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Farmers Coop Society
For farmers, getting the right price for their crops can be the difference between a profitable harvest and a rotten one. In fact, just a one-cent mistake could result in up to USD 10,000 in losses.
Farmers Cooperative Society aims to make the buying and selling process easier for farmers with products and services such as consulting and crop storage facilities. Even though the co-op is a 24x7 operation, its systems would shut down every night for two to three hours to complete backups. Not only did the co-op need to manually track prices during this downtime, but employees couldn’t edit orders or access time systems—often causing unnecessary support calls.
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Farmers Cooperative Society has been working with IBM for nearly 20 years, using IBM® Power® servers as an essential part of its business. This relationship—as well as the scale, performance and support of these servers—is why the co-op turned to IBM to solve its downtime challenges.
Together, IBM and the co-op found the solution in the IBM PowerHA® Full System FlashCopy® (FSFC) offering. It enabled the co-op to stay online during the entire backup process no matter what time a backup is performed. This solution also increased the frequency of backups from once per night to three times a day—keeping farmers connected to the market and helping to prevent data loss.
The new FSFC solution IBM implemented together with Farmers Cooperative Society is yielding a lot more than uptime. The frequent backups allow the co-op to recover more of its data in case it’s ever lost or deleted. And by clearing out those downtime support calls, total support call volume fell by 50%—giving the team more time for other priorities.
In fact, the co-op can now perform tests during the day without impacting the live systems. So Farmers Cooperative Society can continue to improve how it serves those who feed the world.
Headquartered in Sioux Center, Iowa, Farmers Cooperative Society (link resides outside of ibm.com) offers farmers a range of agricultural growing and marketing products and services, including crop-storage facilities and business consulting. This farmer-owned co-op also runs a feedlot that helps members buy and care for feeder cattle as well as a member-only store that sells hardware, lawn-care products, lumber, paint and more.
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Produced in the United States of America. September 2023.
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