First ‘Open Mic’ explores on-farm data-enabled decision making
Last week saw the first of our Farm491 ‘Open Mic’ lunchtime discussions, designed to bring the business and academic community together around a topic of interest, to form a better understanding of both the business and research opportunities.
This month the topic of on-farm data-enabled decision making was explored, with discussion particularly centring around whether on-farm data is a help or hinderance to decision making.
We were delighted to welcome Toby Kellie, agronomist at Hutchinsons, who is closely affiliated with the RAU Farms and strong exponent of data-driven decision making, as our subject-expert facilitator. Toby introduced the topic, exploring the Omnia data platform as an example of digital farming technology, before opening the floor for discussion.
The Discussion
The Omnia data platform is one of several digital platforms that allow farmers to ‘overlay’ data layers to enable more impactful management decisions. Its ability to overlay several years’ worth of data to help identify trends, which can further support analysis, is particularly interesting, giving it the potential to move beyond a management tool into a more predictive decision-making assistant.
As part of the discussion, attendees first raised the challenges of adopting digital farming platforms into everyday use on the farm. Indeed, the time and cost implication of employing a digital platform was quickly identified as a barrier, though it was recognised an initial time and cost outlay could save further time and expense in the long term. However, it was still felt that the ‘benefit realisation’ or return on investment was hard to predict, resulting in reluctance to embrace the change.
The topic of data, how to gather it, store it, secure it, and ensure its completeness, consistency and reliability were then covered in some depth, along with questions surrounding how much data is required for establishing reliability.
Perceived issues around interoperability were seen as another blockage to adoption, and concerns around transparency and trust in the platforms were touched upon. Potential misunderstandings between farmers, providers and politicians, which is seen to be growing, has resulted in a reluctance to adopt some technologies, and this was linked in part to a skills and knowledge gap that fuels suspicion and reluctance.
The practicalities of the physical security of devices were also mentioned, with further discussion on whether farmers should be forced to use data platforms in the future and how this would be incentivised. Arguably, in many ways, this situation already exists as it is not possible to process many daily or funding and planning tasks without using a digital platform. Do we risk overdependence? And what about issues of 5G connectivity and bandwidth?
The need for a culture change was raised, which led to an interesting comment that the evolution of technology was happening faster than the change in culture to adopt it. The implication is that these new platforms are being driven by technologists, not users.
The discussion then turned to the business and research opportunities relating to digital platforms.
Insights
Those in attendance raised the following points regarding the challenges to enabling on-farm data-enabled decision making:
- Time and costs involved to set up and learn how to use digital platforms
- Culture change – many farmers are set in their ways and reluctant to change
- Data problems – affecting gathering and securing data, its uniformity, reliability, consistency and precision
- Trust and transparency between farmers, providers and politicians, leading to reluctance and misunderstanding in take up and usage
- Skills gap – the complexity of platforms and very little available training, compounding the reluctance to change and cybersecurity concerns
- Benefits realisation (return on investment), particularly in the current economic and political climate
- Interoperability – sensors and platforms not ‘talking’ to each other, processing power, and additional workload generated by monitoring and checking platforms
- Market trends and other changes, creating greater risk and investment aversion
- Physical security of equipment and 5G and bandwidth requirements
- Overload of data – establishing what is critical information and how much data is required over how long a period
- Irrelevant data – whether the data is useful to farmers, meet their needs and aid decision making
- Fear of overdependence on technology – farmers want to still be able to do it ‘their way’
The business and research opportunities identified by attendees were:
- Collaboration across sectors and learning from others (for example energy supplier or online banking platforms)
- Forums to get people to work together
- Training provision
- Data management, data access provision and data security
- Provision of analysis and reports, particularly profitability options
- Standard writing and ISO standardisation
- Artificial Intelligence to support profitability and/or biodiversity targets
- Functionality and ergonomics of applications and tools
- Barrier analysis – investigation of the barriers to new industries and/or users
- Interoperability across platforms and providers – the need for operating system standardisation
- Software suppliers – writing tools to exploit existing data to solve problems farmers have
- Field-level data informing national-level decision making – holistic land usage data combining together to provide national-level information
- Incentivisation of adoption of digital platforms
Our next ‘Open Mic’
Our ‘Open Mic’ lunchtime discussion series will continue, taking place on the second Wednesday of every month, with a light sandwich lunch provided.
Our next ‘Open Mic’ will be on Wednesday 14 May, 12.10 pm – 12.50 pm, at the Alliston Centre, GL7 6JR.
The topic of discussion will be Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) -can both genuinely be employed in practical farming, or is it all counterfeit?
Save the date and check back on our What’s On page soon to register.