Japanese make precision ag pitch

Noriko Yamagata unveils HitachiSoft's ag software

On Monday in Los Angles, the Japanese baseball team capped its run in the World Baseball Classic, edging South Korea in extra innings to win the championship. On Sunday, they had thumped the U.S. pros 9-4 in the semi-finals.

On Tuesday, another Japanese team, a group of engineers and marketers from Hitachi Software Engineering Co, Ltd. landed in the U.S. to begin a tour of American agriculture, in hopes of making their own mark on American soil.

Their stop at our office in Des Moines was the first on a tour in which they hope to learn more about American agriculture and possibly develop U.S. partners for development of their products.

HitachiSoft owns 90% of the precision ag software market in Japan, according to Marc Vanacht, a U.S. consultant traveling with the company representatives.

Noriko Yamagata, whom Vanacht described as HitachiSoft’s “genius software programmer,” gave Successful Farming Editor Rich Fee and me a tour of the company’s ag applications.

HitachiSoft, based in Tokyo, has about 5,000 employees, 4,000 of them software engineers. Twenty of them are devoted to ag.

Their applications are being used by 35 cooperatives in Japan, each of which is composed of 200 to 10,000 farmers. The biggest of these use HitachiSoft’s GeoMation Farm software to track up to 100,000 fields at a time.

In the demonstration we saw, the crops included soybeans, sugar beets, wheat, rice, vegetables, and forages. Yamagata showed us how farmers were able to quickly track basic data like soil types, fertilizer applications, tillage systems, rotations, and chemical use.

A harvest GPS system shows you the real-time location of equipment on a field map. Satellite imagery is used to show the growth stage and lodging of wheat, the protein content of rice, and the quality of forage crops. A cool-looking 3D display of a field lets you better visualize slopes and highlight erodible areas.

HitachiSoft has a different approach to ag, one it has borrowed from its service to other industries. Its program for the Japanese national electrical system, for example, includes 100 million “objects” in a GIS.

According to Vanacht the company’s “big engine” of a GIS is one of its main points of difference with other systems for ag.

HitachiSoft starts with a big picture that includes a ton of data and then works down to the field level, rather than starting at the field level and working up. This will make it easer for farmers to create maps that are easy to understand and use, Vanacht says.

"We believe our GIS is more powerful than existing U.S. [systems], said Osamu Nishiguchi, Agriculture Project Manager. "We also believe we have some existing agricultural applications that will interest U.S. farmers."

Rich and I came away impressed with HitachiSoft's people and products. You can’t help but wonder if the Japanese won’t do as well in farm fields as they have on the baseball diamond lately.

'This is stupid stuff'

There’s an old poem I was made to study in college, “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” by A.E. Housman. The title refers to a man’s opinion about the value of poetry (he'd rather drink beer), with the poet arguing that there is actually practical value to verse—to prepare one for the rough and tumble of life.

I've just finished reading the last poems of John Updike, my favorite writer, and I can only echo Housman, and say, this is not stupid stuff.

Updike died in January at age 76 after having written hundreds of literary works. He achieved the rare feat of producing best sellers that also garnered all the great literary awards, including Pulitzer Prizes for two of his “Rabbit” novels.

In 1986, I wrote Updike a letter inviting him to speak at our company about an idea he had written about—how to achieve a “sense of useful work.” (This is something more of a concern for artists and writers than for farmers.)

He declined the offer, but in a warm, personal note conveyed that he was pleased to correspond with me. I have liked to think that it was in part because he viewed agricultural journalism as “useful work.”

Updike’s last poems, which were published this week in The New Yorker are the “stupid stuff” that Housman talked about—they prepare you for what’s in store for all of us.

The poems are written during a brief period between when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the last stages of treatment for his illness. They look back on life without remorse and ahead to his last days with a brave face.

