Farmers can’t control the weather—but they can control which practices they repeat. Acre Almanac, an AI-driven platform built by western Minnesota farmer and Bushel co-founder Ryan Raguse, uses years of your field history to identify what most likely drove yield variability across your operation—so you can tell whether a 5–10 bushel swing came from conditions or decisions.
When Ryan Raguse took over his family’s farm after his father’s death from cancer, he had the historical yields, but he couldn’t ask anyone the questions to reveal the decisions that led to those outcomes.
“I started to build this just for myself, but then I realized everyone has fields they wonder what led to 5 or 10 bushels. And while you have university studies or other field trials that tell you X, Y, Z adds up to this many bushels, this is giving you your own private almanac,” Raguse says.
You need three things to get started:
- Field boundaries
- Planting dates
- Your APH
After those three data layers are input into Acre Almanac, any number of other variables can be added in its modeling to identify what led to different yield outcomes. All data remain private to your account—nothing is shared or aggregated.
“What it does is regression testing to tell you what drove your variance in your yield, and then over time, you can detrend things,” he says. “For example, you can tell whether a practice added more bushels or if it was just good weather. You can normalize every variable across your farm and just pick one you’re testing—it allows you to analyze it across your entire farm all at once.”
Examples farmers can compare include running cultivators at an angle, tillage depth, or spiked vs. solid closing wheels, and more.
For Raguse, he’s been able to see how early soybean planting pays off across his western Minnesota acres.
“This year, I’m thinking about planting all my soybeans first, instead of my corn,” he says. “In farming, everything is an if-this-then-that statement. So, if all my fields were ready at the exact same time, I would prioritize planting my soybeans. But as I can, I’m putting my soybeans in early because the data shows there’s going to be an outsized benefit.”
He says the goal of Acre Almanac is to answer questions that previously weren’t easy to answer unless you had a career of firsthand experience.
“My dad didn’t keep the best records. So I was calling the co-op, the seed person and anyone who could help me piece together the history of the farm,” Raguse says. “That’s where this idea came from to uncover this generational knowledge that was impossible to otherwise extract. We’re creating a private almanac that can be passed down digitally.”
He adds, “Maybe it was 95% dependent on weather one year. But you hear that all the time and you hear about the ‘secret sauce’ — so this really is about understanding the depth of your decision-making and what’s making a difference.”
