Burrus Hybrids

Challenge

Burrus wanted to deliver a powerfully simple precision agriculture platform to enable their sales team to make the best possible product and planting rate recommendation in each field.  The challenge of delivering this value, as numerous input suppliers have learned the hard way, is that many farmers are concerned about letting the same companies who price their inputs to also manage their yield data.  Yield data reflects topline revenue on land that is often handed down for generations and it must not be used to price inputs, since that could marginalize farming profits. 

Opportunity

Burrus saw an opportunity to engage MyFarms as an independent third party to store their proprietary research and the field knowledge owned by farmers.  This approach solves the farmer's privacy concern, since MyFarms doesn’t sell anything other than technology services, while helping Burrus and their customers find the best genetic, trait, treatment and population combination for each field.     

Approach

MyFarms started by meeting face-to-face with members of the Burrus management team over lunch.  We discussed the type of conversation they encourage their sales team to have with farmers, including a set of questions that help them find the best product fit.  Then the MyFarms design team developed detailed mockups of every facet of the product concept so Burrus could weigh in with ideas of their own before we wrote a single line of code.  Then we facilitated an in-depth design workshop with a broader set of Burrus stakeholders, including several of their most sophisticated customers and account managers to ensure everyone was comfortable with the solution.

Outcome

Ten weeks after Burrus approved our coauthored design, the World's first automated method of combining seed company research with farmer-owned field knowledge to find the best genetic, trait, treatment, and population fit for each field was born. That was in December, 2011. Since then we have added variable rate seeding, multi-hybrid planting, weather-driven disease pressure alerts and a web-based training academy to fully onboard the Burrus sales organization.

Weaver Popcorn

Challenge

Weaver Popcorn, one of the world’s largest popcorn processors, knew they could do a better job managing their contracted production cycle.  Of particular importance when we first began working together in February, 2011 was the ability to accurately project crop yield so Weaver could make more informed buying decisions.  This was managed through a series of spreadsheets that were populated by field managers and then emailed to a central office.  The time and effort required to manage this data was onerous, to say the least.  What was supposed to be a strategic management decision often felt uncomfortably akin to a moderately educated guess.        

Opportunity

Weaver saw the opportunity to apply cloud-based computing to trace their contracting and scouting activities all the way back to the field level.  By aggregating data from hundreds of farmers across 10,000’s acres, they envisioned a more granular view of the situation, literally from the ground up.  The problem was that the software they desired didn’t exist.  Enter MyFarms.

Approach

We started by working with their field team.  During our design workshop, they described the nuances of their jobs and where the pain points and pitfalls were.  As they described their daily lives, we mapped their current and future business processes in order to methodically identify opportunities to improve.  They had so many ideas we had to establish a three year roadmap to manage the change process, since some suggestions would affect other stakeholders.  Then we developed detailed mockups of every facet of the first generation solution from field boundary definition, to scouting data entry, to aggregated yield projection reports.

Outcome

Today, every field that Weaver contracts is first entered into MyFarms.  After the field to contract association is made, we run a Key Fields algorithm to identify the best set of fields to scout by maximizing the distance between them.  The moment scouting records are saved by the field team anywhere across the Corn Belt, the data sets are instantly included in reports that the management team runs anytime, anywhere to inform grain buying decisions. 

Here is what Will Weaver had to say, “Weaver Popcorn is committed to employing the world’s best technology to assist us in delivering the best popcorn products to more than 80 countries.  After thoroughly evaluating many options, MyFarms was the clear choice.  The MyFarms team brings unique design intuition that only fellow growers can deliver and they are 100% committed to our success.”

Now we're working with Weaver to extend their AS400 application to the field level by automatically passing contract data between our systems.