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Ag Geek Speak
GK Technology Inc Team Members, Jodi Boe and Sarah Lovas talk about precision agriculture, agriculture mapping, agronomy and drainage.
Ag Geek Speak
24.Special End of Season 1: A Fireside Chat with GK Technology, Inc.
Back in July, Sarah and Jodi sat down with the whole GK Technology, Inc. team at the annual GK Tech summer retreat. In the discussion that follows, we celebrate growth, innovation, and camaraderie. Listen to hear Darin's reflections on founding the company, Kelly's pivotal role in boosting sales, Cheryl's witty take on finance, and more. We share how GK has expanded our available data library storage to over a petabyte, moving from USB thumb drives to hot server rooms.
We also explore the transformative power of precision agriculture, from boosting yields to advancements in watershed modeling and herbicide optimization. Join us for a look at how teamwork, creativity, and innovation drive GK Technology's mission to revolutionize agriculture (and join is for a few laughs along the way, too!)
This is the official end of season one after a short break; join us next week for the beginning of season 2!
And now it's time for a Geek Speak with GK Technologies, Sarah and Jody friends and I can't wait to get in the fields again.
Speaker 3:No, I can't wait to get in the fields again.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to A Geek Speak. This week we have an extremely special episode. We are actually at our summer retreat, which is our summer annual meetings for GK Technology, and we have the entire staff here. So we thought we would take a little bit of time and sit around, just like we do normally at our annual meetings, where we have a drink and we're just going to solve all of the world's problems In agriculture, in agriculture with the powers of precision agriculture Awesome.
Speaker 6:Who wants to start introducing themselves? Awesome?
Speaker 4:Who wants?
Speaker 2:to start introducing themselves. That's me. Huh yeah, I'm Darren. I started the company in 2003 and, oh slowly built software. It seems like it took forever didn't it dear. Yeah, you worked pretty quick About 2006,. Kelly came along and joined me and decided to take care of the sales because I really sucked at that. Generally, if you're going to interact with me, it's because something's really gone wrong and the chains have flown off and somebody's given up and sent you my way.
Speaker 2:So yeah. So if it's ADMS or web service stuff, that's me. If it's SD Drain and the chains are flowing off, you'll probably talk to Travis. Other than that we just gather together this group and get together once a year to try and catch up. We bring all the families in too, because we like to meet the kids and watch them grow up. Got to watch Clinton Sarah's kids grow up from really young to one's going to graduate this year.
Speaker 6:So that splashing that ambiance in the background, that's people having fun in the background.
Speaker 1:We're swimming in a pool playing beanbags Our 18-year-old birthday boy actually Cheryl, you just got done talking who are you, I'm.
Speaker 7:Cheryl, I send you your bills.
Speaker 4:I started in 2008.
Speaker 7:I started in 2008 because Kelly and Darren wanted me to, I guess.
Speaker 4:From there.
Speaker 1:I just Don't kid yourself, cheryl actually runs the company.
Speaker 10:I've done a few things. You got on your knees Begging. Yeah, he did it pretty much was.
Speaker 2:We were very bad at businessmen stuff.
Speaker 9:She wanted us to pay bills too. She wanted us to actually make money. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Well, what a concept.
Speaker 9:Kelly, who are you? I'm just a friend of the family.
Speaker 2:I am.
Speaker 9:Kelly Sharp and I'm one of the co-founders of the company. Darren and I fired off in 2006,. 2007, when we incorporated, I was fortunate enough to be in a environment where I'm looking for a different way of life. I talked to Darren and said Darren, are you looking for an employee? He goes nope, I need somebody to help me out. Get into the company. So I bought in.
Speaker 2:It was more like I can't afford to pay you, but you can sure come on board.
Speaker 9:I should go back and find that, see if I can find that email again. It was not far off from that, if I could find that email again. It was not far off from that and it's been doing it since then and worked with Darren's stuff prior to that at Crystal. He wrote apps for doing field boundaries and stuff like that. So I mean kind of come full circle back to where that started at with stuff, and now we're back to a field map or app Back to kind of coming full circle Back to mobile apps again.
Speaker 9:Yeah, mobile apps again and stuff like that, but the devices are a little smarter and a little more horsepower than we had back in the day. Nothing new under the sun.
Speaker 12:Nothing new under the sun. And who are you? I am Travis Yike. I am one of the developers. I was brought on, I guess 10 years ago now, maybe a little bit longer, yeah, and so I do a lot of the SDJ stuff and you will never talk to me because I don't have any personal skills. Liar, liar and where are you based, travis?
Speaker 6:I am out of wyoming, so I get as far away from everybody else as I can, keeps me secluded over my corner and for context, in the room right now there's's 11 of us DK employees sitting around a table, so we'll continue to share and introduce ourselves until we get to all 11 of us.
Speaker 12:But I think Clint was hired about three or four months before I was hired. So we've been here close at the same time.
Speaker 3:I think so. Yeah, I think it was pretty close to that. So who are you?
Speaker 4:Clint, tori, tori, so yeah it was pretty close to that. So who are you, Clint?
Speaker 3:Tori, I'm Clint Streeter and I'm in Dickinson, north Dakota, where I'm based at or live, I guess Primarily do zone maps and some prescription writing and maintaining our online library for imagery and some of the other stuff, and that's pretty much it. If you need to get a hold of me, it's probably because you have a software question or want to have me make some zones or prescriptions for you, something along those lines, so that's primarily what I do. It's the most underpaid role in the company, by the way.
Speaker 9:Just put that out in the air.
Speaker 5:Thanks, for throwing this up the bus. Well, since we're kind of going in order of oldest employee to newest employee, it makes good sense here. So I'm Paul Fuller. I joined actually, I met these guys in about 2010 or 2011, and I was working for a Charlotte Implement dealership and selling drainage drainage equipment and software, and their drainage design software fit with everything I was doing. So I became a dealer for them at that dealership and about 2010 2011 fall, I came on board with them.
Speaker 5:So I'm eight and a half years give or take, and so my official title is sales and drainage consultant. I work with SD Drain. I've helped Travis along the way, kind of with some beta testing and some ideas, just from my background, and I do custom tile design. I do some barrel rate stuff too. I'm not an agronomist. I will not give you recs, but I understand enough about it that I can help you make maps. I can help you do your recs, but you need to know the agronomy. I've been a great eight and a half years with this company and I think I've got about 15 to go before I'm going to have to retire, hopefully AND I THINK I'VE GOT ABOUT 15 TO GO BEFORE I'M GOING TO HAVE TO RETIRE.
Speaker 9:HOPEFULLY AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, HE MAY NOT MAKE RECS FOR YOU ON THE FERTILIZER SIDE BUT.
Speaker 5:YOU WILL DO DRAIN TILE YES, design DRAIN TILE, drainage, consulting, if YOU HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT DRAINAGE. I DON'T KNOW EVERYTH everything, but I know a lot and I'm still learning.
Speaker 10:We're all learning. You knew a lot more than me when I came in, so that's for sure.
Speaker 4:Some of us aren't teaching anymore.
Speaker 2:I can't remember who the quote was from, but I think it was Thomas Edison. It was a day that you haven't learned something new. It was a day you've wasted.
