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Agricultural Data Management: Looking to the Cloud for more than Just Tomorrow's Weather
Agriculture is beginning to adopt data management as farmers begin to look to the cloud for more than just tomorrow’s weather. Farm businesses are increasingly capturing more data about what’s happening in their fields and analyzing it to achieve greater accuracy and efficiencies.
Farmers are beginning to collect data like soil type, location, inputs applied, growing conditions, irrigation water used and weather. In the near future it won’t be unusual to be able to collect that kind of information on a per-plant basis. Collecting detailed information like that about all plants within an acre of land adds up to about 28 megabytes of data. Data management at the individual plant level is part of a new trend called precision farming.
Dr. John Fulton, precision farming specialist and Auburn University associate professor of biosystems engineering, said that “getting data off the machine automatically is the number one barrier that farmers say is keeping them from moving forward in data management… Getting it down to where it’s organized, where I can view it, simply bring it up when I’m on the road. The key to success is being able to visualize the data.” But the barriers to of being able to capture and transmit data are falling.
Lanny Faleide, president of Agri ImaGIS Technologies, said that “back in the mid-90s, we were talking about beaming crop information from satellites down to the user out in the field. But the biggest limitation at the time was that every user would need to buy a special device to receive the data. Now, just about every farmer has a device. They have a mobile phone… The future’s bright for data interconnecting with everything on the farm. We’re talking with equipment manufacturers to allow us to beam this data directly to a tractor’s virtual terminal so farmers can more easily use the data for prescription maps and other applications.”
Kathy Michael, product manager at the John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group, said that “More of our customers are collecting data from machinery operating in the field. They analyze the data to improve overall operations and share the data with trusted advisors to help make better decisions… Producers want a user-friendly system to take advantage of the new data technology. They want their data wherever they are and with more portability… If data is easier to collect and manage, they will be more likely to use the information to improve overall operational efficiency, thus adding more productivity and profitability to their bottom line.”
