News

Network provides practical farm knowledge

A new grower-to-grower online network is allowing farmers to anonymously share farming tips and practices to help other farmers.

Charles Baron, co-founder of Farmers Business Network (FBN) says farmers have been sharing information with each other for years – but FBN is modernizing how it is being done.  “All FBN is doing is taking that exact same conversation, backing it up with precision data, integrating that data and taking it online,” he says.

Baron tells Brownfield the idea for FBN came from farmers.  “I think there’s been a huge desire to get more out of the precision data that has been generated over the past 20 years,” he says.  “Farmers have said they have this data sitting around – and all they’ve used it for is to get yield maps and maybe generate prescriptions.  But ultimately there is so much more they are able to do with it.”

He says FBN collects different types of data from all brands of monitors and precision equipment and standardizes it.  “Farmers have the ability to integrate it to analyze their own farm and understand more about their own farm,” he says.  “But then it can be standardized so it can be networked together.”

Baron says right now there are over 14,000 fields contributing data into FBN’s system.  He says FBN provides information for a variety of crops from farmers across the country.