Farm Of the Future

Clay Mitchell climbs into his combine, pulls a lever and sits back as the lumbering machinery crashes into a 40-acre cornfield. As the front of the machine noses through the furrows like 13 red moles, chomping at the stocks and churning ears into grain, Mitchell checks his e-mail on a wireless laptop, downloads the moisture content of corn being stored in a bin a

mile away and chats on his cell phone. Except for turning the combine around at the end of each row and the occasional moment when he has to brave the autumn chill to yank clogged ears out of the 30-ft. header, Mitchell's work in his cab more closely resembles a corporate employee's than that of a farmer. In fact, Mitchell calls his combine his "office on wheels."

Is this the future of American agriculture? This 2,500-acre centennial family farm in Geneseo Township, Iowa, is a hotbed of previously unmeshed technologies that have agricultural experts buzzing and farmers considering what might be. "Clay Mitchell is probably the most progressive farmer I've ever met," says Tony Grift, assistant professor in the agricultural and biological engineering department at the University of Illinois. While researchers have been studying for years how technologies such as wireless networks and the global-positioning system (GPS) could be suited to farm work, Grift says Mitchell, 31, is one of the first independent farmers to put them to use: "Clay is bringing it all together."

With a Harvard degree in biomedical engineering, Mitchell is no average farmer. After graduating in 1999, he worked and traveled for a year. He then took the unusual step of returning to the family farm where his father and great-uncle still work in the corn and soybean fields and his mom handles the bookkeeping. In the face of soaring costs and fluctuating crop prices, family farms nationwide have faced increasing difficulty, and many have shut down. Since his return, Mitchell has morphed his old farm into a technological experiment making the farm economically stronger and environmentally sound. "The technology has allowed much larger benefits," he says.

In 2000, Mitchell set out to increase fertilizer efficiency, not only because of rising costs but also because of the tremendous amount of runoff waste on his property. At that time, he learned that the GPS was being used in the precise cultivation of high-value fruits and vegetables, mostly in California, with great results in terms of yield. He asked California-based Trimble, a navigation technology company, to design for him a GPS that would work for the hulking machines of grain country. That fall, Mitchell installed the Trimble AgGPS AutoPilot guidance system on his tractor, making his farm the first in the Midwest to use auto-steering.

With GPS guidance, Mitchell can dig a small furrow in the land and then pinpoint to within an inch where each seed is placed. With such precision farming, he injects fertilizer right on top of the seeds without ever touching the wheel. The heavy machinery takes the exact path every time it passes through the rows, also allowing him to minimize the amount of land that is compacted a serious cropping problem. Since installing a GPS three years ago, the Mitchell Farm has seen a 30% to 40% drop in fertilizer costs and an 8% annual increase in yield over the rest of the county.

With time to spare in the cab, Mitchell decided to turn his tractor into a rolling office. In 2002, he established a wireless network for the farm using specialized 2.4-GHz NavCom Safari Network radios for high-speed Internet access. As a result, Mitchell can surf the Web for weather conditions and stock prices and download aerial images from anywhere on the farm. Because the network also provides a mechanism for remote machine monitoring and controlling, he can check on his grain bins to see how the product is drying and even make transfers from miles away. "Last fall, someone came with a load of grain and dropped it in the bin," father Wade says. "The timer for drying was set too short, but from the combine, I was able to change it." Without this system, the farm would have to hire someone to monitor the grain bins, and as Mitchell puts it, "labor is a tight commodity."