There always needs to be some people on the leading edge of technology adoption, to help guide the rest of us through that tech’s value proposition. Craig Houin, Data and Innovation Lead at Sunrise Cooperative, has always been my go-to person to experiment new technology with and learn alongside. In Episode 10 of Precision Points, I discuss the key tools Sunrise Cooperative, an Ag Retailer, uses for in-season diagnostics. From tools they have used for years, to things they are exploring today, this comprehensive in-season tool round-up wraps up our first season of Precision Points.
Craig has been a leader in adopting crop models into how he builds out recommendations for growers. He uses both AdaptN which is Cornell’s nitrogen model, and the Field Forecasting Tool from WinField United. AdaptN uses pre-existing inform
ation on the field to build out spatial N application maps. FFT usings forward looking modeling to predict the crops needs and potential. These tools in combination help increase their nitrogen efficiency by ensuring there is an adequate amount for the predicted crop.
“We start that in the spring and work with the grower in understanding what the potential is for the year and how we're going to manage it throughout the season,” said Craig. “So we've done that, and continue to do that all the way till post-tassel is when we really stop looking at the nitrogen models from a perspective of nitrogen management because once brown silk shows up, there's nothing more that we can do in our region.”
Craig mentioned the “story” that is playing out in the models so far this year. With the cooler weather and timely planting for most growers in his area, he said they are noticing very high nitrogen mineralization rates. This is resulting in lower in-season application requirements. Typically the upfront or side-dress N isn’t changing but it is impacting how growers would determine to make later season, usually around V7-VT applications of Nitrogen.
Craig also mentioned that when we got into the dry-spell in the end of June through the beginning of July, we noticed a big difference in fields that were variable rate planted. Some years, this decision can be tough to quantify visually but especially in later planted fields, areas with variable rate seedings seem to be showing less visible stress than those that were flat-rate planted.
One of the new tools Craig is exploring this year is the Flir One thermal imaging camera. Below is a quick video demonstrating how the heat is transferred to the plant leaves, and how long it takes to regulate back to its initial temperature.
“It’s interesting to see how plants respond to heat and the temperature differences between the soil temp and the canopy temp and the air temperature and the canopy temp,” Craig mentioned in regards to healthy plant tissue. “I didn't realize that a canopy would be eight to 12 degrees cooler than the air.”
Craig is hoping information from the measurements they are taking from the camera this year will give them some insights on how to apply this information in the future. Seeing some differences in healthy vs diseased tissue is one thing they will be looking at to determine if this camera can help them capture the value of fungicides or making fungicides decisions moving forward.
I’m glad we have people like Craig in the precision world to test new things and see how they could fit for agronomy purposes. His work definitely has pushed me in my career to think about new tech with an optimistic perspective. To learn more about Craig and his work you can find him at Sunrise Cooperative, or on twitter.
Have you used thermal imaging or crop models? Leave a review here.
Transcription:
Host: Morgan Seger
Guest: Craig Houin, Data and Innovation Lead at Sunrise Cooperative
Morgan Seger: (00:22)
Welcome back to Precision Points, an agtech podcast from precisionagreviews.com. I'm your host, Morgan Seger, and in each episode, we strive to bring you unbiased agtech information and ideas, and on today's episode, I'm excited to have one of my longterm friends and colleagues, Craig Houin. Now, Craig has been working in precision ag for the last 11 years and really was my go-to guy for anything new in technology. Today, we break down some of the in-season tools that he has been using to help growers make better management decisions, specifically when it comes to managing population and nitrogen. He also gives us a sneak peek into some of the tools he's been playing with this summer as he's trying to figure out if they will have a good fit for agriculture and the growers that he's trying to serve.
Morgan Seger: (01:07)
Now, before we get into this episode, I wanted to take a minute to talk about precisionagreviews.com. As you know, every episode starts with me telling you that this is an agtech podcast from precisionagreviews.com, but if you're not familiar with Precision Ag Reviews, I really encourage you to check it out. It's essentially a hub of grower-sourced reviews on all things ag technology and precision ag. It's designed to serve growers like us so we can find unbiased information and learn from each other and each other's experiences with precision ag products. If you haven't been there, I encourage you go to precisionagreviews.com. While you're there, please leave a review. We love building our database so we can better serve growers like you. Now, here's my interview with Craig Houin.
