Rural smartphone sightings are already on the rise. As the saying goes, though, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In the next 18 months, the North American farm landscape is going to start looking like a scene from “Star Trek,” with chirping devices on every belt.
Smartphones are putting more management power in farmers’ hands, wherever those farmers happen to be. Already, you can track markets, you can buy and sell, you can control your barns, you can monitor grain storage and do much, much more, all from your phone.
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With a new stream of apps on the way, your remote power is growing every day.
The stylish, portable PC-like gadgets have gone way beyond the trendy urban functions that their makers had in mind. In an era of extreme market volatility and the need to cut production risks and costs to the bone, farmers are discovering the phone’s value.
Just what is a smartphone anyway? There’s no industry standard definition, but Bill Smith, chief operating officer with Winnipeg-based grain-marketing advisory service Ag-Chieve, has one that lines up with the general consensus.
“Any phone that can browse the web and has voice and data basically is a smartphone in my book,” Smith says. “One of the big values is that it’s an ‘always-on technology,’ where you can pull it out of your back pocket wherever you are and get data.”
Mobile sites like mobile.have sprung up for market and news updates. Ag-Chieve got in the act too, after launching its home computer online resource centre in January, 2008.
“We had about 30,000 visits to that in the first 12 months,” Smith says. “Guys really, really liked it, but they said they had to make a time to go and get that information. And when I rolled out our beta version of the mobile data centre, which is really a shrunk-down, lightweight version of the full online resource centre, they immediately found that wherever they were, they could quickly access it.
“Time that for example, would have been used waiting in a truck or a facility now becomes active time where they can log in and follow commodities, stocks, listen to multimedia analysis and commentary.”
Increasingly, that can also mean multi-tasking in a tractor cab, especially in tractors outfitted with auto-steer, says Willie Vogt, farm journalist in Eagan, Minnesota who’s covered farm technology for 25 years. “Smartphones are a great tool for tracking the markets and keeping up with email.”
The obvious advantage there is keeping right on top of whatever is happening.
Vogt knows a farmer who received emails from his local elevator offering 10-cent-a-bushel premiums if he could deliver 5,000 bushels of corn within the next few hours. A year ago, the messages wouldn’t have got through to him in the field. With a smartphone, however, he was able to immediately email back and make the deal.
“And the other thing he does is he’s checking news and he’s checking prices when he’s sitting in the line at the elevator dropping off corn,” Vogt said. “And being informed is a big deal now — the price of gold and the price of oil have as much to do with what’s going on with grain prices today as any other factor. And if you see something going on with the prices of oil and gold, you can call your broker and ask, ‘How’s this going to affect my grain position?’ And you need to know that now.”
“The market waits for no one,” agrees Smith. “Even the time it would take for you to hear about something and then get back to your computer, you could miss it.”
Another advantage is that the smartphone is leapfrogging the technological boundaries of areas not wired for high-speed Internet access. Smith remembers working when the Internet was still dial-up and when 14k was the best bandwidth possible. Given the pervasiveness of cellular service, smartphones provide connectivity basically everywhere.
NO APP FOR THAT? THERE WILL BE
Besides information and GPS access, smartphones also make available a number of downloadable applications to farmers to help them manage their operations.
“Farmers are extremely connected,” said Andy Kleinschmidt, a farmer and agricultural extension educator at Ohio State University. “I personally
