This column appears in the August 2021 issue of Potato Grower.
IT is the acronym for “information technology.” Think about the meaning of these two words, taking “information” first: Information is fact about something. For guidance, everyone knows that having access to fact supersedes not having access to fact. Compare a decision-making process flush with fact to one absent fact. Consider a doctor deciding whether to remove a patient’s brain tumor not knowing the facts of the tumor’s exact location, whether it is benign, or whether it is growing. Each area of the brain is assigned different duties, and these areas can be tiny. There is a big difference in risk between removing a tumor near the optic nerve compared to removing a tumor next to the area that monitors fingertip sensation.
What about “technology”? Let’s examine this using the same brain tumor example: Before MRI and magnification technology, surgeons depended upon the human eye looking through a magnifying glass attached to the surgeon’s eyeglasses to guide a metal scalpel into the brain, where the tumor site had been estimated by clumsy and dangerous X-ray. Today, a tiny camera attached to an instrument that looks like a flexible ice pick follows an exactly mapped MRI course through gray matter loops, magnified 100 times on a large-screen monitor, to the tumor site, and all this so that a laser scalpel next to the camera can precisely excise the tumor. Imagine the difference technology makes here, especially if you are the patient!
Everyone in the produce business knows how Walmart utilizes information technology to reduce costs in transportation, distribution and inventory management. Walmart would not be Walmart otherwise, and neither would practically any other business venture today be as effectively profitable without information technology.
A few years back, the Colorado Potato Administration Committee (CPAC) collaborated with Faceforward Software, a Yakima, Wash.-based software company, to develop an IT system to assist their packer/shippers in critically managing their crop’s value as they moved it into the market. Since then, Faceforward’s software engineers have continued refining their technology, improving its analytic potential, hookup patches, and display design while lowering user cost. Imagine a grower glancing at his iPhone screen and learning in an instant what a 100-pound market basket of regional fresh potatoes are selling for and what the average price per 100-pound market basket has been since the season began. Imagine a packer/shipper/sales group knowing by SKU as well as by the weighted average price per hundredweight (WAP/100#) how their operation’s sales figures compare to those of their region’s average and to other regions’ averages and using that information to protect the producer.
The financial prowess of informed regions today—even though some of the information comes from AMS’s delayed secondhand system—so far exceeds regions that do not exchange market information that the comparison is stark, almost unimaginable. A potato sales manager should not be willing to operate in a market information vacuum. How long would one operating in such a vacuum last at Walmart or anyplace else where making a profit matters? A potato producer can no more afford an informationally blindfolded organization selling his crop than a brain tumor patient can afford a blindfolded neurosurgeon.