Morgan Seger: (01:55)
Welcome back to Precision Points. Today on the show, I have my close friend and longterm colleague, Craig Houin, and Craig, I'm so excited to be back on a podcast with you. Welcome to the show.
Craig Houin: (02:06)
Thanks, Morgan. I'm glad to be here. I just have to share this great experience that we had doing the podcast. Since you asked, I've been thinking about what I'm going to say. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Morgan Seger: (02:21)
Yes. Yes, me, too. For those of you who maybe don't know, Craig and I co-hosted a podcast called Precision Vision a couple of years ago when we were working together before I left my corporate job and it was a lot of fun and we really got to get our hands on new technology and one of the things that Craig was always really good at is being the first one to try something new, so honestly, that's part of why our relationship worked as well as it did, because we were always looking for someone to try things, be our beta tester, and from the software that we were using to the HoloLens that you use from Microsoft, all of these different projects, you were always game to be on, so I'm excited to talk through some of that today.
Morgan Seger: (03:07)
What I was hoping to do is do an in-season tool roundup, so talk through all of the things that you use as a retailer, but before we get into that, do you mind giving just a little bit more of your background, what you do, and how you got to where you are today?
Craig Houin: (03:21)
Yeah, I've been in agriculture my whole life, small scale and large scale, went to college at Purdue, met my wife, moved to Ohio, but I grew up on a small farm, then worked in retail in a co-op before I went to Purdue at a feed mill and I did some agronomy work there and then got into economics and I really enjoyed economics an awful lot on the agricultural side and the analytics of it was really intriguing to me.
Craig Houin: (03:52)
When we moved over to Ohio, which is where my wife is from, I was just trying to find work and I did a little bit of everything. I worked at a manufacturing company where I did international purchasing for a bit and did inventory management, just trying to figure the right inventory quantity to keep in hand and that kind of stuff. There's a lot of math with that, too, and some analysis, so it just kept me sharp.
Craig Houin: (04:15)
It took me a little while to get back into agriculture, which is where I wanted to be from the very beginning and I started working in retail on a branch level and did some management there, both within departments and then also at a branch manager and then left that and went to work for a farmer and he wanted somebody to get their head around and hands on precision agriculture and how he could learn from it and benefit from it on his operation and that was really the start of my fourth life, I think, and it just taken off from there. It's been a phenomenal experience, understanding how fields work spatially and using some of my manufacturing background and my economic background has enabled me to look at it from a different perspective and figure out how we can manage that acre a lot better to be more productive.
Craig Houin: (05:05)
We did that for a couple of years and then Sunrise Cooperative had a position open with a brand new location, so I got into that, and they've just given me the freedom to learn all these new things and to take it to growers and to see how they take it and how they utilize it and how we could develop a better relationship from that and make them better farmers.
Morgan Seger: (05:29)
Awesome. When was that when you started working with the grower, if you don't mind me asking? Or how many years have you been working in precision ag?
Craig Houin: (05:37)
I always forget what year that was. I'm thinking it was 2009 was my first growing season in precision ag. I started that winter before, so like January, February of '09, I think, is when I started doing it, so it's been a really fast ride and I've come a long way, but it's...
Morgan Seger: (06:00)
It's crazy to think probably how much you've seen change in the last 11 years.
Craig Houin: (06:05)
Yeah, maybe it has. It's going to continue to change, but it's been fun. It's been a lot of fun. At my age, I should not be having as much fun in my job.
Morgan Seger: (06:20)
Well, I know that you get to work not only with the precision team at Sunrise, but you also get to work directly with some growers. Do you mind just walking us through things that you are looking at this summer or if there's anything new that you've been trying?
Craig Houin: (06:35)
Well, we gave up on looking at the rain gauge because it was not changing, it was pretty dry. About the end of June, it really dried off middle of June. We've gotten a few showers here and there. Now, the wonder is what we're going to do as far as growth and where it's coming from.
Craig Houin: (06:54)
We started off the year, and I guess I should back up, we start off the year looking at our variable rate scripts for planting. We look at nitrogen management plans. How do they want to utilize the different tools that we have? We have two different crop models that we look at for nitrogen management. We use Field Forecasting Tool and we also use Adapt-N and we couple them together for specific reasons and that works out really well for most all of our growers.
