Setting The Record Straight
February 22, 2010 When Cotton Incorporated’s Jeanne Reeves set out to find a way to keep track of the company’s production costs on some of their research production plots, she quickly found that there weren’t many options available.
While agricultural record keeping is nothing new, Reeves and others before her have discovered that cotton requires a system that is more complex than what other crops require. Further, Reeves realized that creating a solution to this problem would not be an easy task.
“And so I worked with some companies who were interested in working with Cotton Incorporated and working with each other, to – within their already existing, very nice software – add a cotton component. And that’s what we’ve done,” says Reeves.
Together, Red Wing Software and MapShots, Inc. brought more than 50 years of computer software and computer tracking of farm operations to the table. Along with Cotton Inc., they set out to make cotton record keeping an attainable option.
Convincing the modern cotton producer that he or she needs such software would be another challenge unto itself, according to Elliott Nowels, Vice President of Meister Media Worldwide and Director of the Precision Ag Institute. He notes that some producers have been slow to accept the benefits new record keeping technologies can offer, choosing instead to rely on older methods.
“I run into some guys who have a manila folder and when they open that folder they have some café napkins in there,” says Nowels, jokingly.
“That’s not a very precise way, maybe, but it is another way.”
Tailored to Cotton
The software produced by Red Wing and MapShots is superior to the “manila folder” method in more ways than one. MapShots’ updates to it’s EASi Suite product allowed for more manageable crop production record keeping. And Red Wing’s CenterPoint was customized for cotton record keeping.
“To really keep track of your information, you have to track as much detail as possible, without getting too much detail,” says Mathew Hilton, Sales Consultant with Red Wing Software. “You never want to get to a point where you’re having paralysis through analysis. If you can’t manage the information you’re collecting, it’s not going to do you any good.”
To aid with that, the new software is designed to separate information into multiple, easily identifiable tiers. Data such as overall expenses can be broken down into multiple groups – “fertilizer”, “equipment”, etc. – and tracked in a more easy- to-follow system.
The software also allows producers to look at their expenses on a transactional basis.
With the software, says Hinton, “I’ve got the ability to track information to a vendor and apply that to any open invoice that I have with that vendor. And I have the ability to do multiple levels of details of transactions so that I don’t have to do that throughout journal entries, and I don’t have to do this information throughout individual transactions.”
And that level of detail is not just reserved for expense transactions.
“I also have the ability to track profit centers. So I can apply that to what I’m actually growing, no matter what the commodity may be,” says Hinton.
The system can even go so far as to help a producer with tax preparation. While the software can go into great detail, a major strength is that it remains user friendly.
“Our operating model is to build it complex, but to make it simple,”says Tim Taylor of MapShots, Inc.
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