Driving Technology

How One Mississippi Farmer Turned Data Into $330K in Fertilizer Savings

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:19:18 GMT

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.

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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.

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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.

Battle Against Resistant Weeds: How One Technology Could Revive No-Till On the Plains

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 14:02:11 GMT

Farming in southwest Kansas isn’t for the faint of heart. Producing a crop in an arid climate can be a challenge, but this year, Luke Jaeger is thankful for some much needed rain.

“It was the wettest November on record for us in some areas of the farm, which is crazy this time of year.” says Jaeger, a farmer in Minneola, Kan.

For an area that typically receives less than 20" of rain each year, Jaeger says some of his farms have seen 6" of rain during the month of November alone.

The deluge of rain is much needed moisture the winter wheat is soaking up, and it’s also planting ideas for different crop plans next spring.

“I was just talking with our local dealer here about how on our farm, for the first time ever, we will probably plant more dryland corn than we will grain sorghum, because of the subsoil moisture we have in the ground.

Jaeger and his brother farm a mix of corn, sorghum, soybeans and wheat, most of which is dryland, across 20,000 acres.

“Every year, my brother and I, Matthew, take a 30,000' approach and poke holes in our operation to find where we are spending too much money and where can we save,” Jaeger says.

A never ending journey to solve problems on their own farm, they started EGE Products to manufacture specialty ag chemicals and fertilizers.

“I like to say our farm is a 20,000 acre research farm,” Jaeger says. “In our office, we have a full-scale laboratory with formulation chemists, Ph.D.s, chemists and chemical engineers. So, we see problems on the farm and bring them back to our formulations team to work on solutions.”

With the farm to then put those products to the test, Jaeger says it’s a constant journey to innovate.

“I think it’s important to be relevant in the marketplace and always be innovating, whether it’s on the farm or with EGE. We’re always trying to innovate,” Jaeger says. “I think if you’re not innovating, you’re dying. A lot of people bristle at adopting newer technologies and we just dive right into it and go.”

One of the latest products they decided to try wasn’t something they produced on their own. Instead, it was added to their sprayer: John Deere’s See & Spray.

“It’s like that technology was built for our farm,” Jaeger says. “We didn’t approach See & Spray technology to specifically reduce costs. A lot of it was reducing the toxicity of some of the chemicals that we were using on the farm.”

Able to Use More Effective, But More Expensive Herbicides

Jaeger says they run their sprayer 11 months out of the year, and he’s the one who’s typically in the driver’s seat.

“I put about 600 hours a year in the seat of one of our sprayers, and I don’t like Paraquat,” he explains. “What See & Spray has allowed us to do is chemistries that perform the same, but they were a little too expensive, it has allowed us to integrate that chemistry more into our operation.”

Jaeger says in his area, a chemistry like Paraquat is widely used out of necessity, mainly because it’s the most affordable and best option available for farmers

However, they Jaegers don’t like to use that particular herbicide, saying it drifts too much and is too toxic. Now, thanks to the new spraying technology that allows them to only spray where weeds are present, their farm has been able to make the switch.

“It’s allowed us to move to other chemistries that were more expensive and hard to justify when you were spraying every acre. And now we’ve been able able to move to to some of those less toxic. I mean, the chemistry that we use now is less toxic than table salt. So, I mean, you can get real excited about that,” said Jaeger.

The Battle Against Resistant Weeds

Instead of looking at the technology to save on costs, Jaeger sees it as a way to do a more effective job.

“I found that we’re going out earlier, more often than we normally would,” he adds. “If you’re going to blanket spray, you want to wait until there are enough weeds out there to justify the the application. And for us, we didn’t. We don’t have to wait because we know maybe we’re only going to spray 5% of the field.”

Because of their location, the Jaegers had to transition to nearly 100% no-till, a necessity to control wind erosion and help preserve and protect any moisture in the soil.

“A lot of farmers have had to abandon no till because it’s just too expensive, and it became harder and harder to control those resistant weeds,” Jaeger says. “But with this technology, I think we’re going to see more farmers coming back into no till because they can cost effectively control those weeds.

In 2011, it was kochia that Roundup herbicide would no longer control. Now Jaeger says Pigweed and resistant grasses, like switchgrass, have become a yearly battle.

“What this See & Spray technology allows us to do is run a more concentrated spray mixture, a high rate of glyphosate or cluster them. But we’re only spraying that particular weed and not the whole field. So, we can run a higher rate of that chemical, get way better control, and our costs are still very minimal because we’re only spraying that target weed that’s out there,” he explained.

When farming smarter and always trying to innovate, the Jaegers say it’s technology like See & Spray that seems to have a perfect fit here in southwest Kansas.

