Episode 019: Evaluating Equipment Efficiency

In modern agriculture, managing your farm means selecting and managing your machinery well. But how do you make effective decisions about what machinery to use, when to replace machinery, and whether or not your machinery is making a positive impact on your bottom line? Sam Schwab, Implementation Specialist with CropZilla Software, Inc., joins this episode of the FarmBits podcast to discuss how CropZilla is revealing the hidden influence machinery and other operational components and decisions have on a farm's bottom line. CropZilla was born out of a farmer's need to understand his operation past the level of complexity enabled by typical spreadsheet software. The goal of software created by CropZilla - including the enterprise software for desktop usage and CropZilla Machine Analytics app - is to provide farmers easy to use, flexible solutions that enable them to measure the impact of their operations and machinery decisions. As Sam mentions in this episode, it is critical to get all costs on a farm into the units of dollars per acre so that they can be effectively compared versus income and other costs measured in those units. Without an accurate measurement of the costs or benefits of all farm operations and decisions in those units, farm profitability can never be fully captured, or manipulated for maximum benefit. "Making these costs visible, because farmers don't really know. An extra fungicide pass might gsay itll get youy, an extra five bushel an acre or something like that, but maybe they're not taking into acount what you're using to apply it with or your costs associated with putting it on, because you have to pay for the machine, equipment, fuel, labor, all of those things.They might just say well this is X number of dollars per acre and you'll make this much more, but they're not taking into account all those other things. So making these costs visible is the first step in being able to make decisions with them." "A lot of farmers have their fertilizer, their seed, all that down to literally the penny per unit on that. So trying to get a handle on your equipment costs is a big part of that. . . . New equipment isn't always more expensive, because like I mentioned you can get it back with yield increases, timeliness increases." CropZilla Contact Information: Website:: https://cropzilla.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/CropZilla_Inc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cropzillainc/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cropzilla-software/ FarmBits Team Contact Info: E-Mail: farmbits@unl.edu Twitter: https://twitter.com/NEDigitalAg Samantha's Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamanthaTeten Jackson's Twitter: https://twitter.com/jstansell87 Opinions expressed by the hosts and guests on this podcast are solely their own, and do not reflect the views of Nebraska Extension or the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.