“I have no problem endorsing realm five because they get it.”– Tom Haren, CEO, AGPROfessionals
AGPROfessionals is a full-service agricultural development company providing services for the agriculture industry, headquartered in Greeley, Colorado. Among the many services they provide to customers is monitoring and reporting for on-site environmental compliance. From dairy operations and cattle feedlots to hog and poultry confinement, this is a tedious, messy, and time-consuming job. No one likes it but everyone has to do it.
According to Tom Haren, CEO of AGPROfessionals, “There’s nothing more expensive for us than to put a staff person in a vehicle and drive them around the countryside to gather data.” He adds, “We’ve been for 21 years manually going site to site with forms and notebooks and clipboards and tape measures, going to dairies and feedlots and gathering all this data manually. It’s cumbersome and it’s expensive.”
But it’s necessary. A web of local, state, and federal regulations mandate strict recordkeeping and reporting of wastewater inputs and outputs, requiring measurement of not only lagoon levels but also rainfall and irrigation. All of the wastewater generated on site, where it goes, how it’s stored, how much is stored, when it gets moved, where does it get moved to – all has to be accounted for.
Finding an answer bedeviled AGPROfessionals for more than 15 years. The effort to find a remote monitoring solution kept running into dead ends. As Tom puts it, “We needed a device that could measure the level of water and there’s tons of devices out there, but we needed something that was simple and robust, and could survive one of the worst environments you ever want to put electronics in. I’ve had municipal wastewater engineers and salespeople telling me that they could solve my problem.”
The non-ag people got a harsh dose of reality, according to Tom.
“After months of trying, they leave agriculture screaming with their hair on fire and their wallets a lot lighter because they couldn’t solve the problem. The strength of the waste, the volume, the concentration, the corrosivity of everything involved in agriculture.”
AGPROfessionals and RealmFive have been working together for about four years, pioneering a product that met the rigors of AGPROfessionals’ customer environments. Tom sings the praises of RealmFive, saying, “They’ve hit the perfect sweet spot between scientific level instrumentation and consumer instrumentation that’s tailored for agriculture.”
AGPROfessionals uses RealmFive Float lagoon monitors to measure water levels and weather stations to track precipitation, along with pump monitors. Without even leaving the office, Tom and his team can keep up to date on their customers’ operations. “If we notice the lagoons going down and it’s not raining, and you can see that pumps are on. We know that that water is going somewhere, and we can look at what pivots are operating and have a good idea of where it’s going without even talking to the farmer.”
Compliance monitoring is a big part of AGPROfessionals’ plans for the future. Tom says, “We’ve had challenges expanding the program because we’re limited geographically, by how far we can send somebody economically. So, this is key to our business model to open up our compliance services geographically.”
When asked what about AGPROfessionals’ experience with RealmFive, Tom summed it up succinctly: “They’ve been very responsive. we’ve not had a single major issue.”
“They just know how to talk to ag people. They get it.”