Speaker 9:Tried to make sure that every day I'm learning something new.
Speaker 12:That's a good motto to go by, and so what is it today? I'll put you on the spot.
Speaker 2:We had a lot of good conversations downstairs about agronomy. Yeah, we did. I can't remember an exact item that I picked up new today from some confirmation of some biases I had and some slap downs of others. Ernie, you were next in line.
Speaker 13:Alright, so I'm Ernie Johnson. I've been here just about eight years with the company. I live down in a small little hole in the wall called Fulda, minnesota. It's about as southwest as you can get in the state.
Speaker 13:I met Darren and Kelly because I happened to know one of their former employees' wife. She was a good friend of mine and I was sick of selling seed. I was just about done with that. Well, I was done with that and I couldn't handle it anymore. So I talked to Travis and he said not this Travis, travis Bremer, and he's like you know who you ought to talk to is these two guys. They've got a great company. I think you'd like it and called them up and talked to Kelly and met him and Darren and yeah, it's been awesome. I do sales, I sell the software and I also service Call up. I'm going to be able to help you with most of your questions with the software. I also service call up. I'm gonna be able to help you with most of your questions with the software. I also do mapping and I, thanks to Kelly, I've really gotten into some of the drainage stuff and that's been a learning experience. Um.
Speaker 13:I do most of the drainage stuff for us sales. It's been. It's been an awesome learning experience and it's really helped me learn more about agronomy doing the drainage side of things too, because if you understand how the water and stuff flows in the field and all the rest of it, it really helps you get a better understanding of why some of the areas in the field are the way they are.
Speaker 9:So it's been an amazing experience coming here and working so and Ernie is going to be busy for the next month or two making drainage maps yes work speed. So who is next on the on the higher list?
Speaker 11:yeah, I'm Kendra Fuller. I'm Paul's wife, clint's assistant and, truth be told, I think I listen to Clint a hell of a lot better than I listen to Paul. Yeah, it's true, too many cooks in the kitchen sometimes.
Speaker 4:It's true, too many cooks in the kitchen sometimes.
Speaker 11:But no, I take care of downloading all of the imagery, trying to keep that current, all of your county data, things along those lines. And you know, clint needs a hand with something that he's getting kind of snowed under with, and that's kind of it. I've been with the company about three and a half years now. Son went off to college and I needed something to do and Kelly was looking, so yeah, we were needing somebody to fill in, but she also downloads LiDAR too.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, yes.
Speaker 9:Pretty much anything that we have for data. Kendra touches in some way, shape or form, between Kendra and Clint, so Primarily her these days.
Speaker 1:You're rarely going to hear from me unless you need something. She's the reason why we've got imagery that's up to date in our library. It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:We went from having it sporadically updated, occasionally, once in a month, to like daily sometimes.
Speaker 9:Two to three days behind actual flight times, type of stuff.
Speaker 6:I think you had a statistic that you shared with us yesterday about how much data you've got in each of the catalogs.
Speaker 5:Do you remember those numbers?
Speaker 6:by any chance.
Speaker 3:The number of images that we've done this year this year I think we've done 23,000 Sentinel images.
Speaker 11:Should have about 44,000 by the end of the season in October. So yeah, really growing. I think what was last year's total 29,000 GROWING, I THINK WHAT WAS LAST YEAR'S TOTAL 29,000.
Speaker 8:IMAGES THAT WE DID.
Speaker 11:SO WE'RE EXPANDING OUR AREA AND, yeah, just KEEP BUGGING AWAY. Have YOU PASSED UP? Clint ON THE.
Speaker 10:AMOUNT OF DATA YOU'VE DOWNLOADED.
Speaker 11:I DON'T KNOW, probably NOT AT THIS POINT, she's.
Speaker 5:GAMING.
Speaker 9:WE WERE DOING IT FOR A LONG TIME. Now SHE'S GAINING PRETTY FAST. When YOU'RE DOUBLING YOUR AMOUNT PRETTY LONG, it MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:SOMEBODY, you WERE LOOKING FOR NUMBERS, so SETINEL, setinel WE'RE AT ABOUT 110 TERABYTES, terabytes right now, of Sentinel data, about 32 terabytes of county data and about 26 terabytes of.
Speaker 1:LIDAR, so all together in that server room. What do we actually have for how many bytes of data do we actually have?
Speaker 2:so the whole data sets about 190 terabytes right now, but we, for safety sake, have two day two systems online that have copies of that, and each of those systems is capable of only what? 450 terabytes, um. And then there's the emergency system that we turn on once a month in the back of the data too, in case we, god forbid, ever got a malware attack or something. Those systems will be sitting there not more than a month. Yeah, so I calculated the other day that we do have enough drive space in the server room over a petabyte of storage in the server room Okay.
Speaker 6:Petabyte of storage Wow. Can you repeat that, Darren? How many terabytes that is?
Speaker 2:A thousand terabytes is a petabyte. We are over a petabyte in the server room, wow, and it's really hot in there.
Speaker 1:And you walk in there and all you hear is like this hum, cheryl, were you excited when that got out of your basement?
Speaker 7:Yes, Two years ago we bought a building and actually moved all of the surface up.
Speaker 9:But during the winter you're heating bill now, oh yeah, heating bill. And the basement's still cold now, BUT DURING THE WINTER. Your HEATING BILL NOW, OH YEAH, HEATING BILL.
Speaker 5:AND THE BASEMENT'S STILL COLD NOW.
Speaker 9:BUT YOU CAN HEAR.
Speaker 4:YOURSELF GET TO THE BASEMENT.
Speaker 5:NOW. So SOME STRATEGIC FANS AT THE OFFICE. You DON'T NEED TO TURN THE HEAT ON.
Speaker 2:NO, you NEED THE HEAT, but YEAH, I MEAN RIGHT, now, during THE SUMMER, we HAVE TO LEAVE THE DOORS OPEN ON THE SERVER ROOM AND PUSH FANS THROUGH AND KIND OF SACRIFICE SECURITY. The WHOLE SERVER ROOM IS GETTING ME ON LOCKED DOORS, except FOR THE SUMMER ROOM.
Speaker 4:BLOW SOME HOT.
Speaker 2:AIR OUT OF THERE.
Speaker 1:EVEN WITH THE FANS RUNNING, there's EN the fans running. There's enough servers running in there that it's over 80 degrees. It's a lot of data, it's a lot of data.
Speaker 11:Can you imagine like?
Speaker 2:storing all that data when you first started or that you're even going to be storing no, no I mean, you know, I I used to go to training and and, uh, I would wear a usb key around my neck that would have installs of ADMS stuff on it for training. And I tell a story that this is a 32 gigabyte USB key and when I first started we had to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 so that we could have drives bigger than 2 gigabytes, so that we could have drives bigger than 2 gigabytes.
Speaker 4:You know you'd have a hard drive that would hold four Landsat scenes.
Speaker 2:You know things would come a ways. And now the Sentinel scenes are. You know, each one of those is four times as big as a Landsat scene.
Speaker 4:So to put it in perspective when I was still at Crystal, darren's previous company would deliver DVDs to us with a Landsat scene per CD. What does a Sentinel image cover?
Speaker 5:Like what area?
