FarmBase™, Empowering More Informed Decisions
At Scythe & Spade one of our core value is simplifying complex agribusiness issues for our investor, producer, and vendor clients. This starts by assembling the right team of experts and then empowering them with best-in-class tools to serve our client’s needs. FarmBase is one of those tools.
As fundamental Implements in agriculture, the scythe and the spade were historically the sharpest tools in the shed. Yet today, growers and investors have a plethora of implements which include software and hardware solutions. Beware, technology in agriculture can be either a boon or a boondoggle. The right technology makes it easier to source, manage and evaluate data, providing better situational awareness.
For the past two decades Scythe & Spade has been weaving its business processes into an online database, which has powerful mapping and analysis functionality. FarmBase, TM, originally launched in 2002, is a cloud-based, proprietary, geospatial database built to increase our situational awareness and to support our due diligence, acquisition, and asset management services.
Risk Management
At Scythe & Spade we seek first to identify every reason why we should not do the deal, and then turn our focus to mitigating those risks. We have learned over time to be highly skeptical as we look and listen. FarmBase was designed to consolidate and ease our access to information from disparate sources including ownership, market values, crop operating budgets, soils, surrounding land uses, historical crop rotations, irrigation systems, water sources, and zoning. FarmBase helps us refute or prove what we see and hear.
Regional Nuances
Every region throughout the nation has unique drivers. Identifying, quantifying and understanding those drivers is critical. FarmBase helps us identify and capitalize on those region-specific metrics and benchmark potential opportunities that are based on historical data-driven analysis. Perhaps more importantly the data gives us the confidence to say no, in a more-timely fashion. From individual properties to entire portfolios, FarmBase was built to improve situational awareness and facilitate the decision-making process across a wide range of geographies.
Situational awareness can be defined simply as “knowing what is going on around us”, or – more technically – as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, and the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future”.
Recent Changes to FarmBase Include:
Crop Rotations –6 years of crop data added which provides insight into the frequency of specific plantings
Imagery – added near real-time imagery so that planting and harvest can be monitored
Water – easier access to water well and place of use records
Assets – increased our farm asset lists to quickly capture farm value drivers
More than ever, FarmBase aids in the situational awareness of agribusiness across our country from the orchards of the Yakima Valley in Washington state to the vegetable crops grown year-round in Arizona and Florida.
For more information on how you can capitalize on the agribusiness trend insights gained from FarmBase™ in your region, contact us at info@ag-management.com