2020 Spring Farm Outlook

2020 Logan County Farm Outlook LINCOLN DAILY NEWS March 19, 2020 Page 7 By Nila Smith I n the spring of 2010, Lincoln Daily News published its first Spring Farm Outlook Magazine. In that first edition, LDN included an interview with David Irwin, Vice-president and Farm Manager for the State Bank of Lincoln. Now a decade later, LDN went back to talk with Irwin about what has changed and what has stayed the same in the agricultural industry. Irwin has been involved with farming his entire life, growing up on the farm and working alongside family members to raise crops, he has insight from being a farmer perspective as well as being a lender. As a farm manager for SBL, he also has one-on- one contact with farm tenants and is involved in the decision making process for the SBL acreage. Now with SBL for 17 years, Irwin previously worked for a time for local farm equipment dealer Central Illinois Ag. Drawing from all that experience, Irwin can identify one of the biggest changes in the farming industry: the use of technology. In 2003, while working at CIA, the electronic yield monitor installed in combines was the big innovation. Though it would be considered clunky compared to today’s technology, the yield monitor was a big deal in 2003. It gave producers on the fly insight as to how well a particular field was doing. If the farmer had his information all written down, he could identify what field he was in, what variety of corn he had planted and could figure out what parts of the field were yielding better than others. Local banker Dave Irwin observes a decade of change Continue 4