Dan Frieberg: Turning Data into Solutions
Editor’s note: The annual PrecisionAg Awards of Excellence were presented at the inaugural Tech Hub LIVE conference in Des Moines this week. Below we profile Dan Frieberg, winner of the Legacy Award.
As co-founder of Premier Crop Systems, Dan Frieberg’s passion turning data into actionable solutions for farmer-clients for more than two decades has earned him the 2021 PrecisionAg Award of Excellence Legacy award.
Dan Frieberg
In the early years of precision agriculture, Frieberg recognized the opportunity the budding field held for ag retailers and their customers. Ag Leader had, by then, launched the first yield monitor, and growers had begun grid sampling and making variable-rate applications of nutrients.
“I knew that putting all that data together would be potentially something powerful,” he tells PrecisionAg. In 1999, he, Kate Raun, and a likeminded group of retailers founded Premier Crop LLC, and over the years developed a software platform that provides analytics and variable rate prescriptions.
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That small start-up in Des Moines now serves close to 8 million acres, helping to improve farm profitability, sustainability, and efficiency.
“Dan is passionate about the grower. Everything he does in the eye of the grower operation and how he can make a grower more successful,” says his nominator, Renee Hansen. “He knows how difficult it is to raise a crop, to understand and use all the data, and he knows how complex agronomy is, yet accepts the challenge to combine it all together and benefit the grower.”
Frieberg’s career is diverse, spanning wholesale fertilizer sales, retail management, business consulting, and association work, having served as CEO of the Iowa Fertilizer and Chemical Association and later the Agribusiness Association of Iowa.
Premier Crop Systems’ Enhanced Learning Blocks are used to create randomized, replicated trials on a grower’s field. (For purpose of illustration only, image not to scale.)
After working with numerous companies and agronomists Frieberg, with his team patented what they call Enhanced Learning Blocks, which are trials within a field that are replicated and randomized in order to find the right rate within a field. This is all done through a prescription and technology so a farmer doesn’t have to stop and can continue to farm at their own pace while the technology does the work for them.
“We were introducing an experiment into parts of every field. It was a low-risk way for growers to test rates, and so they would risk one acre of anything: one acre of lower nitrogen, one acre of higher nutrients, one acre of higher population,” he says.
The beauty of Premier Crop’s approach was that it automated the process of being able to conduct trials in farm fields in scale. “Doing trials is just a way to inform a better future decision,” Frieberg says.
Using the data from the Enhanced Learning Block, Dan has gone further in his approach to scientific trials and created response curves that will inform a grower of the statistical confidence that the rate provides.
“Beyond this, Dan is still working to perfect the right-rate technology for fertilizer and seeding rates through more advanced spatial data in like areas of fields within Eco Regions. His primary goal is to help growers and advisors build a faster and better automated prescription using data science and machine learning that is optimal for each part of the field,” Hansen adds.
Frieberg credits his thousands of interactions with growers and advisers over the years with teaching him about the marriage of geography and agronomy. “I was fortunate to have Craig Struve, Garry Pellett, Tom Fullenkamp, John Hester, Clyde Martin, Ron Stutsman, Larry Thomsen, Tom Edwards, Ken Root, and the Tinsmans as early retailer and association mentors. Many of them would later become equity partners or customers of Premier Crop. Larry Wenthold, Chuck Wagner, Dave Hintzsche, Dan Frick, and Ron Farrell all joined that group in Premier Crop’s early years. All were committed to the concept of providing the best possible agronomic recommendations to their grower customers,” he says, adding:
“I’m not sure where it came from, but ‘people support what they help create’ was significant advice early on. I had it framed and put it on my office wall to remind me that even though I thought I knew what needed to be done, sometimes it’s good to slow down and collaborate – let others be part of creating the solution.”
His take on the future of farming? “It’s going to be variable-rate everything. The history of our industry so far, for a lot of people is that we have taken agronomic knowledge that was created in a university trial and applied it spatially in fields, but agronomic knowledge creation is going to move from being plot-driven to trial-driven in the farmers’ fields.
“A decade from now, we will look back on 2021 and say, ‘My goodness, we were really crude.’ A lot of people think we’ve arrived, but we’re going to look back and say we haven’t arrived at all – as an industry we were just barely getting started.”
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