 Go to crop x.com. Crop x.com. That's Preston Martha joined by Matt Miles. Right. His field day here in McGee, Arkansas. 00:06:44 And Jacob, apple Berry, the agronomist with live oak agronomy. We're talking about technology 00:06:49 that can help you farm better. We cover things like this. If these extreme ag field days, go to extreme mag.farm 00:06:54 and sign up for the remaining field days. You still have time? We do this through August 21st. Check it out. Dam Mac coming at you from McGee, Arkansas. 220 00:07:01.285 --> 00:07:02.205