How Valley Agronomics Is Creating Value For Its Growers With Agworld Software
Valley Agronomics facility in Pocatello, ID, is using Agworld, an easy-to-use farm management software that provides grower-customers with maps and field data.
Editor’s note: This article first published in February 2020.
CropLife 100 ag retailer Valley Agronomics LLC has created more value for its grower-customers in recent years with the aid of Agworld and its software offerings. Connor Lankford, the company’s Precision Ag Manager, says that’s exactly the way it wants to do business.
“Being a better provider to our growers is something Valley Agronomics has always strived for,” Lankford says. “As a co-op, we are always striving to find ways to help our customers be more successful.”
Valley Agronomics first started doing business back in 2006, when Valley Wide Co-ops formed a partnership with Winfield United. Since then, the company has steadily grown, formally merging with Wilco-Winfield in 2017 to encompass 24 locations across the Pacific Northwest, helping to manage all manner of crops (including, of course, potatoes).
More recently, Valley Agronomics has made a name for itself in the area of sustainability, as the company was named the North American Ambassador of Respect for 2019 by the Environmental Respect Awards program, sponsored by Corteva Agriscience. According to Lankford, part of the reason the company won this honor tied back to its efforts in nitrogen leaching.
“Like many places, one of the major concerns is nitrogen leaching into the watershed, with the American Falls Reservoir and Portneuf River here locally, as well as many watersheds across our entire geography,” he says. “We’ve tried to take a proactive approach and brought on a nitrogen product that is designed not to leach or volatize. We try to be proactive to find wins for our growers and the communities we do business in, and those initiatives we feel strongly serve both.”
According to Lankford, Valley Agronomics’ environmental objectives in this area were made easier by the company’s customized precision ag product, Platinum Precision. The subscription service, which covers 600,000 acres since being introduced in the fall of 2016, provides technology tool options to the 5,000 growers in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.
Precision Enabled
Coincidentally, Lankford himself joined Valley Agronomics at the start of 2016 — just as the company was beginning its precision agriculture program. “I was working as a crop consultant in Southeastern Idaho,” he says. “Helping build the precision ag part of Valley Agronomics’ business is why I came to the company in the first place.”
Using the Agworld program, growers can put in for application work to be done on their fields.
As a crop consultant, Lankford worked with customers to scout fields, write prescriptions, work on variable-rate applications, and introduce technology improvements into the mix. “It all worked pretty well,” he says. “However, getting some of these services to integrate was sometimes a problem, and they weren’t always mobile friendly. Late in 2015, just before Lankford joined Valley Agronomics, a customer mentioned they were looking into a company called Agworld, and Valley Agronomics decided to learn more about the company.”
As a company, Agworld was started in 2009 “as a way of taking data gathered in agriculture and putting it into a standardized format that makes it usable for growers and ag retailers,” says Doug Fitch, Global CEO and Co-Founder of the company. At last count, Agworld had more than 35,000 registered users across the U.S. and its native Australia.
According to Lankford, Agworld is an easy-to-use farm management software. Some of the services it provides grower-customers include creating maps and tracking field data “without having to use spreadsheets,” building budgets, and scheduling field work. “Just a few taps on a device, and everyone involved can be automatically informed, paperlessly,” Lankford says.
Working Together
A truck leaves the Valley Agronomics facility, ready to deliver product to a grower-customer.
In the fields of its grower-customers, Valley Agronomics personnel using Agworld software can perform many activities, Lankford adds. This includes field scouting, writing recommendations based upon this data, and tracking overall field conditions. “All this information can be quickly shared using mobile devices and emails,” he says. In addition, he says, Valley Agronomics’ grower-customers can use the Agworld software to order their own custom-application work, collaborating this effort with the company along the way.
With Agworld firmly entrenched as part of Valley Agronomics’ precision agriculture efforts, Lankford is looking forward to helping expand the software’s reach down the line. For today, it’s aiding the company and its grower-customers when it comes to recordkeeping. In the future, Lankford sees it becoming a centralized spot for records and precision data.
“Today, we are capturing field records, with the goal of being to identify inter-field variability,” he says. “We have begun adding yield data, EC data, and management zones into the system and can keep gathering new information season after season. That way, we can continue to provide accurate and thorough data available to help our grower-customers keep track of what’s going on across their farms, as well as within their fields, and using their own data as an optional guide for improving the yields and profitability.”
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