Speaker 2:A single image 10,000 meter by 10,000 meter file and it's on a grid. Military grid reference system is what they call it.
Speaker 9:I love the way the Sentinel. I love how they call it. I'm sorry, I just love the way that Sentinel. I love how they deliver it, but understanding it's hard to explain because it still deals with the Earth rotating underneath it, so but how they deliver it.
Speaker 10:I'm going there, I laugh because it's just a weird system.
Speaker 2:It's all delivered in a tile that covers the same 10,000 by 10,000 square meter area every time, and it's weird because every tile will come down. You can go into a particular tile 14 TPT or something and the tiles going all the way back for five years will all be exactly the same size Because they're all cut to the same size.
Speaker 4:Versus.
Speaker 9:Landsat, which is 120 miles by 120 miles, but they don't clip them down to the military grids so you're getting a square that's kind of rotated sideways on the earth, which is the same thing that the original Sentinel data is, but they put it to this military grid system so not every grid covers the whole area.
Speaker 2:That's an idea. Maybe we take our Landsat data and import it and flip it to NCRS. The Sentinel sent them the data and they were done. You'd use the same system to file them. Yeah, get over it. That's a good thought. You know we're looking for different ideas on how to change up the system. Just add up all.
Speaker 4:What's that?
Speaker 7:We got to finish with our employees before you can go on to the tab.
Speaker 6:Oh, okay, all right.
Speaker 1:I think you're next. Yeah well, I guess the podcast already knows me. I'm Sarah, you have to listen to me every week. I'm an agronomist with GK Technology. I've been here for about two and a half years. I hail from Hillsborough, north Dakota. I started using this software back in 2006 and there's a lot of really smart people sitting around this table tonight. That's what I know. Don't give me that. Look, kelly, are you serious? No, I'm Sarah.
Speaker 9:Yeah, and that's the sass we love out of you. Okay, eric, then the next one that we hired came on board was.
Speaker 8:That's me. My name's Eric Lee and I am from the Bagley area in Minnesota, just a little bit west of Bemidji, and at GKI I help with systems, so I guess some of the server stuff and some of the odds and ends things with Programming stuff also, and you're probably not gonna talk to me ever. I can't identify most crops. That was just fine, eric, that's awesome, I'm proud that I can identify crops.
Speaker 6:That's what GK hired me for. I'm Jody Bow.
Speaker 4:I identify crops and birds and birds and birds.
Speaker 6:And birds, and birds.
Speaker 5:We all have our skill sets.
Speaker 6:We all have our skill sets. Yeah, I'm the low man on the totem pole, the last person to introduce myself, the most recent hire Best for last, best for last.
Speaker 4:No, there you go.
Speaker 6:But I mean you hear me on the podcast as well. Um, I'm an agronomist, I I do sales as well and and marketing, so you might hear me if you call in and ask a question on the software or if you're interested in the software. You might see me at a trade show and, of course, you'll hear me here on the podcast as well. But it's such a I'm so happy that we're doing this and getting you a chance to hear from people like Eric, like Travis, who you may not interact with when you call in and ask a question, because all 11 of us are what make the software run and so all of us together you wouldn't see the product that you see when you're running ADMS at home or SD Drain or any of the other products that we have. So it's great to have them a part of this table as well, or the FieldMapper app.
Speaker 6:Or the FieldMapper app GeekSpeak Exactly, yes, so there's I mean, that's the really cool thing is Darren mentioned before you know, getting started with this company from his garage to where we are now. We have a lot of really cool products that have come out and we have a lot of really cool things that are on the burner and almost at your fingertips that we're discussing and talking about at this meeting here. So we're super excited to share more about those as we move along and really shows to the public as well.
Speaker 9:Jodi, you may have to be taken outside and put down because you can't talk about some of that yet. You tell them we may have to.
Speaker 6:Let's remember this is July 16th. If you have it hard for me after this date, please contact the Mendota Heights Police Department.
Speaker 9:Don't worry, jodi, I'll always come for you, I'll always come for you and, by the way, we're a really hard group to get along with. We don't laugh often.
Speaker 6:No, it's pretty solid, did you have a phone number for that police officer? I?
Speaker 4:did see him drive by earlier, so they were sketching themselves. Kelly, be quiet. I don't want them to know where I'm at. I'm not, I'm not.
Speaker 13:I'm not. I'm not.
Speaker 6:I didn't see them drive by earlier, so they were sketching themselves. Kelly, be quiet.
Speaker 4:I don't want them to know where I'm at.
Speaker 1:One thing that I am really curious about. So this company's been around since 2006, and there's a lot of different people sitting around this table, a lot of really smart, talented people sitting right here, and we've had a chance to interact with a number of different customers, a chance to have our fingers in creating different products that customers use every day. So one of my big questions that I've got for everybody what is your favorite thing about GK or something that you might be the most proud of that GK has done? Or one of kind of like your aha, like super cool moments working for this customer? You know, just something that's been really neat. What, what is that? I? I'm really curious about that.
Speaker 13:So for me, it was, for the first year, kelly and Aaron really happy learning the software what? And not doing a lot of sales which you know. You don't know the software. It's not going to do you any good to go out and try and sell it. So after I learned it.
Speaker 13:One of my first customers I picked up was in south-central Minnesota. It was close to the borders and he's one of my favorite success stories because he was taking over for his father and his dad was working with a local co-op down there. And his dad was working with a local co-op down there and one of the things that they did was he was always on the build to the max. Platinum gold, put down as much fertilizer as you can, balls to the wall, just go.
Speaker 13:Well his son took over and his dad was like you know, you want to do this precision stuff. You go right ahead. He didn't believe in it. So Andy called me up and we talked and we're like all right, these are the steps we're going to take, this is what we need to do. So we went out and we set up the zones and his dad was like well, you're not even going to grid.
Speaker 13:No we're going to do zones. What's a zone? And Andy just told him you know, back off, dad, this is what we're doing. So went out and we zone sampled and we got the samples back and I called up kelly and I went wow. And kelly's like wow, yeah, it was unreal. It's like, um, those numbers going higher, he's actually going the other way, he's going to be in trouble. Well, long story short, he was also, yeah, very much close.
Speaker 9:I also thought that was scary?
Speaker 13:Yeah, we also. So my first year went out and we were going to and I told you, jody, we were going to have nitrate sample in the lab we used Well, I'm not going to names, didn't do it Came back, kelly and I had a discussion with that lab. So the next year they did nitrate samples and most of his samples came back at 120 pounds of N or higher.
Speaker 1:Oh, and his zero to 24 or.
Speaker 13:And his zero to six oh my gosh, oh my goodness.
Speaker 9:Yeah, holy Hannah, so yeah. So, by the way, never pull a nitrate during a grid test, because it's a waste of money.
Speaker 4:Right, it's a waste of money.
Speaker 9:Don't do it Exactly, because you'll never make money doing a grid sample of nitrate.
Speaker 6:It's a waste of money. You'll just feel like crap. Knowing how much nitrate was in that zero to six Exactly, you might learn something.
Speaker 9:Right Exactly, you might learn something right exactly. And and sarcasm intended by the way people.
Speaker 4:So his dad's yield goal on across his farm was 210.
