On the record ... with Steve Faivre

To say that Steve Faivre grew up in a farming family would be an understatement.

"My family, as far back as we can trace it, has been in agriculture," the Sycamore resident said. "The Faivre family – my father's parents – has over 500 blood descendants. There are about 85 in my generation, and a big chunk of them live in the DeKalb area."

Faivre grew up on a family farm south of DeKalb that once raised cattle and has always raised corn. The farm once had more than 7,000 acres, but has scaled back to about 6,400.

"We have been kind of whittling down to maintain the most profitable pieces," he said.

Being able to pinpoint the most productive segments of the farm has been Faivre's passion for decades. After getting his engineering degree from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, he returned to DeKalb County to find ways to use technology to make farming more efficient and profitable.

Using a combination of computer programs that he wrote, publicly-available maps and recently-declassified Global Positioning System technology, Faivre developed systems to track which acres are the most productive and which ones need modified farming techniques; to handle a farm's accounting; and to identify shortcomings in a farm's overall efficiency.

Last week Faivre, who operates an independent consulting firm, gave a presentation at the DeKalb County Farm Bureau to discuss some of the ways that technology will be used to benefit farming in the near future. He spoke to MidWeek reporter Curtis Clegg after the presentation.


MidWeek: Were you active in 4-H or FFA in high school?
Steve Faivre: Oh yes. I joined 4-H when I was 7 years old. At the time we had 60 dairy cows and raised black Angus purebred cattle.

MW: When and how did you get involved in the high-technology aspects of farming?
SF: In about 1988 or '89 we got involved in yield monitoring. We had a company called AgriCAD that had a piece of mapping software which was one of the first in the area. We were able to combine aerial images with field boundaries.

My father had always been pretty progressive when it came to the adoption of technology. He lived by the adage, "Be not the first by which the new is tried, nor the last to set the old aside." He was one of the first to start using anhydrous ammonia in the area, and an early large grower for soybeans. …We got out of the cattle business by 1973, and part of that is what drove the change – we decided we would concentrate on the crop end of things. By 1975, Kishwaukee College had put in an HP mini-computer and someone got in touch with us and wanted to know if we would be one of their "guinea pigs" for getting on their computer. We connected via a 300-band modem and that's when I started writing software. I built a custom accounting package, and we also built an equipment optimization software package.

MW: What did the equipment optimization software do?
SF: We could put all of our fields in and what needed to be done to them, and from that we determined that our equipment was too small, so we knew where the gaps were and what was holding things up as we went through the season. That was when we decided we needed to go to bigger equipment. The John Deere dealer actually tried to discourage us from buying our third four-wheel drive tractor because no one owned three four-wheel drive tractors. So I brought him the computer printouts and told him, "Here is why we're doing this," but they were still skeptical.

MW: Did your computer models hold true in terms of crop yield?
SF: It enabled us to grow to the 7,000 acres. If the county's average yield was 130 bushels per acre, we were producing 150 to 160. …Our goal was to try to put management and production processes into place so we knew everything that was going on, and what were the issues with every acre.

What drove us to develop the yield monitor was part of wanting to have this intimate knowledge of the land. …We developed software that drove a dot-matrix printer to print out maps showing where different soil types were, and what kind of fertilizer we needed to put on. We printed these maps in the late '70s and early '80s and gave them to Hintzsche, who were some of the first ones using GPS to spread fertilizer.

MW: How important was the development of yield monitoring?
SF: An unexpected drop in yield is what first drove us to the mapping software, but then we didn't always know where the high and low yield areas were. If we had a 150 bushel (per acre) yield from a field, we knew that by weighing every load coming out of the field but we wouldn't know where the high and the low yields were, which is what drove us to develop the yield monitor, which is basically a flow meter that measures how much grain is moving through the combine at any given time. …It's a little like having an investment portfolio where you might have 20 stocks in there and the only thing you know about the portfolio is what the total return is. You have no idea how each individual stock is doing. How do you manage that?

MW: What has your career path been?
SF: About the time we started working with these yield monitors, Case/I.H. and Deere both took an interest. We told them they could watch whatever we were doing with the yield monitor if they would provide some equipment. …Case stepped in and said, "We'll give you everything you want." So we developed the yield monitor on the red (Case/I.H.) combine. It was about that time in 1991 that we first started using GPS, because we wanted to get a map of yields.

I think some of the managers of these companies liked to beat up on their engineers by saying, "Look, you've got a bunch of farmers out here working on stuff that's more advanced than what you're working on." So they got to know us, and when we did the demo for John Deere in 1992, they had been trying to create an off-the-shelf solution for mapping and putting GPS in their tractors and combines and we helped them with that. …In 1995, I was recruited by Case/I.H. to help them start their Position Farming Group.

MW: What are "equipment swarms"?
SF: They won't even have an operator station on them. The big expense on a tractor now is the cab – the cab can cost you $30,000. The question is the electronics – what will it cost? That's kind of the unknown. …A swarm of small, driverless tractors could work 24/7 in a field. You can shift monitoring stations around so they could be monitored from anywhere in the world. …If something looks out of place, the on-board computer will alert the operator and stop until the supervisor can look at the image.

MW: What are the potential advantages?
SF: It could be more cost-efficient, you could get bigger yields because of less soil compaction, and maintenance could be easier, too. If something went wrong with a piece of equipment, someone could come out with something the size of a snowmobile trailer and a tractor – or whatever implement they're using – on it and they could do whatever they need to set it up with fertilizer or seed, and that whole thing goes in the field. They pick up the other one and bring it in. The key here is that some of this stuff is unknown yet, but farmers are pretty inventive. Once they get into a system, they just do a phenomenal job of developing it – finding improvements and finding different ways to do things. The key is making these things flexible enough so you're constantly learning. …It's going to be a real growth industry in agriculture.