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Looking to Cut Costs? This Illinois Farmer Saved $8,000 on Herbicides in a 200-Acre Soybean Field

How This One Technology Helped a Michigan Farmer Cut His Herbicide Use by 60%

Looking to Cut Costs? This Illinois Farmer Saved $8,000 on Herbicides in a 200-Acre Soybean Field

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 21:08:08 GMT

Harvest is running rampant in northern Illinois. With such a mild fall, and not many doses of rain, northern Illinois farmer Dan Hartmann says the rhythm of harvest hasn’t seen many delays this year.

“Things are drier than I expected by quite a bit,” says Hartmann who farms in Maple Park, Ill. “The corn is yielding surprisingly well for being as dry of a year that we’ve had. We got in early, and corn yields are above average. So, I’m very, very impressed.”

Hartmann says corn yields are the star on his farm. Soybean yields aren’t as good but are still hovering right around average for yields this year.

“I think everything kind of ran out of water in August and early September,” Hartmann says.

Hartmann Family Farm: A Legacy of Innovation

Hartmann’s family farm spans across 5,500 acres of row crops, and they also raise close to 7,000 head of hogs. Four generations have farmed here, and as the next generation on the farm, it’s Dan who’s always looking for what’s next.

“We got into a self-propelled sprayer as of four years ago,” Hartmann says. “We were looking to upgrade our sprayer, because we saw the benefit in having a big self-propelled sprayer. And to put it in perspective, we went from a 60' pull-behind sprayer to a 120' self-propelled sprayer, so it was a it was quite the leap that we made.”

It was a major upgrade the Hartmanns decided to dive into, and that decision opened the door for what was possible.

“After doing that, we realized we could get more precise,” Hartmann says. “We could do a couple extra applications.”

Knowing upgrading to a brand new sprayer was out of their price range for this year, they opted for a 2018 model that had ExactApply nozzles.

“See & Spray was a pretty big selling point on it. That’s something we could add to it,” Hartmann says. “I wasn’t sure how to use it on our own farm because I didn’t know how much our weed pressure we actually had since we’ve always just broadcasted things. What impressed me was it didn’t matter what I did, the See & Spray worked just like it’s supposed to. I mean, it saw the weeds, and it sprayed it.”

Significant Herbicide Savings Across Fields

Hartmann was impressed as he watched it work across the field, but he says what ultimately confirmed they made the right decision was the amount of savings they saw when it came to herbicide applications.

“I actually ran the numbers already, and if I only used it on bean acres, the technology would pay for itself in a year and a half,” Hartmann says. “That’s based off data that we collected this year. That alone speaks volumes of what it’s worth, and so that was really impressive.”

Calculating the impact, Hartmann was able to nail down his savings field by field, and calculate it down to the dollars per acre. Hartmann says in one field alone, the savings was several thousand dollars.

“We had a field of beans pretty far south over here, and I ran two residual passes, and then I came back a third time with just the See & Spray. We were spraying Liberty, and so the Liberty cost per acre is pretty high, but that field alone saved us over $8,000 in chemicals because I only sprayed 18% of the field, and it was a 200-acre field.”

The biggest battle with weeds in his area of Illinois is waterhemp. It’s a yearly battle that can be difficult to stay ahead.

“From the cab, you’re driving down the road, you can’t see all the weeds even though it’s spraying them,” Hartmann says. “And that’s a game I would play as I was driving across the field, I would see a weed from the cab that wasn’t very big, and I’d watch it go by the boom. Sure enough, it sprayed it, but it’s also spraying all these weeds I wasn’t seeing. We had really good coverage, so that was impressive.”

Future Investments in Precision Farming

With commodity prices hovering where they’re at today, every dollar counts on Hartmann’s farm, and that means he’s still willing to invest in technology, but he wants to be smart about those investments.

“We’re getting to the point where we’re scraping to save every dollar per acre or grow more bushels to counter or offset the price of it,” Hartmann says. “Our margins are getting tighter, so we have to find a way to make better use of our equipment.”

As he watched the machine work this year, Hartmann saw how much more precise he could be with a new way to fight those stubborn and tough-to control weeds. And as harvest revealed the final results with what weeds survived and what didn’t, Hartmann is excited about what the cameras and machine learning can actually do.

“I haven’t really thought about what’s next,” Hartmann says. “I mean, this sprayer was a pretty big leap for us, so it’s encouraging to see it pan out. It makes us excited for the future. It’s like, what else can we do?”