Craig Houin: (07:19)
They see the value in Field Forecasting Tool and giving that forward look on not only weather, but what's the potential outcome of the year and what are some areas that we could improve and what are some challenge areas we have because FFT is extremely visual and it does an extremely good job of helping a grower hand to retailer see what the challenges we're going to be facing, what have we faced so far this year, and is there anything we could do to mitigate the risk of going forward with that crop. We always want to push it for the next. Looking at that in a visual format allows us to monitor and really pulls the emotion out of any decisions we have, but it allows us to really push that acre to the next level.
Craig Houin: (08:08)
We look at Adapt-N and if you're not familiar with Adapt-N, it's a nitrogen model, it's the old Cornell model from back in the day. It's been around for a long, long time and the beauty of that one is it's a spatial, it gives a spatial recommendation and you can do it on 30-30 grids, you could do it on zones, you can do it however you'd like to do it. I prefer grids. But it goes through the calculations of what weather's hit that field, what characteristics does that field have, what's the management of it, population, intended yield, so we're utilizing the information we have in our GIS software, which is Ag Studio, and pushing that historical yield into Adapt-N to get that spatial expectation of yield and then let the model work on measuring the organic matter that we put in, what the weather's been to hit that with the likelihood of mineralization and things of that nature.
Craig Houin: (09:09)
We start that in the spring and work with the grower in understanding what the potential is for the year and how we're going to manage it throughout the season, so we've done that and continue to do that all the way till post-tassel is when we really stop looking at the nitrogen models from a perspective of nitrogen management because once brown silk shows up, there's nothing more that we can do in our region. There's some things that can be done in other regions, but the nitrogen component is pretty much done at that point in time, but nitrogen is always a big conversation point, fungicide is a big conversation point, but just bringing to the grower a different perspective and a different way of managing those nutrients and pulling emotion out of decisions has been our primary goal.
Morgan Seger: (09:58)
Oh, sure. Yeah, especially those in-season decisions. It's one thing when we make our plan, but then when it comes time to pull the trigger on something that we may or may not need, it does tend to pull out more emotions and makes us maybe second-guess our decisions, so having those tools is really handy. I know I'm hearing you talk through your experience with Adapt-N and Field Forecasting previously, lots of times, those tools help you craft some generalizations about the season or the story for that season. Is there anything you've seen for the 2020 growing season that's really sticking out for your geography?
Craig Houin: (10:36)
Yeah, a lot of early-season N-mineralization from the soil. We had a lot of really good rains that they were not... Grandpa called them "gully washers." We haven't had any big gully washers yet this year and early in the spring, we had a lot of nice timely rain. The soils were cooler, didn't get extremely hot until the end of May, 1st of June is when it started to warm up a little bit. We had a really cold spell through the middle part of May and it just seemed like that enabled the soil to stay in that prime temperature zone and moisture level. We had tremendous, tremendous mineralization going on and it's carried us through a lot of the seasons, so it's helped us look at nitrogen management in that regard that we're able to see some really, really good nutrient use efficiencies with what we were looking at in May and June, so that was a big story at the very beginning.
Craig Houin: (11:37)
Getting it planted, getting everything done correctly, not mudded in, which a lot of people had some good opportunities not to mud it in this year, I think planting went really well. We had some areas of replant, but not as extensive as it's been in the past, and everybody got planted for the most part. There's a few people that didn't down in the Southern region, but we had some growers in Northwest Ohio that remember 2019. They didn't want to do that again, so they got out early. There's a lot of guys down in Northwest Ohio done first week of May, which is unheard of, but they had the opportunity to do it and they ran with it, which is great. We had some guys in Southern Ohio that couldn't do that. They were planting on June 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th because the rains kept them out of the field the whole spring and they didn't get that opportunity to wrap things up.
Craig Houin: (12:28)
It was so interesting to see what the weather patterns were this year earlier in the spring and just what the reaction of the crops were to the available nitrogen that the soil generated was, was really, really interesting to look at this year.
Craig Houin: (12:44)
Now that we come into the dry spell, our early planted corn is still looking really good, our late-planted corn, you can see some stress in it from time to time, but I've seen a lot of positive field response to variable rate planting and this year I think exemplifies that a lot more than previous years we've had because everything got a good start and now we're getting stress, so a lot of the straight rate fields that I see, you'll see pockets of stress points, and in all honesty, those areas are areas that we would have a low population on corn and so that plant would have a better root system, it would not be competing with its neighbor for the available water, which is less in those areas, and it just seems to have a better stock diameter. We have a better root system and I think a better yield potential for those areas of the field, so I see a lot of value in the technology on that, too.
