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Michaela Paukner:

I'm Michaela Paukner, associate editor of Precision Farming Dealer. Welcome to the latest episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast. New episodes of this series are available wherever you get your podcast. Be sure to subscribe to get an alert when upcoming episodes are released.

Michaela Paukner:

Being the newest member of the Precision Farming Dealer team and someone who generally likes looking at data, I'm always interested in finding out what resonates most with you, our listeners and readers. Today's episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast features highlights from the top 5 most listened to interviews we shared on this podcast in 2021. The conversations range from practical advice about hiring new dealership staff, to Precision Agriculture's impact on the environment, to interviews with CEOs of two high profile precision ag tech companies.

Michaela Paukner:

Starting us off today is the number 1 most listen to episode of 2021, entitled Succeeding with Interns from Outside of Ag. Here's executive editor, Kim Schmidt, Karl Huebner, the Integrated Solutions manager at Hutson Inc., and two Hutson interns talking about the 30-store Deere dealership internship program.

Karl Huebner:

That's kind of our model is we're stacking underneath product specialists, letting them get a solid year, at least with that product specialist. And then from there, we're going to turn them loose in the sales or aftermarket part of the world to let them be an employee that's very vetted, an employee that is kind of as John Deere becomes a technology company. We're trying to figure out how to become a technology company as well. And this is the best way we're figuring out how to do it.

Kim Schmidt:

I guess to start, Connor and Andrew, you can decide who goes first. But do you want to just introduce yourself, tell me a little bit about where you came from, what you were doing as an intern. What your role is there and what you're doing now?

Connor Smith:

Kim, my name's Connor Smith. I'm originally from Western Kentucky. And I graduated, like I told you, in December from the University of Kentucky. Like Karl said, I was never part of a farm, but I was always around them. A bunch of my friends were farmers. So I'd always hang around their shops. That kind of got me interested in the ag. So I graduated with an agriculture economics degree. And then not many places offer a position or an internship, like the one I'm in now. And this is what intrigued me to pursue this internship quite heavily, is the fact that I thought it would help me as a person to know everything possible to be successful. And from what I'm learning now is exactly that.

Connor Smith:

It's helping me learn from the ground up, from all the problems, like I just said, I've been out in the field most of the time so I've seen these problems in real world. But now, I'm getting down to nitty gritty of what exactly causes those problems and how they can be fixed in multitude of ways. So I think that will definitely benefit me on down the line to help a customer out. So they don't have to go through having to call a tech. And then if that tech's busy having to wait, I can just expedite the process, if you will. Just help them out and get them up and running as soon as possible.

Connor Smith:

So I think it's a very great idea and a great thing with what Hutson is doing and training us under product specialist and then releasing us out into the sales force.

Kim Schmidt:

And how about you, Andrew?

Andrew:

Yeah, just to piggyback on what Connor said, I graduated from Middle Tennessee last year, as a Certified Athletics Trainer. So I'm in the medical field until now. I've always had an interest in ag. Just wasn't around it enough to really know any options in ag other than being a farmer. And I knew being a farmer these days without having a family in it or a gateway into, it's kind of impossible to start on your own.

Andrew:

So going through the medical field, I just really, really wasn't into it. I wanted to do ag. And there's really not many opportunities around to get into ag if you don't have any experience at all. Luckily, Hutson has this nice model where they're trying to find people with similar experiences outside of ag that could excel once they start learning ag. So that's kind of what brought me here.

Andrew:

Finally, I've been under John Perkins, who's a product specialist here, teaching me the rope. I haven't been here quite as long as Connor. I'm right out of a month now. But I've been thrown into the fire, going into the field with John and learning everything I can. And it's been a great experience.

Kim Schmidt:

So how did you find your way to Hutson? Was it through outreach that Hutson was doing usually or just seeing job listing? How did you from a totally unrelated field...

Andrew:

Yeah. So me personally, I'm trying to get into the ag field. I'm actually doing a Master's in Ag at Murray State. I forget exactly who, but someone from Hutson had reached out to the Hutson School of Ag at Murray State. And sent out an email to all of the graduate students and undergrad students saying, "Hey, this is the program we're starting. Here's the job listing and some more info on it. If you're at all interested, get in contact with us. And we'll see what we can do to give you more info and see where it goes from there." So I reached out and here I am.

