Ag Leader AgFiniti and beyond!→

Sorry. I couldn't resist the Buzz Lightyear reference.

Eric and I spent this past week at the Ag Leader Dealer Meeting. It was good to hear about the continued development that Ag Leader is doing across all of their products lines. Since their acquisition of Intellislope, they have been hard at work improving the interface on the Integra and adding features to their SMS desktop software. Lots of neat additions and refinements are done or in the works. All of the other products lines had interesting bits as well, but by far the most interesting and the one with the most potential was AgFiniti.

AgFiniti was announced at the Farm Progress in September. It is Ag Leader's entry into the cloud-based data storage and transfer market. Initially, we were only going to be able to transfer files, but in November they announced that Remote Support would also be available! We got to see it in action and it was sweet. There are a few limitations in the initial versions of both, but overall it is a great start. Of course, there are costs involved, but compared to the time saved by the customer and the dealer in the heat of the season it is a bargain.

An unexpected surprise was the announcement that they plan to offer Map View through AgFiniti sometime in 2014. No firm date yet, but this will be really useful. You will be able to upload any map and view it with your gps location shown on it through a browser on any device. Sounds like another great start!

There are 2 things to remember with AgFiniti versus other offerings.

1. The data remains the user's completely. Ag Leader makes no claim whatsoever to the data. It will not be used in any way by them or 3rd parties or be aggregated in any way.
2. The data connection will be provided by a cellular hotspot via wifi through your smartphone or tablet (if it has the feature) or standalone hotspot (e.g. Verizon's Jet Pack). The cool thing is you can pick the provider that works best for you and use it on the family vacation to keep the kids occupied during that long summer car trip.

There are many other things about AgFiniti that you may find useful and interesting (e.g. Sharing data with your crop advisor), so click "here" to go to Ag Leader's product page to find out more.

A new look for us and a data driven world!

Well, we've finally gotten around to updating our web site. The new look will allow us to post new content quickly and keep our product and support sections up to date more efficiently. We've also joined Facebook! A lot of change around here in the communication department.

Things are changing fast in agriculture as well. The technology we use to farm and to communicate has changed greatly since I came back to the business in 1999. Shortly before I came back, I was still using a bag phone. We had an Ag Leader 2000 yield monitor and looked forward to the quick and easy precision farming future that many companies promised was just a few years away. Apparently their definition of "a few" is different than mine.

Today, the technology and equipment we have available is fairly easy to use and robust. We can generate mounds of data about all of our field work, but to what end? Here are some points that may be helpful to consider.

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• Is the data accurate? Did you calibrate like you were supposed to?
• Are you taking the time to setup the console correctly to save you or your ag data analyst hours in the office?
• Do you sit down and take the opportunity to leverage that data? Your data.
• You've either invested a lot of money in products or may be thinking about it. How are you going to get a return on that investment?

At Kelley Engineering, we continue to grow and evolve in a ever changing marketplace. We want to work with you to do the same in your marketplace by realizing the full potential of your investment.

Thanks for your consideration.