April 12, 2016

Before he was a reality tv star, before he was The Bachelor – star of the ABC hit tv show, Chris Soules was an Iowa farmer and land investment consultant. Despite his newfound stardom, the third-generation corn and soybean farmer still co-owns and operates 5,500 acres of land with his parents. The family also operates a wean-to-finish hog operation that turns approximately 20,000 hogs a year.

GAI News had the opportunity to sit down with Chris to discuss his recent launch into fame, the new celebrity strategy he is leading with Peoples Company, and his upcoming participation at the Global AgInvesting conference in New York. We also took this chance to get Chris’s producer perspective on key topics impacting agriculture today: agtech and low commodity prices.

Here is an excerpt from that conversation:

GAI: How has agricultural technology changed your farming operations?

Chris: The changes have been incredible and one of the largest changes has been on the genetic side. When I was first starting farming, 100 bushels per acre for commercial corn was a great yield goal. Now 250 is what we strive for and 200 is what we expect. So the genetic side of technology in agriculture has really helped increase yield and has lessened the amount of fertilizer we need to use, pesticides we need to use, and insecticides we need to use. So that’s where I think I’ve seen the largest change.

Then there is global positioning technology that has allowed us to work and run more acres with less equipment.  We can run our planter 24/7 and if the weather is good, we do. Because you don’t have as much stress when you’re in there [driving the machinery] and you’re able to focus on making sure that everything is working properly as opposed to staring out forward to keep your planter lines straight. This enables us to farm more, and more efficiently with less inputs. This can be a big deal when you start to farm 5,000 acres and you talk about overlapping with a certain herbicide or fertilizer. Eliminating that overlap has made us a lower cost provider of food. That comes back to making land a better investment by helping to drive cash rent up because everyone has become more efficient with their production costs.

The other thing coming down the pipe is data. We have all this data that we are able to glean as we are going through the field. It’s almost overwhelming right now, the technology that is coming out to help manage that data, which helps us hone in on how we can make things better. That’s where I really see the trends on our farming operation. People are going to be working really hard to improve the data management and learn how to make more bushels on an acre than they ever have before with less input.

GAI: If you could ask an investor to invest in one technology that would be most impactful for your farm what would it be?

Chris: Right now, data management seems to be the biggest challenge for us, that is, pulling all of the pieces together. We spend thousands and thousands of dollars on really advanced technology that helps us monitor everything in the field but being able to then manage that and have it prove the return on the investment is more difficult. There are a lot of companies out there that are trying to streamline the management into a database that allows you to manage it efficiently and learn something from it. We see a lot of investment happening in this area right now, and as an operation, we’re looking at all of these different options and it is sort of overwhelming not knowing which one is the best.

As an operator, there is a lot to making the decision on data management. It’s a balance of personal management and the addition of a whole new level of management within the operation. As farmers, we have to change our operations to accommodate for all of this technology but we’re not all tech guys. We can manage with the GPS but now it’s becoming more of a bigger picture management challenge and it’s a challenge that has resulted in tighter margins. Farmers are having to learn how to get better and be more efficient and manage through the tight margins until you’re almost to a point where you have to hire more people to manage the data.

GAI: How are your operating decisions impacted by the current low commodity prices?

Chris: With tighter margins, we are all working really hard to get the most out of every acre, lower our costs and negotiate input prices down — whether it’s on the land side or crop inputs, fertilizer, seed or chemical. We are going to pull back – we are not going to be spending as much money on machinery. We are being very selective until we see where this thing is going to settle down. The big question to me is: is this $3.50 corn going to be the limit to the downside or are we going further down? We are in a world of unknowns right now. Can we feel confident that we have seen the downside, seen the bottom, and we are going to trade in a range of $3.50-$4 corn? Or is there a further downside? That’s my biggest concern. There is a lot of uncertainty to where markets are heading and it is going to result in us spending less money on things than we have seen people spending money on in the past five years, like fancy equipment.

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Chris is a member of the speaking faculty at this year’s Global AgInvesting 2016. To hear more from Chris, join hundreds of agricultural investing stakeholders in New York on April 25-28 or check out the forthcoming GAI Gazette.