John Deere recently acquired Harvest Profit, a Fargo, N.D.,-based farm profitability software business.
“We’re passionate about building the best tools that we can, and John Deere’s brand is arguably the top brand in agriculture, and so it is just going to allow us to get our tools in front of their audience which is millions of customers around the world,” said Nick Horob, Harvest Profit founder.
Harvest Profit was created to help farmers and producers with the numbers side of things, an aspect of farming that some farmers and producers tend to put on the backburner due to the many other tasks that must be completed to run a successful farm.
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“I did a lot of work in spreadsheets, and spreadsheets are great tools. What I saw happen was farmers would tend to do a fair number of spreadsheet based work in the winter, but then those spreadsheets would gather dust until the next winter. So, in between there, in the growing season, those decisions need to be made. I made Harvest Profit with the aim to make it just a little bit easier to stay on top of those numbers throughout the entire year,” Horob said.
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With over 700 customers using the software to date and customers in 27 states and four provinces, the software has proven itself to be a helpful tool for producers.
“At Harvest Profit we give our customers more visibility into the numbers side of the farm. Specifically we help them track their cost of production, their profitability, their grain marketing and then we also go down to the field level. So, we do not just look at farm profitability but what fields are making me money and which are costing me money,” Horob said.
Though John Deere has acquired Harvest Profit, the software itself will see minimal changes and remain its own entity.
“Harvest Profit is going to remain a separate product and really not much is going to change besides the fact that we can use Deere’s resources to help make our product better,” Horob said.
The Harvest Profit team is also excited to utilize John Deere’s resources to help better their product.
“We can’t be experts on everything, so we will be able to leverage the expertise that John Deere has across all of their different business lines of technologies. At the end of the day we have had five people working on this product, so the thought of having more resources and more expertise is quite appealing as we look to try to take on bigger projects,” Horob said.
