The Scoop Podcast: Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover In Agronomy
Tyler Mitchell, agronomy account manager at River Valley Cooperative in Davenport, Iowa, details the daily complexities he and his team unravel for farmers as they serve as boots on the ground.
“We've got a lot of products available. It’s our job to sort through those products, picking out the ones we believe provide the highest ROI to the farmer,” Mitchell says. “It’s really working through their acres and helping provide the best solutions to help those farmers solve their issues and help achieve their goals. It’s what we do every day.”
Headed into the 2024 growing season, Mitchell reports the co-op had a record fall application season with eight weeks of good running conditions.
Also carrying over into the new year is a lesson learned from 2023: don’t judge a crop too soon. His area was thought to have yields down 10%, but by the time combines rolled, yields were up 10% to 20%.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” he says. “It doesn’t really matter where this crop is going to start—it’s where it finishes that is just as important.”
As Mitchell works with his more than 60 farmer accounts, he uses data to measure the ROI of the decisions they make in season.
“We have been able to use data and analyze it and find what is the ROI of products,” he says alluding to both company trials and their own farmer acres.
“We have kind of epiphanies or aha moments when we can look at yield data,” he says.
With a surge of biological based products, Mitchell sees data as a key in finding the fit.
“Biologicals are hot,” he says. “That's one area that I've been getting better at product knowledge and learning the different categories of biological or growth promoting rhizobacteria or bio pesticides. There’s a lot of biological companies, and it's going to be one ever increasing and might be the next frontier when it comes to pushing the ROI on these biological products.”
One example is his team’s work with BioPath from Mosaic.
“We applied half the field—40 acres—with and then 40 acres without. When we say the yield map it was 12 bu/acre, and it was an aha moment,” he says.
The test field was a long-term CRP acreage, and he and the River Valley team are thinking about how the product fits where there could be built up soil health and nutrient availability.
“The data was able to prove the product,” he says.
