As the planter rolls across a Mississippi Delta field, row by row, it’s making split-second decisions on how much fertilizer to apply, where to apply it and where to apply nothing at all — a task that’s doesn’t require any second-guessing.
The decisions aren’t happening by instinct nor by habit. The planting and fertilizer decisions on this farm are all driven by data.
For Adron Belk, who farms in the Delta’s rich soils of Sunflower County, that shift — from gut feel to data-driven execution — isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about survival in a tight-margin environment, and ultimately, about profitability.
“This whole field, see how it’s calling for 8 gallons right there? It tells it the target. We’re looking for 8 gallons of fertilizer, and it’s putting out real close to 8 gallons,” Belk says as he’s making a planting pass through the field. “There’s areas in the field where it calls for none. So where it calls for none, it actually cuts it off on its own.”
On this farm, data doesn’t sit in a spreadsheet. It moves. It acts. It makes decisions in real time as equipment moves across the field.
That level of precision means decisions aren’t just guided by data, but automated with every pass.
“Where our phosphorus and zinc levels are low, the starter system turns on and it applies it. And where the phosphorus and zinc levels are adequate, it cuts it all and don’t put anything,” he says.
A Farm That Functions Like a Test Plot
Every acre Belk farms doubles as a testing ground. Every pass is an experiment. Every season is another opportunity to learn something new.
That mindset even extends to what he plants.
“I have never planted cotton on my own. My dad was a cotton farmer until 2007, when he quit growing cotton. We’re going to plant just a little bit this year though, about 130 acres. We’re going to get it custom picked. We’re just really planting the cotton to get a little bit of experience with it on a very, very small amount of acres. I believe it’s the tool I need to have in my toolbox for the future. And right now, I don’t have that tool,” he says.
At a time when many farmers are moving away from cotton, Belk is moving toward it.
“Some would say I’m just a glutton for punishment, I guess,” Belk says as he laughs.
A First Generation Farmer
Belk’s approach to farming didn’t come from following a playbook. In fact, it started with the opposite.
“I’m a first generation/second generation farmer,” he says. “My dad does farm, but we do not farm together.”
That decision for Belk to farm on his own was intentional from the start.
“My dad came through the 1980s. He just had a passion for it — worked really hard, started off with with almost nothing,” Belk explains. “And he did really well, and he knew all the lessons that he had to learn from being on his own, and mainly from messing stuff up on his own and learning. He knew how valuable that was. And he just really wanted us to always enjoy each other’s company and never have work come in between us or our family.”
So when Belk wanted to farm, his father gave him guidance — but not a safety net.
“He said, ‘I’ll give you all the advice you want,’ but he said it’s going to be beneficial if you do it on your own,” Belk remembers.
Belk took that to heart, starting his own farming operation by renting a few hundred acres while still in college. And like many young farmers, he learned by trial and error.
“I have made a lot of mistakes, and if I would have been farming with my dad, I probably wouldn’t have learned from those mistakes. I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to make them to learn on my own,” Belk says. “The mistakes I’ve made have taught me more than the things that I’ve done right, for sure.”
No Silver Bullet — Just Small Gains
While Belk admits he’s learned the hard way and made plenty of mistakes, in an industry often searching for big breakthroughs, Belk focuses on incremental wins.
“I think in farming, we’re all looking for that silver bullet that is going to get you 15, 20 bushels more per acre. But most of those big yield gains like that have already been discovered or have already been done, and so it’s very hard to find those silver bullets,” Belk says. “So, we are really tailoring our farm to finding the 2-, the 3-, the 5-bushel [per acre] differences,” he says.
That mindset is what led him deeper into data.
“We started really trying to look at data. And when we first started, I thought we were doing it right. I thought were interpreting things the right way. And then realized that we really needed to be going a little deeper,” he says.
Data Into Decisions
That realization led Belk to work with Chad Swindoll, founder of J19 Agriculture, to bring a more advanced level of analysis to the farm.
“He is very honed in on how to analyze data. And working with him has really brought a whole new perspective to ‘Not only now that we have this data, how do we analyze it? And then once we analyze, what do we do with it?’” he says.
