Editors' Notebook

This year's DTN Digital Yield Tour, our seventh annual, marks a new step in DTN's mission to provide farmers and agribusinesses with the information needed to make smart business decisions. As followers of the tour will recall, in the past six seasons, we've used yield model predictions from Gro Intelligence. It was a great partnership, and we owe the Gro team a great expression of thanks.

Unfortunately, ag tech followers will also know that Gro closed its doors earlier this year. Companies fail, even good ones. In this humble scribe's opinion, Gro was a good one, with a roster full of smart, solid people who were transparent and up-front about their technology and their company's place in the industry.

We truly wish the former Gro team well. In fact, we've wished at least one of them a hearty "Welcome Aboard" to join the DTN team.

Speaking of our science team, that's where the true next step in the Digital Yield Tour comes in. For several years DTN has been putting together a crack team of data scientists and crop experts to build our own yield prediction models. This year's Digital Yield Tour will feature the first public use of their efforts, a proprietary set of crop prediction models for corn and soybeans. To learn more about the science and other details of the Digital Yield Tour, see DTN Farm Business Editor Katie Dehlinger's piece here: https://www.dtnpf.com/….

As always, our goal is to provide the same kind of broad, data-driven crop information that the Yield Tour has become famous for.

You will see some differences in this year's tour. For one, our focus will be on yields at the state level, featuring key corn and soybean states in the Midwest and Northern Plains. DTN's yield models, while taking in similar data as models used in previous tours, are built for a different purpose than predicting national and global grain supplies. As Dehlinger lays out in her story, our models focus on localized yield information to help farmers and agribusinesses navigate conditions in their piece of the real world. This year that local-focused data scales up state predictions in nine states, with more to come.

Our Yield Tour stories will add on-the-ground conversations with farmers, agronomists and others in those states to get at the crop condition details a model just can't give.

DTN has been a leader in using new technologies to help farmers get real-time information since we launched the first FM sideband receivers and satellite boxes in the early 1980s. That's why we jumped at the chance to work with a company such as Gro to create a technology-driven answer to estimating crop yields across the Corn Belt. We believed at the time, and still do, that using satellite imagery, historical weather and other broad-scope data is the next step beyond physical yield tours, traipsing through random fields and collecting yield samples. Not that those tours don't continue to offer a piece of the puzzle, they just can't take in the condition of the number of fields that satellites can.

Using our own proprietary crop models was the natural next step for a company driven by data and new technologies.

We hope you find value in this year's tour, as we take things yet another step into the future.

Greg D. Horstmeier can be reached at greg.horstmeier@dtn.com

Follow him on social platform X @greghorstmeier

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