Kim Schmidt:

Okay. So you had already made the decision to get into this master's ag program before you ended up. It wasn't totally out of the blue.

Andrew:

Yep. It wasn't out of the blue completely. No.

Kim Schmidt:

And then Karl, could you maybe just explain a little bit, you touched on a little bit with talking about putting them with the product managers, how you've structured either the outreach in trying to find people outside of ag? And then what the program itself looks like?

Karl Huebner:

Yeah. I think the role of our product specialists is to help people succeed, whether they're in aftermarket or whether they're in whole goods. That doesn't really matter much for us. So good people find a way to win. And resourceful people are going to learn as they go. And I think that's a lot of what that role does. And so stacking somebody underneath them that can learn from somebody that's incredibly skilled within their role, we've got away from an apprenticeship style model in this business. And it feels like maybe in some ways that was a mistake.

Karl Huebner:

And it's time to get back to some of that, especially when there's incredibly qualified, incredibly good people in other industries in other roles that I think is no different than what Andrew said, "I thought being involved with that would..." And I was a farmer. But when you look at the amount of candidates that are out there, I guess a cleaner way to say it is like this, that the pool of candidates that we're selecting from, fewer and fewer of them are from the family farm or have any real experience. They may be like Connor, where they might have been raised near a cornfield or knew somebody who knew somebody who did something like that. But them directly being involved with it or being in a cab or anything like that, they just never really had that experience.

Karl Huebner:

And so we've got to fast track that knowledge into them so they can support people that do that for a living. And to me, there's no cleaner way than to stack them underneath the product specialist that does that for their bread and butter day job. And they get to learn from the best of the best of what we have to offer. And then whenever we feel like they're able to support on a basic level and they're able to have a good customer interface, then we're going to turn them loose into the organization and let them become our future leaders.

Michaela Paukner:

Next up is Pairing Predictable Precision Tasks with the Power of Robotics and Automation. Our second most played episode of [2022 00:08:06]. Let's listen in as Michael Langemeier and Michael Boehlje with Purdue's Center for Commercial Agriculture discuss the role of dealers in an increasingly automated ag industry. [inaudible 00:08:18] starts us off.

Mike:

We have done some work with some of the machinery equipment manufacturers and dealers to try to help them do a better job and be more proactive in terms of exactly deciding how to bring precision technology to their customer base. So I think they play a really critical role at not only the manufacturers, but a critical role in terms of developing the technology, the R&D they're doing in terms of bringing this new technology along at a much faster pace than it would be. Otherwise, they're not only doing that with some of their not only traditional engineering activity, but also through M&A, acquisitions of companies that again have focused on precision activity and other industries. And so that's been an exciting play that we see happening at the manufacturing level.

Mike:

At the dealer level, this is how that manufacturer really, really moves these new technologies to the customer base. And so dealers are really, really, I think moving rapidly. And many of them are really excited about the opportunity that they see in terms of bringing to precision agriculture technology to their farm customer base. They're having workshops, seminars and demos and doing all sorts of things to bring telematics to, for example, their customers.

Mike:

And agronomic dealers and chemical dealers using it in their own equipment to try to figure out how to do the scheduling, how to do the movement of their equipment from location to location, how to do a better job of even in some cases, 24/7 application of fertilizer seeding chemicals. And doing it more efficiently and effectively. And as an indicator, moving their equipment from side to side in a more efficient and effective fashion.

Mike:

And the same thing is happening at the producer level, where we have multiple units. I was just out yesterday and I saw two 24 row planters working side by side in the same field. Actually, they weren't quite side by side, but they were closer, so I wanted to make sure they didn't run into each other. And that's a whole part of what this whole thing is about, is doing it more efficiently and more effectively and scheduling.

Mike:

And it's a brand new way of farming from my perspective. And we see both farmers and dealers being really pretty proactive in terms of adopting this new technology. The survey show that we're in the ramp up stage of the adoption curve in this area. And it's coming much more rapidly than I think in the recent say, 5 to 10 years that it did for the first 20 or so years we were talking about precision agriculture.

Karl Huebner:

Just a couple things to add to that, Mike and Jack. First of all, from a producer standpoint, technology can be a competitive advantage. And so the key thing there is for them to be convinced that this technology is going to add value. One of the ways that dealerships have been able to do that and I think Mike, you talked a little bit about that. But I want to bring that point home a little further, is dealers have been hiring expertise to help people set up the technology and also service the technology. Just work with the technology, work with the data that's created with the technology.