For Swindoll, that last question — What do you do with it? — is where many farms fall short.
“There’s lack of implementation on the farm,” Swindoll explains. “There’s a lot of technology that’s available. I mean, we’re with the United States. We’re a very sophisticated production agriculture, but the execution and implementation piece on taking the information that the technology will provide — and then using it to really make a decision beyond just something that looks cool or sounds cool — but really driving change on the farm, that’s very lacking,” he says.
When Swindoll started working with Belk, he quickly realized Belk is different in not only the way he farms, but how he thinks about farming. What sets Belk apart, Swindoll says, is his willingness to act.
“He does a very good job of collecting the things that we need to make those decisions, and then if if the information is telling us we need this or that, he does,” Swindoll says.
Swindoll says Belk is a good executive, and that ability to not only know what needs to be done, but then implement it, is something that’s fueling Belk’s success.
“That’s something that I try to emphasize and talk about a lot in our industry and with my customers and non-customers. The farmer is the CEO, and an executive’s job is to make decisions,” Swindoll says. “And so we can get hung on a fence and make no progress. At some point, you have to move. And to be a good executive, it goes back to having the right pieces of information and the willingness to act.”
Swindoll says it also takes courage to do something different than what everybody else is doing.
“It’s not easy, because some of the things that we’ve found over the years are contrary to what we have been taught or told,” he says.
A $330,000 Turning Point
That willingness to trust the data — and act on it — led to one of the biggest financial shifts on the farm.
“About three or four years ago, we started really letting the data, we started analyzing the data and looking at it. And what we started seeing is, we were spending a lot of this money on fertilizer, and we didn’t really know if we’re getting a return out of it,” Belk says.
The result was a major change in how fertilizer was applied and how much was used.
“Three years ago, we cut about $330,000 out of our fertilizer budget that I would not have done without good sound data that we trusted,” Belk says. “Now, it took me a little while to get to that, to understand it. Then having J19 really run statistical data and showing us what was real and what was not. When you realize you cut $330,000 out of a fertilizer budget, and you still made the equivalent yields, that’s pretty eye-opening,” he says.
Finding Yield in the Details
While something like fertilizer savings have added major cost-savings to their farm, sometimes, the biggest gains come from the smallest adjustments. That includes what the data told them about tire pressure.
“Because we grow everything in the Delta on a raised bed, in between the tires it really pinches that row. We started noticing where we would run 20 lb. of air where the tire would kind of squat, it was pinching the row more, and we were getting more compaction under the tractor,” Belk says. “In some cases, it was costing anywhere from 10 to 17 bushels of yield on the rows just up under the tractor,” he says.
That prompted Belk to boost tire pressure to 30 lb. or air.
Rethinking the Playbook
On Belk’s farm, the field itself has become the ultimate teacher.
“That field is our textbook,” Swindoll says. “That’s kind of how we do this. If you read something in a book and it doesn’t line up, I think it was William Albrecht who said, ‘If you observe nature, and the textbook doesn’t agree, then you throw the textbook away.’ And we’ve had to do that in some cases.”
That philosophy carries through every decision Belk makes.
“Actually, my dad always told me, ‘Never tell somebody who asks you why you’re doing something, to tell them because your daddy did it.’ You know times change. I mean, we’re in a whole different world right now than we were even 5 years ago, especially 10 years ago. And so I feel like agriculture is changing very fast. I feel like we’ve got to learn to adapt and adopt really fast. Doing all this stuff has allowed us to stay kind of current with the changes in agriculture. It’s allowed us stay current with new products, with new things,” he says.
The New Equation for Farming
Farming has always involved risk. Whether it’s weather, markets or input costs, none of it is guaranteed.
But on this Mississippi Delta farm, the approach to risk is changing. It’s no longer just about taking chances. It’s about measuring them. Testing them. Understanding them. And ultimately, deciding which ones are worth it.
Because in today’s agriculture, that difference between guessing and knowing, may be what separates farmers who keep up from those who get ahead.
