The agricultural world is becoming increasingly digital. A tech expert says farmers should do their research before adopting new technologies.
“There are a lot of OSHA inspections, food safety, things like that, that have traditionally been done on paper. We’d hear all the time like, hey, I’m supposed to check the PH of this apple dunk tank five times a day. I can go buy that dunk tank at 3:00 P.M. and there are no records there, and mysteriously at 5:00 P.M., all the readings have been done. We had this interesting thing happen with one of our apple growers. They calibrate their five-pound bag weights; those bags have been over by as much as 16%. And so you imagine you’re doing a billion dollars of apples. That’s lots of money escaping. The reason is they’ve been collecting this information, maybe it’s not accurate. Nobody’s going back through pages to try to correlate that stuff over days, weeks, or months. So now because it’s digital, that trend line can be, pulled out pretty easily,” said Grip CEO Tracy Whitmire.
Whitmire’s company, known as GRIP, serves row crop, field crop, and specialty crop farmers across North America.
