Mitch Konen
Farm Works Consulting & Sales

This atricle is a reprint from the Choteau Acantha from Choteau, Montana and was written by Melody Martinsen. Website: www.choteauacantha.com

Longtime Fairfield farmer and rancher Mitch Konen is now offering consulting and sales services for a software system specifically designed for farm and ranch management.

Konen operates Farm Works Software Consulting and Sales from his rural home at 340 Fifth Lane N.E., where he lives with his wife, Susie and their three young children, Jacob, James and Amelia.

Mitch was born in Choteau and raised at Fairfield, where he has spent most of his life on the farm. He graduated from Fairfield High School in 1978 and attended Montana State University, earning a bachelor's degree in agriculture business and economics in 1986.

After working on farms and in welding and heavy equipment jobs, Konen returned to the Fairfield farm in 1989 and started farming and ranching in earnest with his father, Roy Konen. He discovered that he is allergic to cattle and couldn't help with the calving part of the farm operation so he began to look for other sources of income that he could work into the ranch operation and that would provide additional income, especially during the winter.

After his father passed the farm records maintenance duties to him, he became interested in finding a way to simply record-keeping and get more information out of those records. He turned to computers and soon embraced computer-assisted technology that is changing how farmers plant, fertilize and harvest their crops. "The new machinery these days are being equipped with all the latest technologies, yield monitors, guidance, auto steer, variable rate," Konen says. "I felt like it was the next step to get into."

In 1996 he discovered Farm Works Software, the product of CTN Data Service Inc. of Hamilton, Ind. CTN Data Service is a company that writes programs for elevators and grain handling facilities. "With all of the accountability issues with regards to the public and the environment, good record keeping is a must and also a necessity for today's producer," Konen said. "Chemical and fertilizer usage and application rates have to be recorded and recalled at a moments notice." Konen says this program can help producers to do that. "Two years ago I myself was audited by the state Department of Environmental Quality for records of restricted-use pesticides," he said. "It was nothing more than bringing up a chemical use record sheet from the computer program and handing it to the auditor, less than five minutes."

With eight years of experience using the Farm Works programs, Konen said he has "a pretty good knowledge base to share with others who would like to use the software and need help to understand how it all works." Farm Works training classes and computer short courses at the College of Technology in Great Falls have also added to his knowledge base, Farm Works Software is a complete line of farm management tools. Eight packages offer the producer an integrated approach to farm and ranch management: Farm Trac+, Farm Trac Mate, Farm Fund$, Farm Stock, Farm Site, Farm Site Mate, Guide Mate, and now Farm Stock Mate. Each package is designed to work together to provide different services such as basic field mapping, herbicide and fertilizer applications, yield data, cost analysis, farm accounting, and genealogical and livestock health records.

"All of these packages interact with each other and are linked together by your fields within your project." Konen said. Profits and losses, expenses and revenues can be displayed on an acre by acre basis in enterprise statements, he said. Livestock enterprise statements can display individuals or groups, revealing their related costs and revenues. Soil maps, soil tests can all be mapped and overlaid with yield maps to zone fields in order to write prescriptions for variable rate applications of fertilizer. The same principle can also be applied to weed problem areas in fields, thus allowing farmers to only apply the chemical they need in the site-specific areas instead of blanket-spraying the whole field, thus reducing farm chemical costs, he said. "The options that these programs provide are endless and expanding, from the very basic information to the extreme in site specific management. Farm Works has the module for your needs," he said.

Konen is part of Farm Works customer service department which provides year-round technical support. "Besides talking to an actual person on the other end of the phone when needing assistance, they also provide a discussion group on their Web site, www.farmworks.com, where one can browse other questions and usually find a similar question along with an answer," he said. Posting a question to this web site is a free service while there are several scales of phone support. "I am providing an extension of this support with an 'on the farm' approach to consulting, as well as demonstrations and sales of the programs," he said.

Konen's goals for his business are to "provide a local and personal service to the area farmers and ranchers with Farm Works products, and those who are interested in acquiring some of the product."

To reach Konen so you can find out more about Farm Works, call him at home at 406-467-3151 or on his cell phone at 590-2649.

E-mail Mitch: peaveyt@3rivers.net