Morgan Seger: (13:43)
Gotcha. That's interesting how you're seeing it play through right now with the variable rate planting, but to go back to your increased N-mineralization in the spring, I have a two-part question: Did you see that playing on yields at all and did you see it impacting recommendations for third application or late season nitrogen?
Craig Houin: (14:05)
Yeah, we saw it on both. Early on, we had really good yield predictions, almost fantasy-like in a lot of our trade area, especially when you look at North Central Ohio, the US 30 corridor's a pretty good splitting point for us in Northern Ohio, even over into my neighborhood south of Wester, still along that US 30 corridor, we had really good opportunities, and so the early season yield predictions were in Field Forecasting Tool were higher than I really felt comfortable going to the grower with. I didn't question it yet, but it was almost too good to believe in some cases, and so as you go through and look at that, you see weather forecast changes, everything changes, so yield started to drop off a little bit, but at that moment, we saw a lot in the models, we saw a lot of very good and it didn't matter which one we looked at. Adapt-N had very good nitrogen recommendations and it was calling for less than what we anticipated or what our previous plan was, so that was a big deal there.
Craig Houin: (15:21)
We saw it in the crop, also. The crop just responded extremely well where we had a lot of mineralization, had good early growth. Even though the cool temperatures, the plants still had a very good foundation to it, very good color, and you could just tell the crops were responding to that. Even if it just had a starter or a popup, two by two, whatever the case was, even if it just had that, it looked extremely good all the way out to V5, V6, and then you can really start to adjust your nitrogen recommendations, that side dress.
Craig Houin: (15:57)
Field Forecasting Tool let us know that we weren't going to need as much nitrogen and we're still that way, but now the yields are starting to come down a little bit, but overall, the model showed us that we really didn't need that much nitrogen this year, but I did have a grower that really questioned it hard and he's on board with everything we did and then once we got into the field and started side-dressing, I was getting phone calls: "This is not what we planned. This is not as much as we usually do. This is not our normal game plan," and I said, "We're going to do four or five fields with the models. This is what the goal was, the objective was. I could bump it up, you could bump it up. We can do whatever we need to do." They bumped up a little bit, a fair amount, and ran with it, but the models are still colored that they don't need much more, and their crop is not showing that they need much more, but it's been-
Morgan Seger: (16:53)
Gotcha, and so-
Craig Houin: (16:55)
... Go ahead.
Morgan Seger: (16:56)
... Oh, I was just going to say, and when you say it's not showing you need more, it's not that it wouldn't yield more with more nitrogen, it's that your economics start to slip on the nitrogen allocation, right?
Craig Houin: (17:08)
Yeah. Yeah, your return on investment drops, so your marginal gain for every unit of nitrogen you're putting on, you're getting less response in yield. Our biggest response to yield right now is water and unfortunately, we don't have irrigation in my neighborhood, but that's our most limiting factor right now is water, especially looking at the forecasting tool, when you go out to R1, R2, out towards R4, when you're looking at that grain fill, you need some water to fill that grain, so it's not quite there right now.
Craig Houin: (17:43)
My spot with the growers at this point in time is you could pray for rain. The model is culling at this yield and if nothing else is yield-limiting, you're going to see pretty close to that in some way, shape, or form. I mean, that's not the yield that's predicted, and Field Forecasting Tool is by no means a guarantee, it is to give you some perspective of what's possible, right? But it's only measuring nitrogen, water, and potassium. Everything else around that is out of the model, so that cannot be yield-limiting.
Craig Houin: (18:20)
If you're going to really strive for the yield that's put in there, you still need to take care of that crop in every other way, and they understand that, the growers I work with understand that, and they've seen the benefit of the models that we're using. We've used Field Forecasting for quite a few years and Adapt-N in for about the same amount of time, so it's an interesting combination to have those two together and then bring it to the grower.
Morgan Seger: (18:45)
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Are you using either of those on soybeans or wheat or any other crops or are you just mostly focusing on corn?
Craig Houin: (18:53)
We had a trial with Adapt-N this spring on wheat and we started that one late, so it was not fair to try, but it was a good experience. I mean, it really worked out well for us to give it a shot. Now, we can go into the 2021 crop and focus better on that.
