John Deere technology powers precision farming and golf course management through GPS sprayers, data tracking, and real-time decision making. Desert Mountain golf courses and La OSA farm use the systems to cut waste and boost efficiency.
I lose track of that every day, of the beauty that I get to come in and call my office every day.
So, yeah, we're out here at Desert Mountain Agronomy. It's a private golf club right above Scottsdale.
Yeah, you gotta skip. It's easy.
So, yeah, I originally was working in the ag side in Casa Grande. Five months ago, position opened up and it was one of the things I've been interested in for a while.
So as we've grown, we've gotten to the point now where we just had to have somebody that could be dedicated just to golf. He has a lot of experience in agriculture, and that all transitions over to the golf course.
When I got into the business, I felt like John Deere, quite frankly, was a little behind when it came to golf course equipment. And over the last several years, they have really stepped it up and really become in the forefront of providing us with the latest technology. I really feel like they've led the charge in that and been a very innovative company and really have provided us with the tools we need to be successful.
Sounds good.
Awesome.
We have around 750 acres of irrigated turf here at Desert Mountain.
They have seven golf courses all on one property. And just within the last few years, we've really been working a lot with Desert Mountain on getting all of their equipment connected, getting all of their GPS sprayers set up.
These guys are spraying really, really expensive apps out here. So being able to tell him exactly how much area he's got to the, you know, to the inch pretty much is huge for these guys.
Our expectations are very high. We strive for perfection, even though perfection is not attainable all the time.
Earlier today, we're out mapping a hole. We're getting within an inch of that line, and that allows the customer to know exactly, you know, how much his areas are. He can order seed accordingly, he can order chemical accordingly. The sprayer out there spraying, he was using the autotrac to make his passes accurately without, you know, wasting any chemical or passes.
See, this is the. This is the cool part. Like, watch this. It didn't spray anything outside of that pink line.
You see the nozzle on the bottom a little?
So now he's going to go out. So they'll click off. So it's the same exact technology that we've been using an AG for 15, 20 years, and now it is just smaller on the golf course, obviously, we're.
Not growing crops or corn or cotton. It's grass, but it's still a crop. You know, we're seeding it, we're watering it, we're cutting it and we're trying to keep it alive.
And we want to do it in the right way and just all of these efficiencies help us do that.
So right now here we're in harvest, getting everybody ready, making sure we got variety locators set up for everybody. And we're just starting to get into it.
We've been just making sure that the customers have all their fields, boundaries, varieties put on those pickers so that way they're documenting everything correctly. This is our report card. If we can't nail this step then we can't analyze all that information, how the year performed. So far harvest has been good. We haven't had much weather to speak of. No issues there. The growing season was tough. It was a hot summer, it was a tough year. Pretty hot. Winner. We did it. Alright, we're good now.
So we went out today to Sierra Farming, the La OSA farm and just making sure that everything's working for the operators. So I know Donnie had some questions on layout pages so we changed some layout pages for him and got that set up.
She ready to roll? Can do.
With harvest. There's a lot of, you know, cotton's our primary crop here, but we have a lot of people working on land leveling, getting ready for wheat, corn, a lot of other things.
We're here at our farm, it's the Laosa farm and we're at our cotton production for 20, 23 here.
So we put. So there's the location over there, that's the guidance screen in the cab.
They're looking at real time field data as well as averages, moisture, bale weights, basically everything that we need to know. That real time data kind of just gets us a little more information quicker.
About this time the bank and any of the lenders are starting to want to know where you're at.
Years passed. They had to wait for the gin to be done.
So every module that we create in the field is tagged with an RFID tag. And then we know where in the field that round module came from. And then when it goes to the gin, we scan it coming into the gin. So we know that that module came from this customer, from this field and it's this variety.
And so by giving them that data now opposed to the end of the year, it makes it a more positive relationship between you and the bank. They feel more confident in your numbers.
So the big thing we're looking for is obviously to see what those yields are.
It's always exciting, because that is the report card. This is where we get to start really digging into the data, start figuring out how can we improve the operation. Now we're going to start prepping for our Precision Summit. Every January, we try to get all of our customers together in one area. And this Precision Summit, we really try to let our customers talk to each other and figure it out amongst themselves. What's working well for this guy might work well for somebody else in a different application. Last year, we even brought some golf course customers in, talking about how they're using technology, just the same technology as these, all of these guys that are in agriculture. And then it was also good for the golf course to see, like, how farmers are using technology. So we're working on getting a bunch of customers to come together and start sharing their own stories about how they're using data in their operations.
