- 2019 is a bad weather year. Are you sure you want my data?

We feel you. That's why you get to decide whether you enter corn production data from 2018 or 2019. MyFarms automatically categorizes each field and year combination to account for extreme weather, but if you either planted no corn this year, or believe little can be learned from your 2019 experience, feel free to start with 2018.

- What field data is required?

For each field enrolled in N Balance, MyFarms needs a field boundary, each fertilizer, manure, and cover crop application event, and the field-wide average yield. To enroll in N Practices, MyFarms also needs the tillage category, N management practices, and tile drainage category. Finally, to enroll in N Economics, MyFarms needs the cost information for each unique product or service. Note that farmers can go as far through our simple, seven step process, as they wish.

- How do you use field boundaries?

MyFarms uses boundaries to properly categorize each field. For example, MyFarms automatically evaluates the soil types and climate at each field location to neutralize their effect on yield. MyFarms also uses them to filter benchmark reports by distance and to calculate weighted averages by area.

- How much time does it take?

If a grower uses a corn-soybean rotation and uses roughly the same fertilizer program on all fields coming out of soybeans, it will probably take a few minutes per field, thanks to sophisticated copy tools that use satellite imagery to detect crop rotation in each field. If a grower handles every field differently, it will take a bit longer.

- What management practices do you analyze?

Here is the complete list:

1. In-Season Nitrogen
2. Late-Season Nitrogen
3. Inhibitors
4. Slow Release Technology
5. Dynamic Models
6. Reduced Tillage
7. Complex Rotations
8. Expert N Recs
9. Primary Nitrogen Source
10. Soil Tests
11. Cover Crops
12. Variable Rate Nitrogen (on-the-go)
13. Variable Rate Nitrogen (maps)
14. Manure Application
15. Manure Incorporation

- How do you isolate the effect of practices on yield gain?

This one probably merits a doctoral thesis, but here’s the short answer. We all know that weather trumps all when it comes to yield, but if you start by holding the weather and soil types constant across a sufficiently large field-level data set, you can then evaluate all the practices in the remaining pool to determine which one accounts for the greatest amount of yield variability. You can then split the data pool into two, where the first group contains fields that experienced that practice and the other one did not. You can run this method again on the two resulting data pools, until the effect of each practice on yield gain has been sufficiently isolated.

- How do you determine a farmer’s comparison group?

MyFarms runs this analysis at the field-level, rather than at the grower-level. Each grower will likely have fields in numerous field groups, based on their unique soil types and weather conditions, but we make this very easy to explore after you unlock the benchmark reports.

- What if I already use a different software tool?

No problem. You have at least two options:

1. Almost every farming application lets you export field boundaries as shapefiles. You can do so and then easily import them into MyFarms. Our support team would be glad to help.
2. The entire N Economics toolset is also available as a plugin (more precisely, a web service), which means it could be embedded in the software you currently use. If you would like to ask your software provider to install this plugin, please click “GET STARTED” and let us know.

- Will you sell my data?

No, not ever. MyFarms was built by fourth generation corn farmers without any outside investors, which means two things:

1. We not only know, but fiercely agree, that on-farm data must be kept private
2. We cannot be compelled by outside investors to bend on this principle, because we have no outside investors.

If you want to discuss this very important subject with our Managing Director, Chris Fennig, just click "GET STARTED" and let us know.

- What if I have a new question?

We would love to hear from you! Please either click "GET STARTED" and include your question in the "Notes" field, or submit the form below.