Craig Houin: (19:13)
Field Forecasting Tool has a soybean model that we've used. It's still got a little ways to go. Amazingly enough, I put the correct information in there. I don't always pull a tissue test, but dang, that thing gets close, you know? It's interesting to watch, but on soybeans, nitrogen is not a big game-changer. If you're managing populations, it's not a big game-changer, and the potassium is a big deal, but that's an early season play, so no, we don't do a lot with soybeans in the Field Forecasting Tool yet.
Morgan Seger: (19:52)
Gotcha. Now, jumping back to what you were saying, that you could tell your variable rate seeding was effective this year because you were seeing pockets of stress, is that just you boots on the ground scouting fields? Is there any technology or tools you're using to identify those areas of stress now?
Craig Houin: (20:08)
Well, right now, that piece of it is a Ford Explorer at 55 miles an hour. Like I said, these are fields that I'm not touching. I touch fields I script, which is a fair number of acres, so I'm putting boots on the ground in fields I have scripts on. I'm not seeing a lot of drought stress yet in those fields.
Craig Houin: (20:30)
The biggest stress I see is from one of two to three things, either there was a misapplication on nitrogen, I had one grower, he had a knife that would plug with this ammonia toolbar and every once in a while, you could see it. To this day, you can see it, and that was pre-plant. Another case is they got back in the field just a day too early after a rain and the sea trench was open, didn't close right, a lot of number of things that took place. The seed still germinated, it emerged later than its neighbors, so that's still visible, and the third one is if there was any kind of issue with the pop-up or the two by two. It all comes down to management on that stuff and just luck of the draw in some cases, but those are my big challenges that I see.
Craig Houin: (21:23)
When I see the stress points, those are fields I know the background on, but I don't work with them, so I'm not going to go walk in somebody's field for the heck of it, but I do know the population they were planted at and I do know a straight rate and you can see curling and some spots and wide open leaves in others and just the experience I have, I know that's yield-limiting right there. That could be resolved with correct population and putting it in the right place, so that's what I see.
Craig Houin: (21:53)
Some toys I do get to play with, I think this is what you're getting at, is I've gotten a couple of new toys this year, one I've not gotten to play with, but it's sitting behind me and I've had a lot of trouble keeping the case closed, but I got a new drone the other day at a seed plot training, of all places. The guy looked across the tent at me and said, "How are you doing on your drones license?" and I was like, "Oh, I'm getting there," and he said, "Good, you can have mine," so I got that. I'm taking the test, I got to get my license, but wish me luck on that. It's got a multi-spectral camera on it and it'll generate NDVI image and also NRGB. NDVI, just like any other imagery, you'll get your greens, yellows, and reds, but that tells you a lot of the weak spots in the field.
Craig Houin: (22:43)
The nice thing about a drone is that it gives you a tighter look and you and I have talked for years on drones and you got to be able to scale the imagery and that's one of the beauties with R7 is it scales to the equipment that we're using. A drone is hard to scale that to the equipment you're using, but if you have an area in the field that you'd really like to evaluate and it's not something you can fix today, but you want to look deeper into that, I think there's some value there. I just got it, like I said. We're learning the value proposition of a drone, just like everybody else is. You talk to retailers out there across the country and they'll tell you the drone is fun to play with, but we haven't found a marketable asset yet, so that's one thing we're going to play with and try and figure out.
Craig Houin: (23:33)
A lot of people I've talked to on the drone say there's two timings that are ideal for a drone and pay for itself real quick is doing stand counts early in the spring and tassel counts. I haven't quite seen the value yet in tassel counts. Maybe I'll find that out in a couple of weeks. I really see the value proposition of a stand count early on where you get the entire field done in a short amount of time, and I don't know, maybe you can go and do a replant script just on those areas, but you would know your acreage you'd need, you'd know your population you'd need, so I think that could be extremely valuable for a grower and also for a retailer to provide that kind of service, so looking forward, that's something I'd like to learn more about and play with.
Craig Houin: (24:19)
My other toy I got, which I broke already, I got a backup, but it's a FLIR ONE camera, it's a thermal camera. That's interesting to see how plants respond to heat and the temperature differences between the soil temp and the canopy temp and the air temperature and the canopy temp is pretty interesting to look at in healthy plants. I didn't realize that a canopy would be eight to 12 degrees cooler than the air and so we're looking at that and it measures your heat signature really good. I think I sent you the video that I made where we just ran our fingers across the leaf and videoed how long it took to cool down and the interesting thing, the first week we did it, it took about 10 seconds. This week, it took about 15 to 20 seconds.