MW: What can you tell me about "strip cropping"?
SF: It's where you raise a 10-foot wide strip of one crop, and alternate it with a 10-foot strip of another shorter crop so the corn plants can maximize their sunlight exposure. Corn is more photosynthetically efficient than most plants. It's only now where the genetics have so improved the resistance of the corn plant to diseases and pests that the sunlight is showing up as a limiting factor, strip cropping can be a big factor in increasing per-acre revenue from letting the farmers grow other crops in the alternating strips.

MW: Not all of the possible future farming technologies are high tech. What can you tell me about seed tape?
SF: The high-tech portion of it, if there is one, is the highly-controlled factory environment. We could put a customized mix of seeds and fertilizer and pesticides on a long strip of paper that's essentially toilet paper and make a rope of it and have a different custom tape every row. We could lay the seed tape down going 30 miles per hour while applying complex seed/fertilizer mixes right in the furrow, which would reduce the amount of fertilizer we would need. We could put exactly the right seeds in exactly the right place. The farmer would never touch seeds, coatings, chemicals or fertilizers.

MW: How precisely could you plant a seed with a seed tape system?
SF: To within 1/10 of an inch, and we can reduce depth variance by 50 percent.

MW: How would you plant seed tape?
SF: Right now we are experimenting with a hand-operated strip tape planter from Eastern Europe. There's nothing made for it in the United States yet. It's a "chicken and egg" problem right now – seed producers don't produce tapes because there isn't equipment to plant it, and implement dealers don't make planters because there are no tapes to plant. But last year my wife brought home some seed tapes that she got from Menard's or Lowe's, but it was for radishes and garden vegetables. Increasingly, it's becoming more available, but not in high volumes.

MW: During your presentation you referenced another slideshow you gave at the Farm Bureau 10 years earlier. What do you remember about that presentation, and peoples' reaction to it?
SF: There were people that thought I was nuts. But part of the appeal of doing talks like those is that I'm not a futurist. …I tend to get more specific. Ten years ago I talked about having two tractors in the field, but only one would have a driver and the other one would be electronically tethered to the first, without an operator. There were people at that breakfast who said, "Boy, I'm glad I'm getting old enough that I'll never see that happen," and some of those same people were at last week's breakfast. …Even when I was at Deere and at Case people would ask what my job was, and I'd say, "It's my job to make other people look sane."

MW: What is tethering all about?
SF: The farm magazines are saying that it will be introduced in 2012 or 2013. It's basically where one vehicle has on operator on it, and a second nearby vehicle either ahead of it or behind it has no operator in it but it is controlled by an electronic tether. The second vehicle determines where it's going based on its position to the lead vehicle, and whether it's turning or changing speed or whatever. Its job is to stay a certain distance from the master. With a combine, the combine would control a tractor pulling a grain cart. It's pretty exciting stuff. All of this is being done in the military, in mining, in factories – agriculture is usually the last to adopt.

MW: In your presentation you mentioned "the end of testosterone technology" on the farm. What did you mean by that?
SF: When you think of testosterone, you think of football players and weight lifters and stuff like that. They are big and powerful and aggressive. Farm equipment design is driven by the fact that you have to put a human being in the vehicle. If you take the person out, then why is it so big? Generally, the bigger the equipment is, the more it costs per foot. So, a six-row planter that hooks right up to a tractor is generally cheaper per row than a 24-row one, which has wheels for transport and it has to fold and it has it has a lot of iron in it to handle the stresses of the field.

MW: How close are we to having driverless tractors now?
SF: We are already doing it. Case/ New Holland, Deere, (Caterpillar) to some extent, they are all equipping their tractors so they have hands-free steering and except for some of the safety stuff that's been imposed on them, the driver doesn't have to do anything but sit there. But because of fear of litigation we don't have operator-less tractors yet. In some countries there are people that bypass the safety systems so they can operate their equipment without an operator. …I don't think litigation will be a big issue once we demonstrate the technology, especially with smaller equipment that's just a little bigger than your lawn tractor.

MW: Where do you see the technology heading in the next two, five or 10 years?
SF: I'm not a fortune teller. I am usually more wrong on timing than I am on the eventual emergence, but I think this stuff is inevitable. The economics around it are just so overwhelming, as is the increase in the quality of work that can be done when you are working on a smaller scale. The dependability, the scalability, the transportability – I mean you can move this equipment from one field to the next at 60 miles per hour and right now you're lucky if you can get above 25 or 30.

MW: If everything you discussed becomes reality, what is the potential for DeKalb County farmers?
SF: Right now, if you're producing less than 200 bushels per acre of corn, that's a bad year and the target is probably 500 or 600, depending on who you talk to in the genetics and seed industries. …I think this is going to be part of reducing the damage that that we are doing to the environment with chemistry.

MW: Do you see conventional farming as being crude or inefficient?
SF: It is pretty efficient today, compared to what it used to be. This technology is going to take things to another order of magnitude. It's going to be a way to get Ph.D.-level knowledge into the fields.

MW: Are there any countries using any of these technologies now?
SF: Equipment companies are introducing things now that I talked about 10 years ago, so it's going to happen somewhere, it's just a question of whether the U.S. takes advantage of it. …I try to warn people that Brazil could become much better at growing corn and soybeans than we are, and if they adopt this and we don't in the U.S. That serves as a warning to us. But there is also something to be said for letting another country experiment with this, and then develop it and pull it into the United States. …John Deere is all over the world, and they're building a factory in China and Case/New Holland is building one in South America. These American companies are will be aware of these technologies and be ready to pull it in when our market is ready for it.