Wade Wilson: A Selfless Commitment to Improve the Practice of Farming
Illinois farmer Wade Wilson has earned the 2021 Farmer Award from the PrecisionAg Awards of Excellence program, sponsored by the PrecisionAg Alliance.
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 Wade Wilson, winner of the Farmer Award.
Illinois farmer Wade Wilson’s willingness to put technologies and systems to the test on his land for more than 25 years has provided the industry with a wealth of knowledge, and earned him the 2021 Farmer Award from the PrecisionAg Awards of Excellence program, sponsored by the PrecisionAg Alliance.
Wade Wilson
Wade Wilson is a farmer, and he is the real deal. From the time of his central Illinois grain farm’s first soil grid sampling in 1995 and the installation of the farm’s first yield monitor in 2001, Wilson has been involved in myriad proof of concepts and early testing/adoption of technology from a wide range of companies – all with the chief goal of helping others.
“His patient willingness to be the test bed and early adopter has benefited those companies, and more importantly all farmers by way of his involvement,” says his nominator, Ernie Chappell, EFC Systems President and Founder, adding, “He is someone we can all be proud of, and more importantly thankful for his contribution. We’re all standing one the shoulders of Wade.”
MORE BY JACKIE PUCCI
Michael Ott: Taking Drone Application from the Drawing Board to the Field
Wade’s son, Jeremy, who took over the family farm operation in 2019 upon his father’s retirement, tells PrecisionAg that ironically, his dad has never been the least bit tech-savvy himself. That never mattered.
What drove him and continues to drive him, he says, is “Dad’s deep burning desire to help somebody else. ‘If my five to 10 minutes can help you guys figure out something else in the technology space that makes other people’s lives easier, I’m all in,’” he says of his dad’s mindset. He is not going to peruse the internet looking for his next field trial or project. “You take it to him, and he gets it: ‘I’ll help you do that, let’s do it.’ That’s what is unique about him.”
“Does he want to improve the profitability of his farm? Absolutely. But just as critically important, it’s about what could we do to move the industry forward and what can we do to make lives easier.”
In the late ‘90s, for example, Wade sought to gain a better understanding of hybrid and variety performance. He collected Veris data, looking for correlations between yield and multiple variables like soil type, hybrid, variety, and fertility. In 2012, advanced planter controls helped what the younger Wilson describes as the next real leap in the farm’s precision ag journey. Next came their partnership in 2014 with Dr. Joe Tevis, to push real-time yield data calibration and begin working to tie loads back to actual as-harvested data, Jeremy says.
“The fruits of that labor have not completely been realized yet, but we are making great strides in moving to that point,” says Jeremy, who is also Senior Vice President of Field Data Solutions for EFC Systems and Past Chairman for AgGateway. It was that work on real-time yield calibration and proof-of-concept of grain traceability with AgGateway, where his dad’s patience and willingness to learn perhaps shone brightest, Jeremy recalls.
“During that fall of 2014, the combine stopped just so we could manually log data, weigh loads, and do things I never believed my father would endure. I’m here to tell you that was just painful,” he laughs.
Jeremy is intent on continuing his dad’s work: the farm has added a few more field computers; everything that happens in the field is logged, ready to populate the next tool or widget that comes along. “He didn’t know what decision he was going to make with the data today, but if he didn’t get it recorded he would never had chance to get it again,” Jeremy says.
Further, his dad has always emphasized the importance of quality data to finding out not only what works, but what doesn’t work: “It’s one thing to go out and record everything you do. His passion of getting data right and having quality data was just as critical as helping build the next new thing.”
As Don Bierman, CEO, Crop IMS explains it, over Wade’s career, he has planted many seeds and watched the fruit of his labor germinate, grow, and mature into harvestable crops. What makes him unique, though, is the “seeds” he has planted of another type altogether.
“It is Wade’s willingness – blind willingness many times – to offer his operation, his data, and his feedback from the ‘planting’ of all manner of technologies on his farm that is this other way Wade Wilson is a farmer. He knew good things would come from this and that this was a way for him to contribute something that would benefit producers everywhere,” Bierman says. “This is what we celebrate today: his selfless commitment to improving the profitability of farming.”
Subscribe Today For
