Crop Scouting and Crop Treatment Recommendations Your Way

Controlling potato foes while also creating an environment for their allies is no simple task. FarmQA has proved beneficial in helping Hazen Palmer keep this all straight.

Pests and Prey

Hazen understands that an insect field environment mirrors the importance of a soil environment. With soil, the focus is on fertility and microbiology. In the field, the insect population requires a delicate balance of predator and prey. Hazen advises on which insects are beneficial to a given crop and uses FarmQA Scouting to visually capture pest populations and mark where the problem areas are. Hazen’s knowledge of entomology, coupled with the way he tracks beneficial insect populations, bring a unique dimension to his crop consulting practice. For example, if a beneficial population is high enough, a grower can avoid a costly insecticide spray because the favorable ones can counteract the pests. Hazen has found that using FarmQA Scouting to document what is going on in the field has made it easier for him to provide these details to his growers.

Flexibility Built for the Details

As Hazen spent more time using the product, he soon recognized the benefit of generating his own scouting templates. Although he has worked with other scouting solutions, FarmQA is the first one he has used that offers the flexibility for users to fully customize the templates for what they are scouting. Next year, Hazen plans to increase the detail that he collects regarding beneficials and he will track them in a separate Scouting tab. He is also thinking about ways to slice and dice the data. For example, when aphid populations reach a certain level, he also sees high quantities of parasitic wasps and lay swing insects. With FarmQA, he can make correlations about what predators are present with what prey. This level of detail helps Hazen to understand what is happening in that field and make data-informed decisions.

Hazen added that his experience with the custom templates have opened his mind to all of potential ways that he can use FarmQA. “I have really enjoyed working with FarmQA,” Hazen said. “They have taken my requests and my questions and translated them into features.”

FarmQA Improves Communications with Growers and Scouts

Hazen leverages the merge feature within FarmQA Scouting to improve how he works with his scouts and up-level the finished report that he sends to his growers. The scout collects the initial findings for the field and then Hazen adds commentary in the summary. Using the Merge feature, Hazen combines his summary with the scout data into a single consolidated report for the grower. This streamlines the scouting process and frees Hazen’s time to add value in additional ways. It helps with Hazen’s time management, but also gives his scouts direction. Hazen also likes the ability to assign which fields the scout will go to on a given day and that he can check in with them within the app to see real-time progress.

Dale provides advisement on plant fertility, determining which variety to plant, pest management, pesticide application, growth regulators, and harvest assistance. Dale’s expertise covers the early step of selecting seed and extends through the growing season to harvest to help growers any way that he can.

How has using FarmQA changed how you provide agronomy services?

It is a lot easier to have everything in the app and accessible from a phone or a tablet and not have to deal with paperwork. Growers can see the scouting reports much sooner now, and they see what the recommendations are as soon as we are done scouting their fields. Previously, the grower would have to wait until the end of a day and the scouts provided a summary sheet. Now growers can watch the scouting activity as it is happening in FarmQA. They can call us while we are still in the field. This allows us to be more efficient.

What made FarmQA stand out from other options?

FarmQA is a good value and I liked that I can create my own templates and use my procedure on all the crops. I liked that FarmQA shows a map of my fields and I can show the scouts where they need to go. The color coding to show what crop is planted is useful for my scouts. The main thing is that it takes out all the paperwork. I remember previous years that included long days in the field only to come home to need to finish paperwork that was time sensitive for my growers to react to the advice that I was providing.

My favorite feature is the ability to create a scouting template exactly how I want my fields to be scouted. Reducing the paperwork and being able to see the scouts in progress. Growers don’t have to wait until scouts leave the field and I don’t have to call them on a radio to have them walk me through what they did or didn’t do. Instead, I can look at the reports submitted in FarmQA.

Ramon Ortiz is an agronomy consultant for D&M Chem Inc. He and his team scout thousands of acres of hops using FarmQA.

How has using FarmQA changed how you provide agronomy services?

own scouting templates. We get to customize them ourselves and aren’t depending on the software company to make the changes. At any time, we can make changes and I can do it myself. If there is something that I don’t like, I can go in and change it. It has made us a bit faster, because now we can just input information into our phones.

How has FarmQA improved your relationship with growers?

FarmQA has taken a service that we were providing and made it more efficient, more organized for the grower. It's allowed the grower to see their data in almost real time. Farmers can just about follow us field-to-field as we are scouting and that's pretty incredible. As with any business, we are busy and on the go. If the grower is wondering how things are going because I won’t see them soon, they can log in and see reports as I submit them. We’ve done away with “pen and paper scouting,” but allowing them to see scouting reports sooner has brought us closer with the farmer. Hop growers like the one-on-one time with their agronomist. They like the personal relationship that is built between the service provider and the grower. FarmQA hasn’t eliminated any of the personal relationship. We still have face to face conversations in addition to having everything electronic.

What features sold you on purchasing FarmQA?

FarmQA has a lot of features and I like them all. The fact that you can customize a scouting template is huge. There are other crops to scout and being able to convert is awesome and allows us to scout for new crops. We can make the changes ourselves. I also like going from the app on the phone and then use FarmQA on the computer and navigate smoothly. I go to scouting and filter for my farmer and there are my reports. It is simple and user friendly. We like to be outdoors and not at a desk, so the simplicity is a great fit for us and it is what we wanted for our farmers.

What have you been able to achieve since using FarmQA?

One thing we’ve been able to achieve is being able to show the grower certain levels of a pests with more detail. Pen and paper were challenging to use to describe with detail, but with FarmQA there is a pin dropped in a geolocation on a map with a photo attached.

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