Hey everyone, welcome back!  Now that all the crops are actively growing my duties at Edgewood Farms, LLC has switched from helping with field work to primarily scouting.  With about 4,000 acres to be keeping an eye on, there is no shortage of work for me to do.  This might sound like a daunting task, but luckily, I have some neat technology to help me out.  I have two apps downloaded on my phone; the first is called Encirca, and the second is called Granular.

Encirca is a part of Pioneer and is capable of many tasks, however I use it to assist me in the monitoring of field health.  Some of the fields I’m responsible for scouting are well over 100 acres.  If one of these fields are an area of poor health, I would have a slim chance of realizing it unless I walked through it all, which would take all day.  I don’t know the exact details of how Encirca works but it utilizes satellite images that are taken daily and maps the health of your field.  This is useful because instead of aimlessly walking through the fields, I can look at my phone, see where the problem spots are, and make sure to check those specific areas when out scouting.  With as wet as it was earlier this summer, many of the “low health” areas are spots that were wet or the crop simply drowned out.  The one downside of Encirca is that on cloudy days (which there have been a lot of), the satellite can’t get a clear image of the fields so you have to rely of day from previous days.

The second app, Granular is one that all the employees on the farm have and it is where we either record work that we have done, or are assigned work by someone else. I se it to record all my notes from scouting and add pictures when necessary. My boss can later review my notes and we can talk about treatment options if there is an insect or weed problem that needs addressing.  A few weeks ago, I also used Granular to assign work orders to our sprayer operator for fields that were particularly weedy and needed to be sprayed sooner than later.