Smartphone Technology Will Raise Farmer Productivity

This NY Times article  reports that more and more U.S farmers are using "the cloud" to store data about their farms' conditions and to use their smartphones to receive advice about how to increase yields and improve soil conditions.  Imagine if you owned 400 acres of land.  Using the GPS on your smartphone, you can keep straight which subplots are under-performing and like a doctor figure out how to "cure the patient". Anticipating that farmers can be helped using "cloud power", companies such as farmlogs are popping up.
FarmLogs makes it incredibly simple to always know what's happening on your farm. Start saving time and money. Ditch the spreadsheets and paper records!


Or consider; Solum.

"The mission of another start-up, Solum, is to expand the store of data that farmers use to make decisions. The company has a central office in Mountain View and a soil analysis laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

Founded by three young men who earned Ph.D.’s in applied physics from Stanford, Solum has created new hardware and software technology for soil analysis. It makes a machine for testing soil nitrate levels that is small enough to be kept on the farm, allowing farmers to perform far more tests cost-effectively in a given field, says Nick Koshnick, one of the founders.

“It turns out that there’s huge variability in yield across a field,” Mr. Koshnick says, “The challenge is to figure out what accounts for the variability. Our soil analysis can be used with GPS mapping to help agronomists figure out what fertilizer to put where.”"

So, note my usual theme.  We are worried about farmer yields under climate change.  This information technology removes X-inefficiency and increases farmer productivity.  Brains and good decisions can offset part of the challenges that Mother Nature poses.  

I predict that farmer variability in output yields across plots at a point in time will decrease as the adoption of this technology increases.