Speaker 13:Andy's yield goal has been 300. He wants to get up to 300, but he wants to do it economically. And it's been awesome watching him because, as we've gotten to the point where we're critiquing small changes now and the starter that he's putting down and the type of fertilizers he's using because is right now, his average yield goal across his entire farm last year for his corn was 298 or 290 bushels per acre. So it's trying to get that last 10 economically without. Yeah, so it's just been awesome to watch him grow and just to see everything we've done for him. I mean it's just been amazing and it's just like it's a perfect story for why the software works, what we do. And then knowledge we've had, cause I've been able to call up sarah and ask questions all right, the soil is like this, why and it's just been you know, or call up kelly and all right, what do you recommend with this, and then get answers to questions. I mean, the knowledge in the room is just amazing and it helps so much with the customers.
Speaker 9:So to Ernie's point exactly when I started out, darren was handing off some of his customers and Derek and the guys down in the central Minnesota area not to throw people under the bus, but who was involved there? But the result of it is you started working with them in 1998, 1999, and looking at their yield goals and stuff like that, shooting for 85 bushel bottom end yield goals and shooting for 150 on the top end. We're really going to knock it out of the park. And two years ago our new bottom end yield goal was 150.
Speaker 9:That's our bottom end yield goal now that used to be their top annual goal on the whole best spots on the whole farm.
Speaker 4:But the thing about successes on it.
Speaker 9:It wasn't just quote unquote. When you say the word precision egg, everybody says fertilizer, nutrients, seed. It's these things, these are the cores of precision egg, the core of
Speaker 9:precision egg is drainage. I'm sorry but at the end of the day, majority of our country's, most of our feed there too much or too little water, killing our deficit to our crops. And what Darren brought to the table one of the first products you released back when he did the egg day in the viewer was drainage and I got to pat him on the back say that was the best, smartest thing to do. It was the heart and soul of it, because what brought those guys this far?
Speaker 8:from doing that it wasn't, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 9:The fertility and the seed choices were absolutely huge in it also. But listening to them and watching what they're doing with all the tile, the drain tile and stuff like that, it hasn't been just putting drain tile in a spot or draining a slew or doing this. It's been oh, we spot tiled this, we got this, we got that, we got that.
Speaker 1:And I mean it's just, those little changes make a big difference you know it's really funny when you bring up drainage like that, because I like to call uh surface drainage cocaine for farmers. They're really addicting. When people ask about them for the first time, I say be careful, I'll give you one and if you like it, you're going to pay for it, but you're going to want more, and they always do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, it's a lot like driving your car down the road. You're watching your mile-per-gallon gauge going wow, this is really good. Look at that 42, 38. I drive a little Honda CRV, so 42, 38. Holy cow, that's a really good average. Then you hit a couple of hills, there's some high-speed traffic and it doesn't take very long, and you're down to 30 bush or 30 mile per gallon average. Same thing with a yield monitor. You're driving through the field watching 300 bushel, 320 bushel, and all of a sudden you get a couple of 80 bushel spots and that yield average drops really quick. If you can fix up some of those so you don't have those low yield drive spots, the field average goes up in a hurry.
Speaker 9:Nothing hurts an average worse than a zero.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 6:So and like on that same subject too of you know successes and, like I think back to my first kind of exposure with GK technology as an employee of AgVise, I mean with soil sampling. A huge part of soil sampling and soil testing is making sure you're accounting for that variability in fields and making sure that you are managing each part of the field in a way that's appropriate for the fertility in each area, in a way that's appropriate for the fertility in each area.
Speaker 6:And what I wanted to do to help with kind of communicate the value of zone sampling to our customers at AgVise was put some zone maps together.
Speaker 6:And so God bless Kelly because he sat down on the phone with me and gave me a copy of ADMS and helped me put together zones and even with my we spent a couple hours running through some of these concepts and helped me put together zones and even with my yeah, yeah and just with satellite imagery I was able to make zones for my own farm in western North Dakota and then take those in the combine with me in the fall after soil sampling them and see that, oh my gosh, just with that satellite imagery and the zones that I had with ADMS, when the combine started to go really fast on the reel and not much through was coming through the combine, I could see ADMS.
Speaker 6:When the combine started to go really fast on the rail and not much through was coming through the combine, I could see immediately that that was where the red zone of the field was the poor producing area. Same thing with the green. When we had to slow down and back it off to like 1.5 miles per hour. That was a dark green zone. That was a good zone and it was just really incredible to see the proof of concept and I just sit back in amazement that we're able to do that for growers not only in North Dakota but across the country. It's an extremely powerful tool to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:I gotta say one of the things that I'm extremely proud of being an employee of GK Technology is just the breadth and the depth and knowledge that we've got within our company. I mean, you have to think about this from this day and I say this quite frequently, but it really is pretty cool. I mean, darren Johnson really is a pioneer in precision agriculture. He's one of the very first people that was thinking about agriculture data in the way that it operates within our software system today, and if you think about people trying to teach precision agriculture concepts, kelly was really a pioneer in that front. I mean, in 2006, when I started using the software, I didn't know what a boundary was. I didn't know what a shapefile was they. They didn't teach those things in school. The only place I learned that from was Kelly Sharp going to GK training.
Speaker 9:Well, I learned it from Darren. The classes that were being presented by these other software companies were really painful. They weren't giving you any basis. They were saying click here, click here, peace out. See you later.
Speaker 1:And you didn't understand why they weren't giving me a basis of what that file was and what it was.
Speaker 9:I learned the majority of the stuff I know from Darren, but nobody was passing the. Why am I doing this? It's just do this. Click here. Click here. Click here. And those events that have been to our training classes. Jodi and I were talking about that. There's so much to take in above and beyond. Click here right with. Why are you clicking here and what is this file about that? Darren uses the loving term as a firefighter himself.
Speaker 4:It's like a little fire hose with having been around some of that technology and lingo that there's just a lot to take in and it and it was when I first took training class the first time, and this was when I was still a customer.
Speaker 1:I was working in ag retail trying to do precision agriculture. I didn't think this was going to be that big of a deal to learn. I can clearly remember I signed up for all three classes. No big deal. I'm going to be doing agronomy and prescriptions and drainage. We're just going to do it all. I'll take three days of classes. I'm not dumb, I can do this. So I went to the first day of class. I stayed caught up to the end of class. The next day I went to the second, second day of class and I got done with that day and I had such a headache oh my gosh, I just hurt so bad. You probably didn't know this, but I took like four Advil on the way home and I called you and I did not go to the third day of classes.
Speaker 1:I worked with it for um I don't know six weeks and I retook um class one and two. You know that was when there was like two sessions of training in the winter time, and so I then I retook classes one and two and then it started to click because the concepts that he had taught were starting to finally come through, but precision agriculture wasn't anything that was offered for a course. I mean, there might be like one tiny course at a university, but it wasn't like you could really learn what you were doing. So GK Technology was really the place where I had the opportunity to learn that. And I don't know. There's a lot of other companies that are coming on the market today that are trying to venture into precision agriculture, but they just don't have the breadth and the depth and the history and the knowledge that we do. I mean, it'd be interesting to know how many years of experience is actually sitting around this table. Um, anyway, I'm very proud that I work for a very for a pioneering precision agriculture company.
