Gain insight with an outlook on American farmers’ planting plans for the year.
The FBN℠ Network is tackling one of the most important challenges facing our society today; feeding the world. The human population is growing rapidly, but the amount of farmable land is decreasing due to human development and environmental degradation. The FBN network is using information technology to ensure that humans can sustainably grow more food in the face of increasingly scarce resources and a growing population.
The FBN approach to this issue is to empower individual farmers to make better decisions using the combined aggregated intelligence of a farmer-to-farmer, agronomic network. Farmers have every incentive to grow more with less, though they do not always have the information and knowhow to do so. A single farm generates a lot of information about how to best manage their operation, but the reality of farming annual crops means that an individual farmer only gets 40 chances in their lifetime to fine-tune their decisions.
As FBN members, farmers learn from the combined experiences of the whole network, and have access to the information and tools to quickly make better decisions - reducing wasteful applications of fertilizers and chemicals and optimizing every acre they manage. The FBN network grows smarter with every farmer that joins the network and with every new piece of data that is contributed.
Agriculture is an enormously important and valuable industry, generating close to $200 billion worth of crops each year in the United States alone. The FBN network have already proven that its information and analyses can save farmers tens of thousands of dollars in just a single decision. In our first year, we grew to a network of thousands of farms growing 19 different crops across 28 states in the U.S. And we’re just getting started! There are hundreds of thousands of American farms operating on hundreds of millions of acres. As we look internationally, we want the FBN network to be an essential tool for every farmer in the world.
Don’t ever underestimate a farmer. Farmers are the quintessential entrepreneurs- they’re highly curious and intelligent men and women who run sophisticated family businesses in rural regions with limited access to information. Inspired by self-driving cars? Farmers were some of the first adopters of GPS technology and have been utilizing self-driving tractors for the better part of the last decade. Farmers are devoted stewards of the land they work, preserving its value not only for growing crops, but also for harboring wildlife and providing the underlying support for modern rural economies. Many farmers have earned degrees (both from universities and from the school of hard knocks) in disciplines as varied as biology, chemistry, botany, engineering, meteorology, economics, and business management.
Building products for our farmers is both challenging and exciting. Agriculture combines complex biological, mechanical, meteorological, chemical, and economic systems. Our team is constantly looking for ways to capture the data necessary to help explain these systems, and we work to present the analyses at the right moment and in the right format so that our farmers can easily interpret the information and make the right decision.
The FBN team is looking for people who are eager to join some of the brightest minds in data science and engineering to help build an immensely valuable company for our farmers and for our future.
Danny TurkovichHead of Product |