Signal for the Noise
There's a week every August where my phone gets more interesting than usual, and it's not because of anything happening on my own farm.
This week the Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour runs from Ohio to Nebraska, walking fields through the heart of corn and soybean country. I look forward to it every year, especially on X. Opinions on the tour run the full range, from full support and promotion to the detractors who call it the "Trespass Tour."
I posted last night that I don't really care what the tour reports as yield. I'm watching for deviations from trend, and probably more important, the in-field observations, especially after the rains, winds, and derecho that hit Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio the past two weeks. There's also a real conversation to be had about the statistical validity of the sampling. That one's legitimate, but it's academic to me.
What I found more interesting than any of that was the discussion the tour kicked up. When I posted my thoughts, I got hit with "But Chip was wrong last year," "They just parrot USDA," and "They just want to screw the farmer," none of which engaged with anything I'd actually said. Just entrenched positions firing at each other.
Here's what gets lost in the potshots and the academic sampling debate: the tour offers real-time, in-field observations and shows its math against what they saw the past several years. That's the power of it. Not the absolute yield number, but the trend, the thing that tells us what kind of crop is actually cooking out there.
I'm sitting on the patio thinking about how this isn't really an ag problem. It's a business problem too. We latch onto the metric, the tracker, the touch-point count, and we miss the signal for the noise. I'm borrowing that phrase from the long-gone AgriTalk pairing of Chip Flory and Jim Wiesemeyer, but it applies well beyond the crop tour. We get so wrapped up in the minutiae that we lose the big picture sitting right in front of us.
Too often, in ag or in business or honestly in most of our disagreements, we skip straight to critiquing before we've actually sat with the information in front of us. Observe first. Assess second. Comment and plan after that. The nuance is almost always in the data we jumped past on our way to being right.