Efficiency A Conversation with Praxidyn's Doug Applegate
Doug Applegate, Co-Owner of Praxidyn, is no stranger to technology. In fact, the Mixmate unit the company markets to the agricultural world-at-large was designed as an extension of the kind of efficiency-improving technology he uses on his own Iowa farm.
But in the world of 2022, Applegate looks at the overall agricultural landscape and sees how current events, including the ongoing COVID pandemic and persistent marketplace shortages, have increased the need for more technology adoption. This is especially true given the current state of labor within agriculture.
“Everybody’s looking for efficiency, and the top operators are looking for that these days,” says Applegate. “And it’s a great time to do it because there’s more profit in agriculture right now. Probably the biggest thing I hear out there right now is a lack of skilled and reliable help. So, I think that’s a real driver for this, for pushing technology. If you can leverage your quality people so they can get more done, it really helps. So, you don’t have to have so many people around. Your business is really built around the quality of the people that you have and when you can leverage those good people, I think it really helps.”
Besides labor issues, however, Applegate also sees the need for more technology adoption within agriculture being driven by today’s supply chain disruptions. “It does seem like finding the help has gotten more pronounced,” he says. “The COVID thing really emptied our supply chain, so you take people out of the workforce. The world was operating on a lean inventory-type thing, and as long as everything was working, it worked fine. But you throw COVID in there for a couple of months of a lot of people not producing and it just drained the supply chain. Well, now everybody is trying to catch up to that. And so, it’s really difficult to get many things — parts, for instance — so that everything has just slowed down.”
However, in addition to these “negative” factors driving technology adoption in agriculture, Applegate does see some positive drivers as well. This includes sustainable agricultural practices such as the push for carbon credits and the desire for more open communication between operating systems.
“One of the big trends we are seeing today, especially this year, is the push for carbon,” he says. “Traceability and sustainability are really getting to be buzzwords. Well, in order to verify this, we need traceability through quality data. So, data connections are a huge thing, which I really think is another big driver of the trends happening right now. I’ve been working with AgGateway for quite a while on developing standardized data. So, when we have standardized data, it’s kind of like creating the Rosetta Stone, so that all our different systems can talk to each other. It’s a huge deal when we can standardize that data because it takes much less labor to set all the data connections up, there are much more reliable because things aren’t changing – you don’t have one person change their data on one end and it crashes at the other end. So, there are a lot of things happening in the industry as far as data standardization.
“And kind of one of the interesting projects that is going to the field this spring is proof of concept,” continues Applegate. “We have been working on, more or less, a message. So, when an ag retailer sells seed, for instance, to their customer, we would like to see that seed list show up in the monitor. So, when you go to the field, you just pick that seed and that’s what is in the planter. So, this message and process that’s starting to happen is we would have the message come from the ag retailer and it might go into the John Deere operations center or the farmer’s accounting system or field management system. But just getting that list of seeds transferred is kind of a first step on that piece of data. And we are going to be working on that for chemicals and a ton of other stuff as far as traceability.”
Applegate adds this type of open communications system would be an improvement over many of the current methods for sharing data, which tend to be more operating system specific.
“Right now, the data is, more or less, in silos,” he says. “It works very well within John Deere or other companies’ systems, but it’s not quite universal at this point. Say I have a Kinze planter and I use this piece of software and that piece of software. Getting all that data connected back into your farm management or accounting system is hard. That will add a bunch of efficiency to the office work.”
