How Vegetable Growers Can Add Some Order to Their Ag Tech Tools
September 7, 2022 
Aaron Hutchinson, Co-Founder and CEO of cloud technology company CropTrak, describes the current ag tech space as being “messy.”
“Very messy,” he reiterates. “And we want to help clean it up.”
Hutchinson is not alone in his mission. CropTrak and fellow digital technology companies The Yield and Harvest Master by Juniper Systems all share the goal of simplifying the lives of vegetable growers while growing profits — all from their computers and smart phones.
Digital Supply Chain Management Tool (CropTrak)
Started in 2009 by a pair of farm kids and a city kid, each wanting to bring his military geographic information system (GIS) training to farmers, CropTrak has grown to provide cloud technology solutions to large growers and multinational consumer packaged goods (CPGs) companies to help increase the efficiency and transparency of their supply chain management processes and systems.
CropTrak makes data collection easy for growers, the company says, offering a single application for almost all their different processes rather than having to remember which app to use for each process. Customers can use CropTrak for planning their crops, contracting with growers, all growing activities, harvest, environmental/social/governance (ESG), sustainability, food safety, and contract settlement.
“At CropTrak we believe the global food chain — and vegetable production specifically — is on the cusp of a data explosion,” Hutchinson says.
These screen shots depict the financial platform of the CropTrak digital supply chain management tool.
Image courtesy of CropTrak
For years, pundits touted big data as the path to smarter and better-informed decisions, he says. But while the industry awaited this breakthrough, the demand for even more compliance data increased.
“For example, new product delivery contracts now require even more complex and voluminous data packets about field activities and observations. This data drive is powered by the need to document provenance, sustainability, compliance, and traceability. The future requires growers and their supply chain partners to close the technical gulf — including on-farm tools and rural digital infrastructure — while standardizing data requirements for a more seamless transfer of information up and down the chain.”
CropTrak works with specialty crop growers of all sizes. Del Monte employs CropTrak for full-scale, on-farm data collection and tracking. CropTrak’s intuitive, map-centric platform works on mobile devices and offline, making real-time data collection simple regardless of field location.
The platform allows field personnel to collect data fast and easily, informing field selection at contracting and tracking yields when weighing raw products.
Digital Playbook and Harvest Predictions (The Yield)
Australia-based The Yield transforms food and farming practices with scalable digital technology. Using real-time data and artificial intelligence to power its anchor products, the company’s Digital Playbook and Harvest Predictions provide U.S. growers with blueprints on how to grow crops more profitably and with less environmental impact. The goal? To scale their businesses faster and reduce risk.
Customers include large-scale growers, processors, and marketers who typically have data assets and historical records that can be put to work in The Yield’s analytics. Only in the U.S. market a few months, The Yield is onboarding one of America’s largest in-field tomato growers for yield predictions, the company says.
Growing protocols are codified into farmers’ unique Digital Playbooks, which match their genetics with growing practices. The technology automatically adjusts for local growing conditions and different growth stages for the crops that customers are growing, The Yield reports and then converts these insights into easy-to-use apps with recommended activities and traffic lights showing the applicable risks.
“Our Digital Playbooks deliver highly accurate crop predictions and recommendations for spray, harvest, and irrigation; or to mitigate the risk of pest and disease, or extreme temperature events, such as frost or heat stress,” Ros Harvey, Founder and CEO of The Yield, says. “We combine our powerful analytics with our customer’s know-how and automatically adjust recommendations for local growing conditions across our customers’ sites. Our customers can then easily configure the recommendations to meet their operational requirements.”
Screen shot of data from The Yield’s Digital Playbook.
Image courtesy of The Yield
The Yield’s technology solves for the problem of uncertainty created by weather. Using the Digital Playbook with patented microclimate data, the company reports to have demonstrated a:
- 57% reduction in water requirements
- 47% increase in safe spray windows
- 150% better extreme weather event identification
“Companies in our industry are continually looking for ways to do more with less,” Harvey says. “As a digital transformation partner using data and AI, this is where The Yield can help — to grow and distribute crops more profitably and with less environmental impact.”
Casma Potato Yield Monitor (HarvestMaster)
While its original root crop yield monitor made its debut in the late 1990s, the market “wasn’t quite ready” at the time, according to manufacturer HarvestMaster by Juniper Systems. The company released an updated product in 2021.
HarvestMaster’s yield monitor, unlike yield data and maps that for years have been used mostly with large commercial crops like wheat and soybeans, caters to root crops, such as potatoes, sugar beets, sweet potatoes, and onions.
MyCasma screen shot of data derived from HarvestMaster’s Casma Potato Yield Monitor.
Image courtesy of HarvestMaster by Juniper Systems
A yield heatmap in myCasma, the company’s web-based software, provides a visual representation of variations in potato yield across the field. This allows producers to validate what works to increase yield while giving them the data they need to make informed decisions for fertilizer applications, seed varieties, or whatever they want to test to increase their yield and keep that information for years.
“The system hits a price point that makes sense for most growers and costs much less than many other improvements that growers consider,” HarvestMaster Product Manager Doug Moore says. “If a grower wants to know what their field is producing in any area of that field, this would be an extremely valuable piece of equipment. One significant insight from utilizing the yield monitor can pay for the system in the following harvest.”
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