Your Next Read: How This One Technology Helped a Michigan Farmer Cut His Herbicide Use by 60%

How This One Technology Helped a Michigan Farmer Cut His Herbicide Use by 60%

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 21:30:25 GMT

Settled just south of Holland, Mich., it’s always busy on Scenic View Dairy. This time of year, with 2,000 head of cows being milked and a couple thousand acres of crops in the field, it’s bustling more than ever.

“The crops look pretty good this year,” says Brian Geerlings, a partner in Scenic View Dairy. “We got off to a little bit of a slow start with a cooler spring, but we’ve got some heat right now that’s really making crops turn around, and they’re looking good.”

Geerlings says while weather is a challenge year-to-year on the farm, his other biggest challenges as a dairy producer are milk prices and finding enough labor.

“Labor has been a challenge, obviously. It seemed like after the Covid pandemic, we couldn’t get people to work quite as well,” says Geerlings. “The pricing [of milk] has been a challenge. There’s been ups and downs. It’s not a lot of fun when we can’t pay our bills. And that weighs heavy on us when we can’t. So, pricing matters a lot in those situations.”

The reality for dairy producers is milk prices had been below the cost of production for consecutive years. Geerlings says lately prices have turned around, so the dairy side of the business is a little more optimistic.

That’s good news for Scenic View Dairy, because the partners are serious about milking cows and pumping close to 40 million pounds a day. But Geerlings says the operation is much more than a dairy farm. The producers are progressive, proactive and always on the hunt for the best technologies.

“We’ve done several things in the last 20 years,” he says. We’ve put in anaerobic digesters, drones for spraying fields and now this new See & Spray technology with John Deere, that I think have been very valuable. There are other technologies we’ve looked at and passed on either because they didn’t seem to be a good fit for our farm, or they didn’t provide good ROI or a payback.”

Geerlings says they definitely don’t shy away from technology. From turning methane gas into natural gas and putting it in a pipeline, to finding new ways to spray crops, the partners are always looking for ways to become more efficient and are often early adopters of technology.

One of the recent additions to the farm was a sprayer. Instead of buying a new sprayer, the dairy opted for a used sprayer, but added a precision upgrade kit with See & Spray .

“We’re working with some weeds that are herbicide resistant. It’s really no secret that those are out there, and we have a couple that are a problem for us,” he says. “But we really wanted to be able to control costs. The weed isn’t widespread, it’s in certain areas or spots in the field. So to broadcast-spray the entire field would have been very costly.”

He says weed-control programs can cost anywhere from $20 to $30 per acre, but by being able to see and spray only the weeds actually present in a field, the technology is producing a savings even bigger than he imagined would be possible.

“I have a couple of fields that I was spraying last week, and I think we saw 26% of an area applied in one field. And then in another field we sprayed around 43% of it. So, there are fields with the higher weed pressure and some with lower. But in either case, the benefits add up quick.”

He says he’s cut his herbicide use by 60% in some fields, and even more in others.

“We were going to be happy if it was a 50% reduction,” Geerlings says. “We’re pretty much exceeding what we were hoping for, which obviously makes the technology pay even more. It’s really working well for us.”

That herbicide cost savings even caught their local retailer by surprise.

“He showed us some maps and he was at 34% in this one field of applying product. So, he’s saving a significant amount,” says Josh Rabbers, ag sales manager at GreenMark Equipment in Michigan. “I think this is a big game changer for what we’re going to see in the future just to have chemical savings and benefits in just spraying those certain problem spots in the field.”

Geerlings says watching the sprayer work in the field has been impressive.

“It’s amazing that the cameras that are on the booms are seeing weeds that I can’t see as an operator,” he says. “These machines are so wide; nowadays, they are 120-feet wide. From the seat, you have to be able to see 60 feet each direction. And to be able to see weeds that are an inch tall or less at times, you can’t possibly do a good job of spot spraying.”

What he’s been really impressed with is watching the nozzles fire on and off as the camera sees and sprays a weed. And that’s exactly how the technology works. Each camera serves as a set of eyes, finding weeds so small that not even Geerlings or the farm’s sprayer operator can see them.

“It has cameras along the boom, and it’s looking ahead of it and seeing the weed that’s there. It’s spraying product on just the weed there,” Rabbers says.

For a dairy that sits close to Lake Michigan, the savings isn’t just about dollars. Less herbicide use means applications are more environmentally friendly than ever.

“My dad always said farmers were the first environmentalists. So, it really fits with our philosophy of trying to not use more product than we absolutely have to,” Geerlings adds.

Geerlings is seeing solid savings result in dollars and environmental costs, and in the process uncovering even more opportunities on the farm, making Scenic View Dairy truly leading-edge.