Streamline your crop scouting process
Every successful growing season begins, and often ends, with field scouting. Accurately collecting data on crop conditions, pest threats, weed risks and disease management does more than offer you an up-close look into year-over-year crop trends – it allows for real-time interpretation of field and insect data, giving you and your growers the insight needed to identify and quickly implement intervention measures. With the right insights, growers can prevent crop loss, optimize yield and, ultimately, protect profits.
Effective scouting is hard work. Manually writing and recording details in a notebook took extra time, and human error in recording, reading and managing data. A mobile application slims down your scouting toolbox from notebooks, sketchbooks and cameras to a single device.
“Historically, field scouting has been a poorly documented process where someone writes on a piece of paper or puts information in a spreadsheet. But what if you accidentally lose your notebook or can’t remember if you told your customer what you saw,” says Zach Worden, Global Head of Agronomy and Compliance Sales at Agrian by TELUS Agriculture. “With digital scouting, you can see who you’ve sent things to and update information directly into the platform.”
Identify, record and share
TELUS Agronomy allows you to use your mobile device to enter field observations under categories such as insects, disease, weeds and damage. You can easily log the percentage of crops affected, degree of severity, photos of your observations and record any action items and notes. All of this information is stored in easy-to-read GPS pinpointed icons on the Dashboard map and are available for others to view in real-time or, alternatively, can be turned into reports.
“This is a tool for advisors to service and better connect with their customers,” says Worden. “Our digital scouting tool is extremely powerful because of how simple it is to create information quickly based on a number of different datasets that you can use while scouting, and then efficiently communicating that information to customers.”
Enhanced client experience
Capturing relevant intelligence in one place ensures your customers have access to what they need, when and where they need it, which closes information gaps, making for an enhanced client experience. Anyone who has been granted access to the platform can quickly and easily find the information required to keep things moving forward.
“You have to think, what is my return on investment? And it’s creating and streamlining information, and getting those details to the customer quickly,” Worden says. “Our cloud-based ecosystem enables users to drop pins and, from there, their customers can either login to view the pins or have reports quickly generated for them. It’s all in a consolidated format.”
Centralized data collection
TELUS Agronomy can have a significant impact on the time required for daily and weekly tasks. By recording field-level observations on a mobile device, important decisions can be made quickly and in real-time. And leveraging the power of technology means data tracking is performed in minutes, allowing you and your growers the opportunity to service more acres in a shorter amount of time.
When it comes to insect-related trends, TELUS Agronomy's trap counting solution empowers you, your field staff and growers to easily monitor activity and gauge collected data to make decisions relating to pest threats on-the-fly. And because TELUS Agronomy stores information in one central location, it’s easy to see what tasks were completed in previous seasons.
“We archive information for all time, as long as you have an up to date subscription. We never remove anything you’ve created,” says Worden. “You can very simply filter and see all scouting events season by season, month by month, week by week and day by day.”
Enterprise dashboards
TELUS Agronomy is designed for all crops, in all markets and for any size organization. You can document the percentage of crop affected, level of severity and any further actions required. Those observations easily roll up into Enterprise Dashboards, a tool used to share disease tracking, monitor activities and report on data trends by location in near real-time.
“This is a dashboard where you can create and customize the widgets, pivot tables, charts and graphs. You can see, chart, draw and pivot things like certain areas, crops, scouts, and diseases,,” says Worden. “If you had a problem last year around a certain time, you can check how early you saw it last year so you know how much time you need to anticipate it this year. With that goal in mind, you can accomplish everything with just a few clicks of a dashboard.”
TELUS Agronomy's field scouting capabilities also includes in-season imagery and directed scouting with layers, including application, planting and harvest data.
“Using additional information like satellite imagery, soil and tissue layers, application planting and harvest data means that when you’re scouting that field, you have the ability to target certain areas and really focus on field hotspots so that you’re making the most of your scouting time,” says Worden. “Labor costs for scouts is an expenditure, so how do you get your best return on investment on the team members? By using a digital scouting platform.”
TELUS Agronomy provides fast, accurate crop data. Real-time syncing between devices means your team and growers can see observations as they’re being created. With early detection of crop issues, the likelihood of a successful harvest is even greater. To learn more about TELUS Agronomy, connect with our experts and they can help set you up.
