Big Data -- the new trend of agriculture

    Data collection, monitoring and evaluation is a new trend of technology in agriculture. As Lance Donny, the founder of Onfarm, a agricultural system that managing farming data, said, big data in agriculture could be called Ag 3.0 era. Compare to Ag 1.0, the pre-industrial subsistence farming, and Ag 2.0, industrial farming, Ag 3.0 would be beneficial to farmers in many ways. 

    Sensors could collect data from the field, for example, testing the seed in different varieties of climate, soil condition and on different fields. The sensors could diagnose the symptom of crops to prevent epidemic. collecting these data would create a database for farmers so that they could farm more strategically rather than rely on intuition.

Monitors and screens inside the tractor

    However, collecting data is not enough. The article "Seed by seed, acre by acre, big data is taking over the farm" introduced the phenomenon that tractors using GPS systems can drive themselves and sow with accuracy of less than an inch error. There are tons of data coming from thousands of tractors, without data analysis, it would be hard for farmers to extract useful information for the tremendous amount of data. 

    Big data company then comes and provide solution for this problem. They developed software or systems that store and evaluate these data. The data analysis would tell farmers how effective is the fertilizer, how much fertilizer and water they need, suggestions improving hybrids. These all make this low margin industry more profitable and predictable.

      Also some of the companies saw the potential of integrating the data together to provide faster and more effective information to farmers. Since more and more farmers are adopting new technology and hardware, they came to a point to stop adopting new technology when they found that data are coming from different sources and ends up in different platform, resulted that the frustration since farmers could not consume these information. The unorganized data could not help farmers with better decision.

  OnFarm is one of the startups creating the networks among the industry. They are trying to connect the major players by building data connectors and create a platform for farmers and made the hardware interconnected. Farmers can customized the input and output of the data and eventually get what they want to make decisions.

   

 

 

Farmers can customize their dashboard

    But there's also limitation for this industry. Data integrity and security could be a issue that farmers worry about. They may not want to share their data with others or worry about how the big data firms would use their data. The industry is still under development and more farmers may adopt the big data methodology as it develops.