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Brett Blankenship (left), chairman of the domestic policy
committee of the National Association of Wheat Growers
and a farmer from Washtucna, and Wayne Hurst, an Idaho
farmer who is president of NAWG, were all fingers as they
communicated with the national office about the latest
farm bill developments at the recent Tri-State Convention.
Nicole Berg never knows when the camera
on her smart phone will be called into action.
Sometimes it is used to photograph a rainbow.
Other times, it’s used to document a breakdown
like this one.
younger generation of farmers who have embraced smart phones as
the high-powered pocket computers they are. Working a farm that
is both irrigated and dryland, the ability to control and monitor irrigation
pivots by phone has revolutionized the way they operate.
“Back in the day, we used to need an individual—or two or
three—on the farm 24 hours a day to physically go to the pump
and push a button to start the water and troubleshoot. Now, we can
turn on and off our pumps and pivots by our smart phones, we can
see on a map which circles are running and which ones aren’t and
if there are any in trouble,” she said.
Berg said the ability to have control in the palm of their hands
has saved the operation thousands of dollars and countless
headaches.
“It’s not just the extra help we don’t need to hire, it’s the extra
pickup we can do without. And it’s so fast. If something goes
wrong, there’s a phone alert, and we can transfer water to another
pivot or shut down immediately so we don’t have lines blow up
that will hurt the rest of the system,” she said.
At 57, Steve Hair, who farms near Walla Walla, is close to the
average age of the Eastern Washington wheat farmer demographic.
That, however, is about all that’s typical about him. Hair wowed
a team of Natural Resource Conservation Service personnel who
came to his farm by using a Global Position System application on
his phone to show them moving across the topography. The screen
also highlighted the individual tracks he was thinking about put-
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WHEAT LIFE JANUARY 2012 51