Speaker 5:When you talk about the first training class. So I went to my first training class in 2010 or 11. I don't remember for sure. I can probably look back because it would be the first manual I have and it was in Watertown, south Dakota, at the event center and there was probably 20, 22, 25, nice full room and there was some experienced agronomists, there was some newbies and after we got through downloading Landsat through Globus which we did that in training that was part of training class and I didn't have a clue. I knew nothing about agronomy. I knew some trainings at that time and about noon I was about ready to say I can't sell and support this software, I don't have a clue. And we got to the Drainage Day by then. Of course, now I understood Drainage, so that made more sense. But after going through, creating zones and writing prescriptions was something I knew nothing about and I'm glad I stuck with it because I'm really happy to be here today.
Speaker 9:I'm glad you stuck with it, because I'm really happy to be here today.
Speaker 4:I'm glad you stuck with it too.
Speaker 2:The training classes. I mean, really, when Kelly came on board, we started talking about how we were going to do this and I always thought we were going to do training classes and they'd just be like free seminars. And he said, oh, we can get people to A to come to training. And I went. Really, you think so? And that first winter, I mean we filled classrooms in Fargo and Grand Forks and Watertown and.
Speaker 2:Crookston and all paid attendance and it was. You know. People were out there and wanting to learn to do the things we did, and that was it was it was. I was very proud to see that happen, and they're the growers that stepped up to tell her how to do things what did that happen after the first? Boy that had been the winner of 2009. You did it right off the bat. I think it was the winner of 2006. You started.
Speaker 9:Fall of 2006,. You did it right away.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:I hadn't been using Per Se in the software for more than probably six, eight months at that point in time, so it was.
Speaker 3:So there's good adoption.
Speaker 9:Joby just a few things. Yeah, there was some. There was some ah Darren, ah Darren, but I mean it was kind of blindly going out then.
Speaker 2:They had a good following in the Crookston Minnesota area. Crookston was a hotbed of precision agriculture going back into the 90s. Absolutely it's just a very progressive community up there.
Speaker 9:Jim and John Ross were just huge huge supporters of us, but supporters of the concept of precision agriculture.
Speaker 1:I do think it's pretty cool that, as time would go on one of Darren's original customers would end up being one of my customers when I was independent crop consulting and he still had his data in there from when Darren was doing his original mapping, so some of those maps went back to like 1998.
Speaker 2:There's like yield data maps that were yield data maps and we have yield data maps and Landsat data the yield data was never good enough to use for zones, but there was a lot of. Landsat data zones or Landsat zones. Neal data was never good enough to use for zones.
Speaker 4:So it was a lot of Landsat, data zones or Landsat zones.
Speaker 2:And mostly B-top, I think.
Speaker 1:But it was I mean you think about what the technology was like back then to what we have today, it's pretty impressive what you could do and how good the zones were with the data that we had, compared to what you think about what we have today but I think I make.
Speaker 9:I make a point that I always like. I always like to make this point. I used to sit down and show people drainage maps and stuff and trade shows and stuff like that, but I actually really started stop doing that. I have no offense to the people listening, but I've stopped doing that because I'm sorry, but it blows my mind that people don't realize that water goes downhill or towards money.
Speaker 4:Touché.
Speaker 9:But it just blows my mind. I pull up the LiDAR map and tell them that water flows that way, and they'd argue with me I don't know. When you've got five feet of drop going from north to south, well, all the water in my area is closeering plus to the north. Well, on this field it doesn't. And then they just walk over there and and go home and they're like oh well, that was all I needed to know and just fix my drainage problem, that I've been trying to run water to the north for the last 50 years of my life and it didn't work. And now I just fixed all their drainage problems because it actually runs itself.
Speaker 9:But, I quit doing it because I can't tell you how many times I've happened to event trade shows that somebody would I'd ask them about a field or whatever and I'd bring up a map and I'd show them something that would just blow their mind and I'm like this is basic, but if you don't know something and somebody tells you the answer once you know it, you know it and it's really everybody in this room can appreciate what I'm saying from the standpoint of once you're told something and the world is round and you thought it was flat, and once you grasp that concept that the world is round, it's over, it's like no, the world is round, my thing is gone.
Speaker 9:But knowledge is power and we don't realize what we have for knowledge sometimes, darren you spoke off so way beyond people's grasps because they didn't know anything about that concept and it's such basic things to do yeah, I mean, everybody looks at their fields and they go.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm in the red river valley so it goes north and east towards the river. So, except for a certain distance away from the goose river, if you're on the north side it runs south to get into the goose river and if you're on the other side of the river. It runs north to get into the Goose River and if you're on the other side of the river it runs north to get into the Goose River. It might run west. It might have to run west to get in.
Speaker 1:So I don't want to put anybody on this spot but I'm going to With much love. I do actually have to ask Cheryl, what is the thing that you are the most proud of with GK technology? Oh come on, come on in and tell us and we'll take an edit pause so you can walk in. You can walk in. I really want to know. I want you to give me a hint because I don't know, but you've seen so much, you're the outsider looking in, I'm the outsider looking in Pun intended.
Speaker 4:She was the outsider looking in. I know exactly you were able to get the majority of us to turn in our billing.
Speaker 3:YOU WERE ABLE TO GET THE MAJORITY OF US TO TURN IN OUR BILLING WITHIN THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS.
Speaker 7:EXCEPT, we WERE ONE OF THE OWNERS, but WE WON'T SAY IT.
Speaker 9:BUT MAKE THE POINT, darren AND I, when WE WERE STARTING OUT FOR THE FIRST TWO THREE YEARS, we WERE SIX MONTHS out. For the first two three years we were six months, eight months, nine months out on billing stuff and Cheryl's going um. You wonder why you don't have any money. I have to feed the children, yeah.
Speaker 4:We have to pay the power bill.
Speaker 9:And me, being the single guy, it's like, yeah, whatever, yeah, whatever. All the SSI, though I was like, yeah, we need to get this done, but it was just a real fight and not because Darren and I didn't want to do it, but we were just so busy trying to do other things and those of you guys that run small businesses out there. You guys can appreciate that. The best thing I can ever tell anybody starting a new business is find a good bookkeeper or a good assistant to take care of the background stuff and cheryl was that person and is that person.
Speaker 9:So when she came on board, cheryl, tell them about coming on board and the disaster.
Speaker 7:Well, it was basically, we needed money. Yeah, the disaster, and I hated my job.
Speaker 6:So the one before GK, right? Yes?
Speaker 7:yes, yes, I was, I was. I was Working at the Valley Journal, putting the Valley Journal together, and I was getting $7 an hour and was not appreciated. I'm done with this. So I came on board and got their books together and we got paychecks. Kelly and Darren used to write each other's. They'd fill out a paycheck for each other and then sign. So Darren would sign Kelly's paycheck and Darren would sign.
Speaker 13:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It was because they couldn't sign their own paychecks, so yeah, but you've seen a lot of stuff with GK over.
Speaker 1:I mean, you've seen the company grow from the ground up and everything. So you've seen a lot of stuff. What do you think is the coolest thing that you think you've seen?
Speaker 7:I have no idea, that's a hard one it is isn't it? It's a very hard one, just the growth, I think, and this is not a normal company, I mean.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 3:Not just based on the employees.
