Growers who sell to the fresh market know better than anyone that color matters: accurate classification is the key to quality assurance and integral to success in commercial-scale produce markets. Apart from filtering out obvious disease, color is a primary classifier for selling fruit in graded classes. Contemporary tech solutions compliment the human sorting touch, while speeding up the processing element of harvest. Having the right tools in your QA supply toolkit improves your competitive advantage in the highly time-sensitive world of perishable goods.

This article is the second installment of our ongoing security series.

Having all your important tasks and stats held in a service provider’s cloud storage is now normal. As we covered in our first data security post, this means good data security hygiene is a collective effort, led by managers that organize team members’ tool access mindfully. Software as a Service, or SaaS, has reframed software as a licensed subscription that is accessible online rather than relying on local storage of the tools and user data. Organized by user permissions, access to information and its controls can be precisely managed.

Nearly half of cropland farms are owner-operated in the U.S. Every farm operation has a change in ownership eventually: when that time comes, how will things take shape? Answering this question is more challenging when there isn’t a younger farmer in the family in line to be a successor. Land ownership legislation (and specifically how it relates to farmland) varies by region, with different plans and desires informing aging growers in their plan of action.

From the Green Revolution to present, agricultural innovations have allowed for the rapid evolution of food production internationally. Along with innovation comes new terminology to articulate what’s taking place along the way. There’s precision agriculture, which has denoted the last few decades of tech’s integrations with farming. And then there’s more recent phrases like smart farming and digital farming. How do these terms fit together, and which apply to your operation practices?