Too Old for Back to School?

Aug 29, 2014

You’re never too old to learn things that will help your farming business.

Are you, like me, in the 50+ category? Do you feel intimidated by technology? If your son or daughter is not there, are you capable of downloading an app or changing anything on your phone? As the kids are settling in back at school, I challenge you to conquer your phone and make it just another one of the tools that any farmer has on hand.

Today almost everyone has a cell phone. But do you have a smart phone, and if you do, are you utilizing it to help run your business better? According to statistics from Pew (January 2014), 90% of adults have a cell phone. The majority of people, 58%, now own a smart phone. A smart phone is a handy thing, particularly for farmers. It can help you to accomplish a number of tasks while you are in the field.

Cell phones are great for checking the latest agriculture news as you are in the field. In addition to checking websites to determine the price of cash crops, etc., many services now exist to receive price updates via text messaging and other things. You can even follow the price of cash crops on twitter – which you can have on your smart phone.

By now you have heard the expression “There’s an app for that.” While in the early days of apps, there was not a large number of Apps for the agriculture and farming industries – more and more farm apps exist and can be quite useful. Farms.com has a complete list of agriculture apps.

In the early days of apps, you could often only find an app in one platform, but today, most apps are available for Android and Apple. For example, the Farms.com Used Equipment app lets you easily search for used farm equipment in your area (Ontario), without having to surf the web.

There are lots of great apps out there, some specific to farming, some just great tools. If you have a great app that you find particularly useful for farming, share your thoughts with us, we would love to share your app suggestions with other farmers.

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Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.