Speaker 7:No I meant based on the employees. We're all abnormal. You have to be a certain kind of special to be hired.
Speaker 9:You know, you go to these big companies and they've got the hr departments and well, we don't follow those rules really close because we we know each other yeah, and, and we know what we're like, and that's sure what so prior to me joining the company, I mean, I just think about the days when darren was trying to get through all of this. I mean the days when you guys had your kids working on.
Speaker 7:We had kids doing soil sampling, we had our daughter cutting up maps, yep. But we also had a couple wonderful farmers in the Halstead area that kept us going and paid us above and beyond what was really what we deserved or what Darren deserved, and he always wanted to pay that back. So that's why we don't let him sell anymore, because he would never bill anybody anything, he would just do it for free because we had a lot of help at the beginning. So he just wanted to pay it forward and that's what he is. And then Kelly came along and he actually started training people and going out and selling and then all the money started coming in, trying to build people?
Speaker 7:Yeah, Trying to build people. No, I meant yeah, going out and training people and getting more customers instead of just the farmers in the local Halstead area.
Speaker 1:And then it just kept growing and, you know, I think that's something that's really interesting, because there's a bunch of people sitting around this table that have mapped in some really neat places. I think most of the audience that we usually interact with think of us just as being a company from North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota but that's not true, Okay. So where is everybody mapped in here? Where has everybody worked? Farthest away places?
Speaker 2:My farthest away is Dalhart, Texas.
Speaker 1:Dalhart Texas, Dalhart, Texas.
Speaker 2:I had a couple of customers at Dalhart Texas that I had gone down and helped do some really weird, not weird things. It was pretty impressive things with converting John Deere air carts before they were capable of doing variable rate and rolled into Dalhart Texas area and installed electric motors to control the gearboxes on a John Deere planter with a Raven 750. So we're doing variable rate, ammonia and two cart John Deere stuff by running the gear ratios up and down on a John Deere with Raven controllers.
Speaker 9:And how big were those ammonia tanks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was. That was amazing. You rolled up the field and I thought what's that ammonia plant doing out here? It was like a 10,000-gallon tank on a fifth wheel behind a tractor, with a toolbar behind that Holy cow, and they would pull up with a semi and fill it.
Speaker 5:I have a picture of that in my trade show, my trade show, my trade show.
Speaker 13:I have a picture of that in my trade show, my trade show slide show. I have a picture of that.
Speaker 5:That's a cool sheet, yeah, wow.
Speaker 4:You guys see us.
Speaker 9:If you see our stuff at the trade shows and watch the slide show. It's one of them it's still one of the slides and I had done a.
Speaker 2:Mony application for years with, you know, one-inch hoses coming between the tanks and the toolbar, the tanks and the toolbar, and down there they had a two-inch hose coming off and going to, from the tank going to the toolbar and to really big valves and really big flow meters. And you'd roll along and they were just knifing it, so they weren't using a lot of power and running along with a 60-foot applicator at eight miles an hour putting on 200 pounds of N. With a 60-foot applicator at 8 miles an hour putting on 200 pounds of N.
Speaker 1:Well, Clint, you've done some mapping in some different places around. Where have you done some?
Speaker 3:Yeah, california I did quite a bit. Arizona I do quite a bit. Washington State I did. Still I'm doing a lot of mapping there and variety of crops, I guess too, done like rice fields in California, and orchards for almonds and walnuts, and hops fields, vineyards, all kinds of different stuff.
Speaker 7:Cheers, cheers and it's all over the Internet, right, you don't go down to California. Right, cheers, cheers and it's all over the Internet. Right, you don't go down to.
Speaker 3:California. Right, yeah, it's sight unseen. I never end up actually getting to see the fields that I map, but we're able to do it well enough the way we do it and stuff.
Speaker 1:Happy customers.
Speaker 2:Travis's addition there of the elevation data and being able to 3D map and verify zones with 3D maps?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's been a huge help.
Speaker 2:It's amazing, it was huge yeah.
Speaker 3:Probably the hardest were rice fields, and I don't think we ever really did get a good map of those, just because the timing had to be perfect, with enough foliage above the water to even get reflectance from the plants and stuff, because stuff depends on water so much it's like pivot irrigation too, or flood irrigation. They're harder fields to map just because of the water. But yeah, I've done a variety of things. I guess You've done some drain tile in some different places Just because of the water. But yeah, I've done a variety of things.
Speaker 1:I guess Well, you've done some drain tile in some different places. Yeah, that was Paul.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I've kind of done kind of go from sea to standing sea. I have an SD drain customer on the Columbia River in Washington. We found a bug in SD drain when we first set that up because his elevation where he set up was negative three feet and three feet below sea level. Travis had everything set up below sea level gets discarded. So we found a bug, got it fixed right away. So from the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean in Washington State I have a vineyard in the they're in Napa County but they're not in the Napa Valley, they're the next valley east of that and I do all their drainage design plans. I actually went out there and got them set up with SD Drain and they showed me their tile plan and I said, oh my gosh, who designed this? And well, we had a civil engineer design it, so functionally it was correct it would work.
Speaker 9:Water went downhill.
Speaker 5:Water went downhill. They were doing it the totally wrong way because they're trying to collect water. They're not trying to drain water, to collect water to pump back up into lagoons or reservoirs for irrigation in the summer and in 2016 or 17,. I was out there and we still do one or two vineyards a year and I've done stuff from botano, north dakota, which is about as close to canada as you can get in the us, and I've done stuff in the carolinas and as far south as kansas. I haven't done anything. You know real far south on the drain deal, but Kansas is far south. So we've been. I've covered I did add it up during my real interview, I think it was like 31 states or 28 states. I've done drainage design projects in.
Speaker 2:I would guess Tiley is pretty thin in Oklahoma and Texas, not in Texas, really Coastlines.
Speaker 6:Oh yeah, not in texas, really. Coastlines, oh yeah. So, and I know we're talking about mapping, but I do want to include kendra on this as well, where one of the farthest reaches of what you pull in data for um to include in our libraries libraries and if it's easier, you can even say what states don't we have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it might be easier.
Speaker 11:Yeah, I think we might be down to about eight or nine states now that we don't have county data for um. Yeah, I mean basically from about new york all the way over to the coast we're doing imagery for all the time up into canada. Um, we started going down into southern Texas this year, so we probably don't have Alaska.
Speaker 1:No we don't have. Hawaii, maine.
Speaker 11:Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island. Yeah yeah, so it's pretty small that we don't have Utah Nevada.
Speaker 3:Nevada. Yeah, Just a little lighter for Wyoming.
Speaker 6:And so if you're in one of those places and you want to use our library or have maps made, let us know and we can pull that into our library.
Speaker 9:Yes, we can. Kendra's looking for something to do.
Speaker 11:You betcha, was that a you?
Speaker 4:betcha yeah.
Speaker 9:And we use the word oof-da and text-a-hoo.
Speaker 4:Yeah, sure you betcha, you don't need to know.
Speaker 6:So this is Jodi. I'm the only person that can hear the sound effects of the board, but Travis made sure that the sensor went off, which all of you that are listening to the podcast can hear. But those Norwegian words, those are curse words. I'm surprised you found the right button for that. That was impressive.
