The Wonderful World of Technology

If you’ve been following Dishing the Dirt for any length of time, you already know my addiction to weather apps. They are the predominant icons on my phone and tablet’s home screens. As foul weather approaches, a cacophony of chirps, beeps and chimes begin to sound.Having worked on the ocean, my go-to weather data had always been NOAA (free) with real-time buoy reports alerting me to conditions offshore that would affect my commute. But when I became shore bound, the bookmarks remained on my desktop. A few years later I would upgrade to AccuWeather as the company was owned by a co-worker’s family. Next came Weather Underground at the behest of fellow farmers. Life before smart phones meant constantly hitting the refresh button on my desktop’s browser before embarking on any farm activity in which a fast-moving electrical, snow or ice storm would be dangerous. My Weather Channel addicted dad would occasionally call me at market if inclement weather was headed my way. Without up-to-the-minute updates, sometime mother nature got the better of me. But that first iPhone was a game changer.  Now I had the weatherman in my hip pocket and at this point, he was still a cheap date (aka: free). That all changed when one of my regular customers pulled up a real-time map using a new app called Dark Sky which was a crowd-funded project using AI to predict weather. “It’s less than five bucks ($3.99) and totally worth it,” he told me. It was my first weather app purchase and he was right. I loved the uncluttered interface with just enough information and no advertisements or silly news stories. I could pinpoint data like the probability and rate of precipitation. And the global map feature…whoa! For years, this would be the first and last digital data of my day, my go-to forecast for Sundays, and my first audible alerts to impending precipitation. One bit of information that Dark Sky lacked was a decent representation of the wind. Now that may sound silly to some, but as someone who works under a tent I want to know about wind speed, gusts, and direction. Enter Ventusky, a colorful, dynamic real time weather app from a Czech meteorological company. The week before Thanksgiving I stood in the light rain at market because Ventusky told me that putting up my tent would be risky with wind gusts up to 30 mph at the busiest time of the day. Tent weights can only do so much. Like Dark Sky, this new weather app also cost $3.99 (price has dropped to $2.99). A nice cup of coffee costs more so I saw it as a worthy investment. As winter rolled around, the Snow Cover feature paid off.  This week, however, a new app, Climacell, caught my attention thanks to a Washington Post story about weather turning into big business. Sure, I’d been shelling out a few bucks here and there over the years to have advertisement-free weather and innovative new technologies, but this new app was using more than the traditional weather sources such as radar, weather stations and satellite data which is mostly government-based. Included in their sensing technologies was information from cellular towers—unique to their data set—which provides hyperlocal weather observations. Additionally, they could predict precipitation as low as 30 feet off the ground as opposed to a thousand feet and above for traditional radar and the winner, weather conditions accurately updated every minute compared to the 5-20-minute lag time for most weather apps. Instantly I thought, “Take my money!” until the app store notified me I could pay $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year. I paused.  But then I thought that if I expect customers to pay a premium for innovative and technology-driven sustainable, local food production, why shouldn’t I be doing the same with cutting-edge technologies that can have a positive impact on my livelihood? Having worked in the technology sector, I know that data centers, employees, hardware, software and development was by no means cheap. And farming isn’t much different.  Recently, a non-farmer described me as someone who was born two hundred years too late as they went on to explain how I raised food and it dawned on me how woefully misunderstood farming is even as 2020 looms at the end of this month. I wanted to scream no! no! no! I don’t want to farm without my weather apps and spreadsheets. The commute into the city is much easier with GPS, Google Maps and Waze. For markets, the applications, sales tracking and document repository for insurance and licensure is all digital. Point-of-sale apps that operate over cellular signals has opened up the world of credit and debit cards to both vendors and customers. I will never again farm livestock without a skidloader. They didn’t have those in the 1800’s. They had draft animals to do the heavy work. There weren’t gadgets that spit out 900-pound round bales for winter hay storage and I couldn’t FaceTime the veterinarian or send pictures of an ailment for an easier diagnosis, saving time and money for both of us.  Social media and online sales have opened up new avenues for adventuresome marketing and education. And then there are all the agricultural technologies, such as the robotic milker used by Rock Hill Orchard, state-of-the-art greenhouses and food storage facilities utilized by many of the growers offering shoppers year-round markets and farmers year-round income and climate-controlled cheese caves for affinage.  Want to dig even deeper? How many understand the A2 designation for dairy and how it was discovered? That’s another topic for a later blog. Electric netting for rotational grazing, solar power, electric fences, Brix monitors, satellite imagery, soil nutrient and forage analysis…the list goes on.   And the truth is all of this innovation and technology costs money. If I’m not willing (or able) to shell out twenty bucks a year for up-to-the-minute information critical to the success of getting food to my customers, then I don’t deserve to do this job.