The US farming industry is huge...$200 Billion...and more than 50% of the market is from massive large-scale farms. Farms are notably driven by efficiency, but there are changes taking place now due to wireless, GPS, and data-everywhere that are just mind-numbing.
Precision Agriculture is a term that has been around for a while, but it is taking on new meaning today in light of some incredible technologies. Global Positioning Satellite devices have been driven into farm equipment. The simple process of tilling the land (or fertilizing or seeding) requires tractors to go back-and-forth in very straight lines. Any deviation and there is measurable waste…from either over-tilling/fertilizing or missing sections…which could be as high as 10 to 20%. John Deere has a new line of tractors that are GPS controlled…the tractor steers itself and is able to keep perfect tracks. Not only does this eliminate field use waste, it significantly increases the operator’s efficiency and comfort, plus extends the work day to 24 hours. This is a pure example of technology. Driving some focused benefit. Very cool and interesting, but essentially an incremental change.
Somewhat similar, there are now tractors and harvesters that have built-in measuring sensors. These sensors can measure the volume of grain AS it is being harvested. They can measure the moisture content and some basic chemical or physical analysis. With every swath or chew of these machines, data is immediately available. Just more data…unless it is available to higher sources. So, today, many large farms have WiFi connections back their ops center so that this sort of data can be stored and converted into information and analyzed.
Step 3 is bringing it all together. Precision Agriculture is a new style of farming that takes into account as much information as possible to allow a per-square-meter approach to farming. Every square meter of a farm behaves differently due to local soil conditions, differences in irrigation, subtle shallow land ‘wells’ that change the heat-exchange equations, and so forth. Historically, farmers had to universally apply pesticides or fertilizers or seeding…over a broad area. In the new world, they want to deploy the exact right amount per square-meter based on knowledge of that exact section of the land. With GPS to know locations and soil tasters and harvesters broadcasting information back to the ops center, they can now factor all of that information together (along with weather forecast and climate databases and so forth) and turn all that back to the equipment in the field. In a somewhat bizaar twist, even on the commodity futures floor, pricing can not be set by real time access not just to farm inventory, but related to the actual amount of grain spewing off a harvester and its quality level. This is what Inescapable Data is all about…its about the fusing of many different data sources together…both real-time and historical data…from devices we would not commonly think of as “data rich”.
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