Karl Huebner:

So that's one of the ways they can really help producers to start adapting these technologies. Because there's a different skill set when you talk about the old technology versus this new technology. And so by hiring these expertise at the dealer level, you can get people to adopt these technologies a little bit quicker and they can see the advantages of these technologies a little bit quicker.

Karl Huebner:

One of the things that we talked about in the automation or robotics article that I think has a lot of potential, and I don't know to the extent that they're doing this in agriculture dealerships yet. But I think they will down the road. And that's 3D printing of parts. The 3D printers are becoming much more sophisticated, even more efficient, cost less.

Karl Huebner:

And so I think that has a lot of potential because as we talk about in the article, in talking to farmers this is also a very real issue. Any downtime you have during planting and harvesting, particularly planting is extremely expensive. And so we can get these parts out to these farmers quicker, get the machine fixed quicker, that's worth a lot of money. And so I think that particular technology has a lot of promise for dealerships.

Mike:

Just a comment a little bit on this whole issue. One of the payoffs that we talk about of precision agriculture is the reduced downtime. And as we're trying to, in one of the articles, we talked about the number of ways in which you can reduce that downtime that a farmer faces. And with the concerns we have about getting timely planning particularly, but also harvesting. This whole issue of downtime reduction by not only getting machinery pre-prepared for going to the field, usually telematics to figure out what might be a possible repair that needs to be made in anticipation of a particular breakdown during the critical period.

Mike:

But secondly, to work at more hours. And third, when you do need to repair, to get it done more quickly using 3D printing. Those are all different ways that precision agriculture is going to increase the efficiency and get payoffs to both farmers as well as to dealers trying to serve those farmers.

Michaela Paukner:

Before we get to the number 3 episode on our list of top 5 podcasts of 2021, I'd like to invite you to the upcoming Dealership Minds Summit in Iowa City, Iowa, July 26th through 27. This two-day dealers only conference offers knowledge pack, general sessions, panels, roundtable discussions, networking and more. Mark your calendars for July 26th through 27. And register online at dealershipmindssummit.com.

Michaela Paukner:

In our third most listened to episode of the year entitled How Precision Technology is Creating More Environmentally Friendly Agriculture, Curt Blades of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers shares how a study about precision agriculture in the US needs to educate lawmakers and the public about the environmental benefits of precision agriculture.

Curt Blades:

The stated audience for this has been the public. And obviously, we like to talk to farmers as well. But when we designed this for farmers, we were very clear. It was like, "You're not the intended audience. You are looking at this to be armed with this information, to share to people that are not farmers." So we wrote the examples in easy to digest and sometimes playful conversations. Like one of the things we say is that, "Productivity's increased to an estimated 4% as a result of precision agriculture adoption over the last 20 years. And that is the equivalent of 10.2 million acres being avoided. Or 4 1/2 Yellowstone National Parks not being tilled because productivity has increased."

Curt Blades:

And you put those in those terms that a non-farmer gets, their eyes open right up. It's pretty fun. And another one we used was taking a look at water as an example. Using precision irrigation, we avoided 750,000 Olympic swimming pools just because we put sensors in the ground. Or because of auto guidance and fleet telematics, we saved a 100 million gallons of fossil fuels. Or the equivalent of 193,000 cars taken off the road in fuel savings alone.

Kim Schmidt:

Yeah. Those are...

Curt Blades:

Those numbers matter.

Kim Schmidt:

Yeah. Those are great examples too. Because I can't picture how much water, however many millions of gallons that was that you said. But that many pool, I can picture one Olympic size pool. 700 and whatever it was, that's a crazy amount. And 4 1/2 Yellowstone National Parks, okay, now that's serious land.

Curt Blades:

Yeah, exactly. And what's cool about all of those things, Kim, and this is the greatest story that I love telling when we're talking about precision agriculture, farmers adopted this because it made sense to them. The environmental benefits are a ride along. That wasn't their primary driver because it made sense to them.

Curt Blades:

It made sense for a farmer to have a tractor that steers in a straight line and doesn't overlap. But boy, the environmental benefits as an analog, that story resonates very well. First version of this didn't include carbon, CO2 emissions. And then we updated it to include carbon emissions frankly, because of some of those discussions that are happening in DC right now.