Speaker 4:What are the odds?
Speaker 11:I do want to tell you, guys, though, you're talking about things that you're proud of, and I was thinking about that and, honest to God, proudest moment was when Clint let me paste something to the server.
Speaker 4:Seriously.
Speaker 11:Yes, he trusts me enough to paste something to the server.
Speaker 3:I knew how easy it was for me to even screw something up. I know I got it. I don't want to put her through that I got it.
Speaker 11:But yeah that was like the first baby step 50 terabytes later of her pasting.
Speaker 11:Yeah, there hasn't been much for mistakes, but you know, it's been really cool because I grew up in the city. I have no agricultural background other than the backyard garden I mean that is it and watching them throw hay bales on my grandpa's farm back in the day A lot of stuff. When I first learned it, I was taught the process and didn't yet have the understanding behind it. So I mean that's very important. I gotta know, why am I doing this? So it's been very interesting just to see how that's grown, how I've come to understand things that I knew nothing about.
Speaker 11:And I'll have conversations with Paul sometimes where, you know, I just, you know, pick up on little things that I wouldn't have had even a clue about. Kelly will get on the phone with me and it's like oh OK, that's why that works. I get that now, you know. So just all of the knowledge with you guys and the amount of like ADMS that I haven't even begun to touch, you know, yeah, but I think six months ago I told you I hadn't worked with polygons because I'm so stupid. I've never worked with polygons. Oh my God. Anyway, yes, I have, yes, I have. And I got off the phone and went oh my God, he's got to think I'm just yeah.
Speaker 1:By the way, at the last team meeting, kendra was talking about how didn't you like write some of your own computer code recently?
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Oh, a little bit of Python, that's it.
Speaker 1:Just a little bit of Python.
Speaker 11:No, because I do not code, but I do not. I don't code, but I am. I like to figure things out and I don't know. Sometimes you can spend hours looking at something and it's like why am I doing this?
Speaker 13:But there's that reward at END, I GUESS.
Speaker 11:SO.
Speaker 4:YEAH.
Speaker 2:ANYHOW YEAH I.
Speaker 4:JUST LOOKED FOR KENDRHA.
Speaker 11:AND.
Speaker 2:THERE'S 40 STATES OF COUNTY.
Speaker 11:Data ON THE SOURCE OKAY WOW.
Speaker 2:SO WE'RE MISSING IT.
Speaker 9:WE'RE GET there, we're getting there probably, probably, won't do a lot in Hawaii and Alaska ever, but I believe, I believe we have a little bit of data on there for, uh, puerto Rico, oh, I think they're a little bit on for Puerto Rico and um and Canada and usually the way we add to that library is by demand.
Speaker 1:So once there's a customer in a place, we start working with them and that library gets created. So this is a library that's been created based on demand, On demand.
Speaker 9:And more so for you guys that are listening, to be aware too. We're talking about North America stuff. There's nothing stopping us from. We have users in Australia, we have users in South Africa. There's nothing stopping us from adding more stuff to the library if we get the interest and the demand from those areas. So just like.
Speaker 5:Sentinel covers the world.
Speaker 9:It does that, and so does Landsat.
Speaker 6:We see you listeners outside of Canada and the United States on our Buzzsprout or our little podcast information website, so we do know that there are some listeners that at least have IP addresses outside of the US and Canada.
Speaker 1:So if you want something mapped, let us know so I do want to ask Travis, you've been here for 10 years, yep that was it? So what is your most proud thing of working here at GK? Or what's your most proud thing about this company, or the most rewarding thing that's happened, or there's something along those lines yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 10:I question I did when I first started. I reluctantly started with with gk technology because it was not in the area that I wanted to see my future grow. I wanted to be in in research and uh and stuff like that, because that's what interests me. Um, I don't get me wrong, I love to be here now, but one of the things I was so frustrated with research was about was there's so much research that does not get out into the real world and it's not applied, and GK here we actually do apply it and we take what we learn and we help people out. And that's some of the things I missed in what I was doing and that we do have here.
Speaker 9:So, yeah, so one of the stories that I have that goes with Travis. When he first started we had him helping out with some ABMS stuff and one of the first projects we put SD drain in front of him and we laid out this concept of a ditching, ditch cleaning, ditch, maintenance, whatever product they're going to survey and cut a ditch and whatever. And one of the comments that stuck with me about what Travis said is and he probably doesn't remember saying this but we got done and laid all this stuff out and he goes so what am I going to do after this? And he goes so what am I going to do after this? I'm like so when this gets built there's going to be maintenance and stuff. I'm going to have to do more stuff to it. And here we are ten years, nine years, after that was built and we're still building on it.
Speaker 9:Yeah, but the point to be made was software with what Darren built, with what Travis has built, with what Eric and everybody on the programming side brings to the table here. When you build a piece of programming, the technology world moves so freaking fast that you're not just trying to keep up with the code that you wrote, but you're trying to keep that code. I mean you started out on Windows 95, 98? 95. 95. But I mean trying to even just take a piece of code to keep it up to date, to get IT UP TO 95, to 98, to XP, TO WINDOWS 7, to WINDOWS 8, to WINDOWS 10, to WINDOWS 11. I MEAN JUST MY POINT FOR PEOPLE IS WHAT AM I GOING TO DO AFTER THAT? I'm LIKE I DIDN'T LAUGH. I JUST GOT TO IN THE BACK OF MY MIND. I WAS OMG, you GOT A LOT TO DO AFTER THAT, I BELIEVE I CAME gee, you've got a lot to do. After that, I believe I came up with a fairly proper answer. I said there's more projects coming, so don't worry.
Speaker 2:Sorry, we'll have some work for you.
Speaker 1:This is never going to be done. So, travis, have you ever been bored? No, no.
Speaker 9:Well, one of the things I want to throw out to everybody, I mean within the group, I feel like have we ever said, no, don't think outside the box? I mean it's always. I feel like we've always encouraged you guys to keep on finding a new way to do something.
Speaker 2:Our and a lot of our best ideas at least from when I started came from our growers. I mean the growers requesting things and crock consultants yeah, crock consultants. You know it. Just you know, could you make it do this? Why wouldn't we do that? Why would you do that? And then he's playing it and you go yeah, I think we could do that.
Speaker 5:I learn from my drainage customers and this is people who I'm doing the mapping for the drainage design for and they say well, I want you to do this for this reason, and it's like that makes sense. They don't want to lay out their own tile plans, but they have a few things that they want to accomplish by it and they know how they want to do it.
Speaker 1:One of the coolest things that I saw in the software and this happened just this last year so frequently we kind of have two divisions of customers right Drainage and agronomy and it tends to there's a few customers out there that'll do all of it, but for the most part we kind of end up having that split right. And so I had this one, this one agronomist. He wanted to make zones based on flow accumulation lines. He had. He had an idea for a residual herbicide. He was getting way more activity out of this residual herbicide in one part of the field I can't remember it must have been on the hilltops or something. Anyway, he wanted to know where the flow accumulations went and from that he was going to make these zones.