One of the poems pays tribute to his "dear friends of childhood, classmates" for providing him material for his life-long profession. Everything he needed for a life of writing was right there in his home town of Shillington, Pennsylvania, he wrote--with its “little factories, cornfields and trees, leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.”

This appreciation of the details of daily life is something that all of us work for, I suspect. It's just that John Updike got it all down on paper.

Farm until I'm 80

A farmer friend of mine, who just turned 65, told me recently that he was going to farm until he was 80. In fact, he had just decided to buy a new planter, a used 8-row machine, and was in the market for a combine, an item he hadn't owned for a while.

I was getting a tour of his farm shop where he was overhauling the planter--replacing fertilizer coulters, roller chains, disk openers, and seed tube protectors, while adding new spiked closing wheels. Whew, it looked like a job for a man half his age. Next to the planter was a chore tractor that he was getting ready to drop a new engine into.

The man is in good health, it would seem, and he's still supporting at least one of his daughters. Still, the news surprised me. He has a couple part-time jobs, knows how to entertain himself off the farm, and otherwise seems pretty well set to cruise comfortably into his twilight years, at least as much as anyone can these days.

It strikes me that there are three intriguing demographic trends in agriculture right now: the full-blown emergence of young and beginning farmers, the rise in the number of female farmers since the last ag census, and now this growing set of retirement age farmers--who appear ready to bop until they drop.

A recent discussion on senior farmers in Agriculture Online's Farm Business Talk, garnered a huge response--some 140 postings.

The idea of farming forever is not without controversy. The topic elicted an outpouring of emotion, including a fair amount of grumpy argument. How do I get to farm if dad (or mom) keeps going? How do we change with the times if the old folks stay on the place? Is it safe for old-timers to be running that equipment? Is it fair to the spouse to stay trapped on the farm for another decade?

One of the enablers of old-age farming, of course, is modern technology.

One respondent makes the point that the "continued advance of technology in farm equipment has been a principal driver in allowing farmers to continue their chosen profession well into their advanced age." He believes machinery manufacturers and others serving ag will have to look at elderly farmers as a new trend.

'Soybeangate’ gets polite treatment at Classic

The long-standing rift in the soybean industry between the American Soybean Association (ASA) and the United Soybean Board (USB) widened to a canyon in December, when ASA charged USB with misconduct in managing the National Soybean Checkoff. ASA requested a USDA investigation of eight different allegations.

Given the seriousness of the charges, you had to wonder if there wouldn’t be some fireworks at the Commodity Classic last week in Grapevine, Texas.

ASA and USB held press conferences, both of which were well attended by the media, though clearly this was not the kind of press corps that hounded Richard Nixon into a corner. Questions from the press were polite.

Leaders from both groups stuck to a script in which the “soybeangate” topic was kept in the background. Johnny Dodson, ASA president, talked about the group’s successes with the farm bill, biotech development, and exports promotions, among other things. He touted the groups 16% growth in new members this year.

Dodson eventually was questioned about the new American Soybean Federation created by a break-away groups in Minnesota and Missouri. “The federation will just flutter away,” he said. (In a January news release, he was more blunt, calling the action "radical and ill-conceived.”)

Next, John Hoffman, ASA chairman, responding to a question, defended ASA’s actions, saying that “at the end of the day it will be a good thing to restore accountability and transparency” to the checkoff."

At their press conference the next day, USB representatives put the spotlight on their support for new research and other checkoff initiatives. Chuck Myers, USB president and a Nebraska farmer, addressed the controversy indirectly, pointing out that a new producer survey shows 87% support for the checkoff among ASA members.

In a video interview, Myers told me that farmers attending the classic had given him “a lot of feedback, all very supportive."

Asked by another reporter about any tensions felt at the Classic, Myers said, “Everything I have observed has been very cordial.” He described ASA as a host of the annual conference, and USB as a guest at the event.

Soybeangate has been a divisive issue among growers, but for this time and place, people were determined to be polite in public, and maybe that's a start to bridging the big chasm between the two organizations.