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Planting Season Helpful Hints

Planting 2023 is underway in much of the Beck’s marketplace, and still WEEKS off in other areas. Regardless of where you are with your planting season this year, your Beck’s precision farming department wants to give a few helpful tips and resources for you.

Figure 1

Specifically on the FARMserver software there are two things I would like to touch on quickly that relate to weather. At the top right hand of the home screen (Figure 1), you have access to BAMWX weather videos that are updated daily (and during planting sometimes multiple times per day). This Indiana based and agriculture focused […]

FARMserver Update: Take Advantage of the FULL Beck’s Experience

If you haven’t heard by now, Beck’s offers a precision farming software to all their customers at no extra cost. That means no hidden agendas and no strings attached. We simply want to provide you with a secure place to organize your data, analyze what you’re recording, and make improvements based on what you learn. That’s where FARMserver comes in.

FARMserver is a web-based tool developed and maintained by Beck’s employees, taught by Beck’s employees, and is backed by a support team of Beck’s employees who, just like you, are Farmers at Heart. We get our feature ideas from farmers and […]

FARMserver Update: Management Zones and Field Boundaries

A new year presents us with a whole new set of challenges and successes. Many of us are focusing on our New Year’s resolutions, looking to better ourselves, the lives of others, or setting new financial goals for the year. Whatever goal or accomplishment you’re working towards, sometimes reflecting on last year’s results is an excellent place to start. You may find yourself wondering, “what did I do well last year,” “what can I do better this year,” or possibly, “how can I be more productive?” As we finalize our plans for the 2023 crop year, questions like these help […]

FARMserver Update: Post Calibrate and Compare Tools for Post-Harvest

We all have a phone with WAY more capabilities than we know how to use. FARMserver is no different. There are MANY tools and features you won’t know are there until you really need them and someone can show you how to use them. I have highlighted the two most valuable tools post-harvest below.

Bulk Post Calibrating Yield

Post-calibrating in FARMserver can be done in two ways; by individual harvest events or by selecting multiple fields and calibrating them all at once. For someone who has all their bushels determined for each field or knows what general percentage their monitor was off, […]

FARMserver Update: “Autopsy” Your Fields With FARMserver

Yield maps are often referred to as “autopsies” of the field. They show the patterns of good and bad areas, whether those acres are naturally occurring or man-made. Changes in topography, soil drainage, weather, texture, nutrient levels, disease, and other environmental factors can help or hurt yield. Man-made patterns, while typically distinguished by their straight lines, can be the result of tillage practices, hybrid or variety changes, fertilizer or herbicide test strips, fungicide trials, or any other practice in the field which affects yield.

While it’s true that any analytics at this point would not help the freshly harvested crop, learning […]

FARMserver Update: The Importance of Yield Data

Yield data. It’s the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind when “precision ag” is mentioned. Yes, yield data is critical to precision agriculture. It’s the culmination of all your efforts throughout the year. The report card. The “good, the bad, and the ugly.” The map we use to analyze what we did and how it performed. But before we can really dig deep into the analytics, we must first put it into a usable format. 

Enter FARMserver.

We like to say that FARMserver is “colorblind” when it comes to data, meaning we can upload data from just about any monitor or format […]

FARMserver Update: High Priority Situational Alerts

Located between our agronomy and weather alerts under notifications, we have introduced another new tool in FARMserver to keep you informed during the growing season, the high-priority situational alerts.

What is a high-priority situational alert? It is an alert delivered with high importance that provides timely information on specific agronomic conditions that could impact yield potential. Examples of these timely alerts are listed below:

What is a Situational Alert?

The following situations are a few examples of when you can expect to receive a Situational Alert, along with helpful agronomic recommendations:

Corn/Soybean Frost – Air temperatures reach 28 degrees or lower sustained for 3+ hoursCorn Crown […]

FARMserver Update: Weather Alerts are Here!

The wait is over to figure out what fields had how much wind, hail, and most importantly RAIN! But not just how much it rained: how much in the last 24 hours, since planting, and how much this year. FARMserver uses scoured radar generated rainfall amounts to accumulate the 24 hour, and date range totals, BUT if you have a Davis Instruments weather station, you can integrate with FARMserver and we will prioritize that data for any field within 0.5 mi radius of that station.

Having the ability to track when and where storms hit that bring […]

FARMserver Update: Don’t Forget to Scout!

Across the Midwest, acres and acres of fields are planted in hopes of producing the best crop possible. Several factors influence these growing conditions, including product performance, input prices, management practices, soil types, and of course, weather. While we as farmers certainly cannot control all of those things, we can monitor our crops and do our best to make the best decisions with the resources we have. FARMserver’s scouting app is here to help with that.If you haven’t tried the scouting feature yet, let me share some of the functionality with you. For starters, you can access it from our website […]

Crop Growth Model in FARMserver

With the month of May dwindling down, planters, field cultivators and anhydrous toolbars are cruising throughout the Midwest in a race to get this year’s crop planted. These can be hard times as the “marathon” of spring planting can wear down even the most experienced of us. Certain areas of the region have been blessed with favorable planting conditions, while others are still battling muddy fields and last-minute nitrogen applications. However, we cannot lose focus on what is left to be loaded into the planter, or the progress of the crops that are already emerging from the ground. FARMserver has […]