Medius Ag Heads to the Middle East for AgraME
Whether it is potatoes in the Pacific Northwest or cotton in Egypt, agriculture production can be boiled down to a simple goal: To produce a crop with the greatest yield and best quality at the lowest cost. It sounds straightforward until you factor in the variables. Everything from the cost of equipment fuel to precipitation–either too much or not enough–to pest and disease pressures impact a farmer’s ability to be profitable and successful. Consider global geopolitics and other marketplace uncertainties, and it is a wonder that anyone would want to be a farmer. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why we’ve seen such a drastic movement of people away from the farm, at least in the United States. Since the end of World War II in 1945, the U.S. population working in agriculture has fallen from 12 percent to less than two percent. Regardless of measure, farming is not for the faint of heart or weak of spirit.
For those who continue in farming and wish to remain profitable, investments in modernized resources isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. We all know about tractors, but what about variety selection? Matching the right seed to the right environment is the most sustainable thing you can do–it is a critical choice and not one to be taken lightly. Doesn’t it make sense to invest in data that will paint a more complete variety selection picture?
At Medius Ag, we don’t pretend to be the solution for everything. Instead, we focus on what we can do to help agricultural producers, researchers, and customers in their daily business. To us, that means making available data useful to your operations so that you can make the best possible decision when it needs to be made and to do so quickly, confidently, and efficiently. Most of us don’t want to spend our day sifting through spreadsheets, yet that is where we oftentimes find ourselves when seeking to connect the proverbial dots. Study after study has concluded that the time wasted by employees searching for and then preparing data for use is a huge drag on time and money, as if those two things are different. Perhaps the most famous of these reports came from IBM, which in 2016 estimated that the annual cost of bad data was US$3.1 trillion, in the United States alone.
We wrote about this enormous “data quality tax” in a blog post back in May 2020 and noted that the shocking scale of the problem represented more than 16 percent of the entire U.S. economy and was larger than all but four economies across the globe: China, Japan, and Germany, besides the U.S. We also noted that it was three times larger than the U.S. agricultural economy and that researchers believe the negative impacts of bad data cut across all industries. In other words, it’s a big problem for everyone, even those of us in agriculture. None of us is immune to the headaches, additional work, and sub-optimal decision-making that comes with bad or inaccessible data.
At Medius, we like to say that we make data useful, which means it needs to be 1. Accurate, 2. Accessible, and 3. Actionable. If any of those three elements are lacking, then you’ll be at a disadvantage. That’s where our flagship variety data management and analytics platform comes in. Medius.Re standardizes your variety trial data securely so that when you need it, you not only have it, but have it in the right format. In other words, you can customize your data analysis to give you the answer you need, when you need it.
Growers, researchers, and other agricultural stakeholders throughout the world need better data. This is why we are excited to travel to the United Arab Emirates to exhibit at the AgraME show next week in Dubai on October 9-10. The conference and trade show are expected to bring together more than 5,000 agricultural leaders and visionaries from throughout and beyond the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) Region. Last year, more than 4,400 attendees from over 100 countries attended AgraME.
We believe that our goal of promoting sustainable agricultural production through wise decision making in variety selection is perfectly aligned with AgraME’s goal of promoting food security and independence in the MENA region and beyond. Agricultural producers, researchers, and consumers everywhere benefit from smart production decisions that can only happen when decision makers have useful data to drive those decisions.
Brad Halladay - Medius Ag Founder
Medius has public and private clients in more than 20 states in the U.S. and expanded to six countries following a successful exhibition at the World Potato Congress in Dublin, Ireland, last year. “Since we got our start in potatoes in the United States in 2015, it only made sense that the potato industry would be our first international test, which we are happy to have passed,” added Ryan Krabill, Director of Business Development. “We are optimistic that agricultural producers in other parts of the world and particularly the MENA region will also be receptive to our overall service offerings that deliver improved data usefulness.” Besides potatoes, Medius Ag helps manage variety trial data for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, peanuts (groundnuts), sorghum, oats, barley, triticale, and several other crops, including forage blends.
If you are planning to attend AgraME next week, please book a meeting with us here. Even if you are just curious about what we do, please come see us in stand H3-A009. If you will not be attending, we’d still love to hear from you. If you are interested in seeing how Medius can make your data more useful and powerful, send us a note at info@mediusag.com. Or, simply reach out to us on one of our social media channels or give us a follow. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Talk with you soon!