Stotz Equipment precision data solutions manager Justin Childears heads up the dealership’s 3-person data analytics team, helping customers across the 8-state footprint make sense of their data and use it to make improvements in their operations.   

“Justin and his team focus on creating analytical reports to help our customers utilize their data to become more efficient,” precision department manager Layne Richins says. “One of the things we’ve been doing for a long time is benchmarking and showing customers where they rank against their peers.”

Stotz offers a variety of data analytics packages that can be purchased by customers. Some customers prefer extensive packages, “where we do basically everything for them,” Richins says, and others opt for more basic weekly or monthly reports.

“We summarize the data, so they don’t have to spend all that time in front of their computer trying to wrangle everything together,” he adds. “We want to find those wins and opportunities for them to save some money or find a better product. That can range from fleet optimization, fleet sizing and different operational efficiencies.”

The data analytics team also helps customers set up agronomic trials and guide them on how to leverage on-farm data through various John Deere software tools they have access to. But the challenge is their customers don’t fit the typical corn-soybean mold that most available programs are geared toward. 

“We’re working on standardizing the process. It’s fairly easy when it comes to corn and soybeans because Deere spends so much time on it, but most of our customers don’t grow corn and soybeans,” Richins says. “Especially in Idaho, for example, where it’s all sugar beets, potatoes and small grains. It’s a challenge trying to figure out how we use the data and what matters to our customers vs. a traditional row-crop farmer. 

“Obviously AI is in a lot of those spaces,” Richins adds, “and one of the things that we’ve been working on is just trying to figure out how we can safely connect different data sources to AI so that we can have AI do a lot of analytics for us.”

To learn more about how Stotz Equipment does business and how they utilize AI technology, read Noah Newman’s article “24-Store Deere Dealer Goes All in on AI & Data Analytics” featured in the June 2026 issue of Farm Equipment.