Speaker 1:So we actually went in and we did watershed modeling from the flow accumulation lines. We buffered out that. Then we went back over and we made zones, two zones from those flow accumulation buffered out lines and then we applied residual herbicides based on that and it worked. And they did it for like 1,000 acres of lentils. And now he's got like farmers that are trading off sprayers to get sprayers with pulsating um nozzles so that they can do more next year. It's amazing, but it's kind of emerging of two different very pieces. You know two very, two very pieces.
Speaker 9:But more importantly, more importantly, now we're probably putting less in that watershed flow area where you're going to potentially get more runoff and stuff too. So I mean all the environmental benefits.
Speaker 1:Way better.
Speaker 2:Yeah the weed control is better, the environmental benefits are better, the crop injuries minimize it was a lentil situation.
Speaker 1:It was for lentils, I think, and so lentils are just really sensitive to to um, those herbicides. So it's just. But it was neat when you could see, you know, he called up with this idea and he was trying to think about how to do it and he said, well, let's just do a watershed model. I don't think he'd ever played with the watershed model before because he's he's just an agronomist and he hadn't thought a lot about well, but how many, how many times have we heard this story in our region?
Speaker 9:So right over in Valley, everybody gets the concept that drainage is a big deal. Or you get into the river plain areas where that's a big deal. But oh, I'm out in the Roley Hills, pot Hill, pothell, prairie area. Drainage, it just doesn't matter out here, the water just comes here and that's it.
Speaker 8:But how many times have we heard that it?
Speaker 9:just doesn't matter out here. We don't need high-precision RTK stuff out here, because we got all this rolling ball and we know where water goes. But you get into those scenarios.
Speaker 1:There's so many times, so many times this was out in southwest North Dakota.
Speaker 2:Yep, absolutely. In central North Dakota you have people getting stuck on side hill seats, absolutely, and you can stick some tile in perpendicular to the hill and intercept that water flow and pull it off and don't get stuck anymore.
Speaker 9:Amazing miracles of heaven, miracles and we get better crops and and clint tell us about a little bit about your I, I'm, I'm with a change from gk, so so part that everybody online needs to know, or everybody listening needs to know, is that Clint came to us from? Where were you working previous to GK, previous to AGO?
Speaker 9:Yeah well, I was working at UND University of North Dakota as a pilot flying aerial imagery for aerocams, and then you came on and went from that and you were we hired, we actually worked. We worked with you as uh, as an employee, as agio. So actually, yeah, you were three years prior to your higher date with gk.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you were working for us or working with us for three or four years prior to that so, yeah, and the neatest thing I guess with that that transition was, as I was flying imagery, I was always trying to figure out or learn how the images were used and I had customers that they had me fly their fields farmers in the in the area and stuff and I get them nice pictures and they'd say they were great and they could do all this stuff with them.
Speaker 3:But I never knew the software they used or how they did it and I sort of knew you and Darren and the software that you had with ADMS. But then getting hired here and then actually being able to bridge that gap of seeing, okay, this is what we're doing with the images and analyzing it and combining them or whatever we're doing to make the zones and and now that's the basis you're making decisions for the field and things like that. So I finally was able to go full circle from the images that that I was creating to how they could be used I've always I've always thought clint's background for kind of how we got into what he's doing, what he's bringing for us.
Speaker 9:I've always thought it was background for kind of how he got into what he's doing and what he's bringing for us. I've always thought it was one of the a really interesting story, just to kind of the background and some of our overlaps with the university and stuff with Carson and stuff like that.
Speaker 9:There's just some background, crossing paths and stuff that it was just fun to see how it all came together and how, like you said, the full circle. I thought it was just a to see how it all came together and how, like you said, the full circle.
Speaker 3:I think to an extent I was a little bit of an experiment for you guys too, because I didn't have a lot of the ag background to see if somebody that sort of understands, that's willing to learn and stuff and be able to pick it up and run with it.
Speaker 9:I guess I was able to, or have been so far clint, clint hit, clint hit a really key item there for everybody. Everybody doesn't matter who you are, where you are, but willing to learn, you know at the point that you're not willing to learn anymore. Don't come to my training classes. Yes, if you aren't willing to learn, just stay home.
Speaker 6:Like darren said, earlier, right, like if his thomas edison quote about if you aren't willing to learn, just stay home. Like Darren said earlier, right His Thomas Edison quote about if you haven't learned during your day, it's a day wasted. Coming at the end of this, too, I want to ask one more question, and specifically to Eric, what's been as a relatively new hire here at TK what has been the most surprising thing to you either about.
Speaker 6:GK, or just about like agriculture in this area, or what's your greatest adventure? Yes, which is, oh, I like this. You can't see this podcast listeners, but airspace just lit up I actually need you to repeat the question?
Speaker 4:what is?
Speaker 6:what has been your, your favorite GK adventure thus far, working with GK, an aha moment, or aha moment, or most surprising part of what you do at GK.
Speaker 8:I think it was when I did the training class the first well, the only time I've done the training class and kelly was saying all of these terms that I did not know, but I was able to follow and click along most of the way. Sarah would show me some things and I'd get caught back up and then at the end I saw this map of, hey, this is where all the water's going, and I thought, wow, I didn't know you could do that. I didn't even know. Yeah, I guess I just didn't know that you could do that with a map, um, or that that was an important thing within a field. I guess I kind of thought there were like leprechauns that carried all the water.
Speaker 8:Yeah, I guess, just realizing, um, you know, applying for the job, I, I didn't know a whole lot about precision egg, but, uh, learning about it, it's like, holy cow, this could, this is like, uh, I don't know how you actually make a difference in the world and how you can be a positive influence on, well, countless people. And I just thought that seems like the kind of place that I'd like to work at and develop skills and work with people who are on that same kind of mission a big part of what?
Speaker 7:Wow, that was awesome. Change my answer.
Speaker 9:I know I would ever came on and some of the shifts in what he's done and where he's gone with, with different roles in what he's working on and stuff was I mean moving into, moving into the stuff he gets into such technical in the technical world that Darren and Travis and Eric work in. The new thing was like the sonic wall stuff and things like that, setting some of the protective things of the company up, things that are keeping things from happening.
Speaker 9:But I just it always blows my mind with all the data that we have floating around, people trying to figure out how to make all this stuff go back and forth. Honestly, it just blows my mind Again. Like Darren said earlier, did we ever really expect that we'd be carrying around a petabyte of storage?
Speaker 5:in a facility.
Speaker 9:No, not a chance. It just wasn't even in the realm of things. But, eric, to the point of what? You setting some of that stuff up for the protection of it? Is just it's interesting. Like trying to figure out how to run some of that stuff is just yeah.
Speaker 6:It's just not what any of us do, so it's just a totally different piece to bring to the well, I think we're getting to the end of our more than hour long conversation, our gk fireside chat, but it's been a great reminder of just this whole conversation in general has been a great reminder of with the maps that we make, with the software that we sell here, we're able to take these agronomic concepts, these ideas, these engineering ideas and concepts, the drainage, and actually make them work and apply in the field and make a difference in people's lives. I'm so glad that Eric mentioned that, but it's really exciting to work for such an impactful company and thank you everyone for being here and sitting down with Sarah and I to make this podcast.
Speaker 13:So at GK Technology we have a map and a map for that.