For six generations, Ben Riensche's family has tended corn and soybeans outside Jesup, a town of 2,500 on the windswept plains of eastern Iowa. But today he's harvesting a valuable new crop from his 12,000 acres: information. "The future is simply data analytics and tech," says Riensche, who still has his grandfather's handwritten notebooks containing everything from the bushels of corn he brought in to the number of eggs the chickens laid. In the half-dozen years since he signed up for a data analysis service from Climate Corp., a unit of Bayer AG, Riensche has reduced the seed he uses by 6 percent and the fertilizer by 11 percent while growing his best crops ever. "Before, there was no secret sauce other than just keeping notes and making field observations," he says. "Now we have all these digital tools."
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