Enjoy the Cycle of Continuous Improvement

MyFarms provides growers and the crop advisers they trust a new way to work and learn together. The process begins when a grower decides to join the Tyson Land Stewardship Program. Either the grower, or a trusted crop adviser can enter the grower’s field boundaries, production practices, and yield results. When it’s time to learn from anonymous peers by running the benchmark reports outlined below, we suggest an in-person discussion between grower and adviser, if possible. By acting on the truth of what works, this virtuous cycle facilitates a rich learning relationship that continues to grow through the years.

The Principles of Continuous Improvement

• Grower as Innovator – Because all production systems are unique, all growers and crop advisers have something valuable to learn from their peers.  The N Balance, N Practices, and N Economics benchmark reports (outlined below) facilitate data sharing and learning among real growers, crop advisers, and scientists.

• Practice & Product Agnostic – The system does not favor any subset of practices or products. Practices are ranked exclusively by their correlation to yield and economic gain.

• Scientific – Field-level data are automatically filtered to hold constant the climate and soil variables that farmers can’t control, to quantify the impact of the fifteen management practices they can control.

• Safe – Only anonymous results will ever be shared among users. Reports must contain at least five growers before they are unlocked.

What is N Balance?

N Balance is simply the difference between the pounds of nitrogen entering and leaving farmland each year. We like N Balance because it is tied directly to farming decisions, which makes it valuable for helping farmers and their advisers to learn from peers and to decide if they have room to improve or not.

N Balance – “Do I have room to improve?”

• Learn from Peers – Growers can learn at a glance from anonymous peers. 

• Clear Guidance - Vertical gold bars represent the desired N Balance range.  Having a green bar is desirable, having a red bar is not. 

• Excessive N Balance – Being above the right gold bar can lead to poor economic and ecological outcomes.

• Insufficient N Balance – Being below the left gold bar can lead to organic matter mining, which harms soil health.

N Practices – “Which practices maximize yield?”

• Practices Tracked - MyFarms tracks fifteen nitrogen management practices, which growers in a comparison group actively use in the course of a typical growing season.

• Yield Gain - The N Practices report quantifies the yield gain associated with each practice based on the field data provided by a grower and his or her peer group.

N Economics – “Which practices actually pay?”

Benchmark Report Anatomy

• Filters - It’s important for growers to filter the results to those most applicable to their farming style.  For example, if a grower uses conventional tillage, setting the tillage filter to conventional will remove his no-till counterparts.  Click the image to take a closer look at all the filters that can be set to create a highly dynamic learning environment.    

• Grain Value - The user must project the value of corn.  Yield data from all farmers in the pool will be multiplied by this value to calculate the average economic gain of each practice.  Use it to explore the best and worst case economic scenarios.    

• Practices - Any and all practices that have a positive correlation to yield or economic gain will be presented.  Note that the number of acres behind these average results will also be transparently shared with each participant.   

• Value of each Practice - The blue bar indicates the average yield or economic gain tied to each practice. The gray bars represent the 90% confidence interval of each result.