Curt Blades:

And so what we were able to do is take all of these things together. So you take auto guidance, section control, variable rate technology, fleet telematics and you couple that with more productive land use, reduced herbicide use, fertilizer efficiency, reduced water use, reduced fossil fuel consumption. We put all of those together to create some crazy number as it relates to the amount of carbon that has simply been avoided because of the current adoption of precision agriculture.

Curt Blades:

And the number we came up with was 10.1 million metric tons have been avoided as a result of adoption of precision agriculture. And to put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of 2.2 million passenger vehicles. So when you throw a number like that out, people's jaws drop. And then you back it up with the facts. And that's why agriculture is part of these conversations about being part of the solution for some of the challenges that our planet is facing.

Curt Blades:

And what is really fun is that we talk about this in a positive way. Not farmers are the enemy. Farmers are the solution. And precision ag is the solution. And that's a lot of fun. Those are completely different conversations than we were having five years ago where arrows were being pointed in our direction of doing the bad things. But when we can tell things that we're doing right, it's pretty fun.

Michaela Paukner:

Number 4 and 5 most listened to podcast with 2021 are Conversations with CEOs of two ag tech companies that made headlines over the past year. Coming in at number 4 is this episode featuring Michael Ott, CEO of Rantizo, discussing the company's drone offerings and its unique dealership model.

Michael Ott:

Rantizo is selling a turnkey drone spraying package. We target this specifically to ag retailers, selling them everything that they need for safe and legal drone application. So it's a drone hardware, software, insurance, permitting, a trailer, support, all the training that you need. And so everything that you need to have a drone as part of your operations, which really leverages up the abilities and capabilities of everything else that retailers have.

Kim Schmidt:

So our audience is precision farming dealers primarily. Is there an opportunity for someone who isn't an ag retailer but has a similar business to work with you guys?

Michael Ott:

Yeah, absolutely.

Kim Schmidt:

And if so, what are some of those opportunities?

Michael Ott:

Yeah. We're looking for partners and customers that are providing spraying services or doing spraying themselves. And we'll hook them up with everything that they need. So that's our target market. We aren't going directly to farmers. We're trying to find people that are providing those services.

Kim Schmidt:

And so if a dealer wants to become a contractor with you guys, what's kind of involved in getting hooked up with you guys?

Michael Ott:

So we'll find the right size package for them. It could be just a single drone. It could be a drone or a trailer or a swarm of up to three drones at a time. We're the only people that are legally swarming nationwide.

Michael Ott:

So that package, we'll sell them what they need and then provide training. So they'll come to Iowa City and we'll show them how to do it, how to work the drone, work on some marketing, tell them how the whole billing system works, everything else like that. And then we can provide them support in the field as they get out there. And inevitably questions will pop up.

Kim Schmidt:

So do you work with them then on getting a drone license? Or is that something that they need to do on their own? And then kind of...

Michael Ott:

It's a collaborative effort. So there's three things that you need for legal drone spraying. So first is a part 107. And that's a drone pilot license that the actual pilot has to take. And that's a relatively easy test.

Michael Ott:

Second is your state applicator license, which once again, the pilot has to take that, they have to pass if they're in Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota or wherever. Just pass to their satisfaction. So those are two easy things to do.

Michael Ott:

The third thing that's really difficult is the 137 that comes from the FAA. And Rantizo has that. And once you're trained by us and you meet our standards, then you can fly on our 137. So there's two easy things, one difficult one. We make the difficult thing very easy.

Kim Schmidt:

Okay. Others may know what this is, but can you explain what that 137 is?

Michael Ott:

Sure. So the FAA regulates federal airspace. We're obviously flying in federal airspace. And we're spreading what are called economic poisons. That's anything that affects the growth of a plant. So a herbicide, an insecticide. Water can be an economic poison if you're irrigating something. You're actually affecting the growth of it. So that's what that is.

Michael Ott:

So when you're spreading something like that, you need to have a license to do so. And we've made that really difficult process that takes several months and thousands of dollars to get a standard license. We actually have a much more complex integrated license. So the Rantizo 137 has a swarming exemption. So we can actually fly three drones at once. And we have no buffer to the edge of the field. So many drones have a 500-foot buffer. So you can't go closer than 500 feet to a road, which that's a really penalizing thing for other drone applicators. Because the edge applications are the best things to use a drone for. And if you're legally prohibited from being 500 feet, that's a problem.

