At Top Producer this week Conservis Corporation announced significant expansion of their industry-leading farm management software, now with new management and analytical tools. Conservis 8.0 helps growers make critical business decisions using their own data of activity and costs down to the field level. With digital tools to plan production, direct activity and analyze profitability, farmers make informed choices with records to share with lenders, landowners and partners.
“In Chicago the talk is all about data and profitability,” said Pat Christie, Conservis Founder & CEO. “With lower prices, top producers need timely and accurate data to run a competitive business. Conservis 8.0 makes this data actionable. For the first time, farmers can compare performance to spending at the field level, understand break-even points and better plan an optimal crop mix based on the cost per unit of production. These plans easily convert to work orders for assigning and recording field tasks.”
Reporting tools enhance visibility of the complex details and numerous activities on the farm. Easy-to-view reports make it simple for a farmer to conduct daily analysis and make immediate, informed adjustments – at all levels of the farm, from seed and other inputs, to harvest, marketing and all critical points in between.
“Having the data immediately, rather than three months later, helps us make real-time decisions” said Andy Jenks, Jenks Farms. “This is so important in today’s production agriculture.”
Planning and budgeting is crucial for business success. With Conservis 8.0, a farmer collaborates with agronomists and others to create sequenced activity-based crop plans. It is easy to evaluate scenarios for profitability, resource usage and timing bottlenecks. Final plans are used to create budgets down to the field level and are converted to purchase and work orders, which are easily tracked against the original plan. Storing all this information in a single cloud-based platform is a distinct advantage over planning spreadsheets and paper work orders with verbal updates to manage the pipeline of field-level work.
“It was sort of like the game of telephone because the process was predominantly a verbal one,” said Parker Merritt, on-staff agronomist for MBS Family Farms, a pilot tester of the Work Orders feature. “For example, I would scout fields, assess spraying needs and make decisions. I would then have a weekly meeting with our Operations Manager to relay the information. He’d use a legal pad to take notes and chart out the various fields and spraying needs, and then convey the direction, again verbally, with the sprayers. Now it all happens digitally via the Conservis system (on smart phones) and I can have real- time visibility into where we are at in the process.”
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