Craig Houin: (25:14)
Don't know what any of that means yet. I think at the end of the season when we start looking at what we've seen, what we've learned, the data we collect, tracking temperatures through the whole process, air temperature, soil temperature, canopy temperature, and seeing if there's any correlation somewhere, we'll figure it out, but we got to collect the numbers before you can do anything, so that's one of the things we're looking at.
Morgan Seger: (25:37)
Sure. It seems like the temperature would be related to plant health. Are you looking at anything like treated with a fungicide versus untreated or different hybrids or anything specific like that?
Craig Houin: (25:47)
Yes. That's the goal is fungicide treated/untreated. One thing with the Field Forecasting Tool that I have played with a little bit, sometimes if you beg and plead long enough, they'll turn something on for you, so they're testing that disease-risk model. It's not something that's going to tell you it's there, but they'll tell you the risk is there. I want to see what that looks like and then go to the field and see how long it takes for the lesions to show up, but I know the canopy temperature will indicate that there's an infection, that the plant is fighting something. It's just like the human with a fever, so my thought is if you treat it as the temperature is going up, you might have a better opportunity for success than if you wait for it to come down and show the lesion. That'd be like trying to get an antibiotic when you already have the cold sore. It doesn't make much sense to me. That's one thing I'm just playing with. I have no idea if will ever materialize, but I think it might be interesting to at least look at and investigate.
Morgan Seger: (26:52)
Sure. Well, I think you've gotten pretty good at that role, right? You take things on to see what type of benefit it can have, specifically around ag and precision ag and see if it works. I mean, if we're not trying things, we'll never know.
Craig Houin: (27:07)
That's right. That's right. I mentioned before we started recording, this year, I've gotten toys. It's like Christmas every day right now. I call them "toys," I play with them, but it's for serious work, but you got to love your job to do it, and I think I got that.
Morgan Seger: (27:24)
Awesome. Well, I am so grateful that you took the time to be on today. If someone wants to follow along with some of the things you're trying out, where would you recommend they go?
Craig Houin: (27:33)
That's a good question. I am on Twitter, @houinfarm. I'm not on there as much as I should be, but I do tweet once in a while and I use that as my work platform more than anything else. I will be putting some stuff on later this summer, so keep an eye out for that.
Morgan Seger: (27:54)
Awesome.
Craig Houin: (27:56)
You could email me or anything like that or just go to Twitter and find me and talk to me there, that'd be great.
Morgan Seger: (28:03)
Perfect, and I will link out to in our show notes, if anyone wants to reach out to you.
Craig Houin: (28:07)
Awesome. Appreciate it.
Morgan Seger: (28:08)
Well, thanks for keeping us up to date on what you are trying and have a great rest of your day.
Craig Houin: (28:13)
All right. Thanks, Morgan. Enjoy.
Morgan Seger: (28:16)
Well, I always have fun catching up with Craig and I hope you enjoyed listening to our discussion around in-season tools. After we stopped recording, we actually had a nice conversation about using drone imagery. Now, as you recall in our conversation, he said that "I've always been of the mindset of high-resolution imagery is great, but it needs to be able to scale to the size of equipment that we are working with," and he said that drone imagery is maybe too high of resolution to really scale to today's equipment, but as we continue to work through smaller and more autonomous equipment, I can see high-resolution imagery that you can get on the go becoming even more valuable, so that combined with the other crop models and things that he's using, I think it's really going to be a powerful force for the growers he's trying to serve.
Morgan Seger: (29:03)
Thank you so much for spending this time with us and listening to another episode of Precision Points. Don't forget to go to precisionagreviews.com to check out the grower-sourced reviews that we've collected or leave a review of your own. We would really appreciate it. Let's grow together.
Host: Morgan Seger
Morgan Seger spent ten years working with ag retail, specifically in ag tech. She lives and farms in western Ohio, where she has four children with her husband Ben. Morgan, has her own blog called Heart and Soil where she talks about her experience farming, gardening, and raising her family.
Guest: Craig Houin
Craig grew up on a small grain and livestock farm which eventually led him to Purdue University to study Agricultural Economics. Craig moved to Ohio with his wife where they started a small livestock farm with their 3 kids. Craig strives to grow precision technologies on the farm level through interaction with farmers and technology providers. He firmly believes precision technologies will improve farm level decisions through the understanding of current practices to improve environmental and economic impacts while helping the consumer's understanding of agriculture.