Michael Ott:

Rantizo has that solved. We have no buffer. We can get right up to the edge and that's the best situation for drones. And we can do it with more than one in the year at the same time.

Michaela Paukner:

And rounding out our list of top 5 episodes of 2021 is my conversation with Igino Cafiero, the CEO of Bear Flag Robotics, the autonomous driving startup acquired by John Deere in August. Let's listen in as Cafiero explains how the company will work with Deere as a subsidiary.

Michaela Paukner:

Talking about the acquisition, how did those conversations between your companies first start?

Igino Cafiero:

Yeah. We've known Deere for almost since the inception of the company. We were in John Deere Startup Collaborator in [2019 00:24:48]. And we got to know all the people that we interface with today. So I report to Dan Leibfried. And I met him three years ago in Urbandale, while we were still figuring out a lot of things with the company. And Deere was immensely helpful to us in our journey.

Igino Cafiero:

And I think one of the things we did well was bring them along for the ride and expose some of the learnings that we were having in the field. And I think they were impressed with the progress. We moved remarkably quickly, but we were also always eager to share learnings with them and get their feedback. And they've been immensely helpful to us even before the acquisition, of course.

Igino Cafiero:

And so when they approached us to ask if we'd be interested in joining forces, it was a no brainer for us. We were like, "Yes, not only is this strategically where we want to be with the market leader, but we also know you're on a human level." And we know that our cultures align, our values align. And so it was really a no brainer.

Michaela Paukner:

Do you recall some of the areas where Deere was offering you guidance that helped you get to where you are now?

Igino Cafiero:

Oh yeah. They have one of the largest customer bases of growers in the world. And they have a lot of insights to where these growers really value autonomous. And they shared a lot of that with us. And really happily, it was confirmatory rather than mind blowing. It was like, "Oh, we also see the world the same way." And so a lot of the core assumptions we've made seemed to hit here. But there was also a lot of nuances there too. And to their credit, they were extremely open with that.

Igino Cafiero:

They wanted us to succeed too so that we could learn the lessons. And we could be out there sharing what we've done with them. And listen, I'd say this very transparently. We make mistakes every day. We move forward as quickly as possible. We make good on our mistakes. We always do right by the customer. And we endeavor to never make the same mistake twice. But that's part of the process. And that process is really valuable. And I think we were also pretty transparent with Deere about missteps we've made and things that we don't think will work. And I think they value that transparency too.

Michaela Paukner:

What is an example of a mistake that you've made that ultimately you used to further the product?

Igino Cafiero:

Yeah, I think areas about applications. Sometimes we've pursued opportunities that probably didn't make sense from a larger perspective. But we did them because they were right in front of us. And realizing that that wasn't a good place to invest time. And unwinding them pretty quickly and moving forward. In hindsight it's obvious, but when you're in the thick of it and you have a huge customer that's asking you to go do this thing, the temptation from a startup perspective is you have to say yes.

Igino Cafiero:

So we probably chased a couple technical initiatives that didn't make sense for our long term roadmap. But we learned a ton from it. And we were able to find it without seeing expectations from growers.

Michaela Paukner:

Were they technical in terms of what the equipment was going to do? Or what did that look like?

Igino Cafiero:

Yeah, it was sort of corner cases of how the tillage operational work, in so far as what bed set up would look like in this particular farm, how we need to change our technology to address this corner case, things like that where I might think we might have lost sight of the big picture.

Michaela Paukner:

That's it for our top 5 most played podcast of 2021. You can to all five of the full episodes at precisionfarmingdealer.com/podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Michaela Paukner:

Were there any conversations that stuck with you in 2021 that weren't on this list? Share them with me by emailing mpaukner@lessitermedia.com or calling 262 777 2441. And be sure to keep up on the latest precision practices impacting your dealership by registering for our free daily email newsletter. Go to precisionfarmingdealer.com to sign up. From all of us here at Precision Farming Dealer, I'm associate editor, Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.

Intro Music: Squire Tuck - Rush to the Head
Interlude Music: Squire Tuck - Expressing One's Emotions in Public