By Joe Dales, Farms.com
John Deere is a leader in developing Precision Agriculture software and technologies for farmers and the company is increasingly reaching out to agriculture software providers to increase the scale and scope of the information services available to the market.
Recently John Deere organized and ran an annual conference for software developers to discuss how systems can be integrated to help farmers manage their information. The 2014 Develop with Deere conference assembled a group of dealers, independent agricultural software application developers and John Deere staff primarily from their Intelligent Solutions Group.
There were a series of speakers and conference sessions networking the participants and briefing them on technology updates and education on how to best solve IT issues.
Starting the conference was a keynote presentation by Pat Pinkston, Vice President, Technology and Information Solutions, Agriculture and Turf Division. Pat provided an overview on the challenges and opportunities of new technology in the precision agriculture sector. Some of the major challenges he sees include the difficulty to prove returns, the complex management of data and operations and that it may challenge the farmer’s intuition and experience. Pinkston also said that precision agriculture needs a consistent and accurate flow of data combined with expert agronomic decision making and the ability to execute and monitor the results.
Here is a Zimmcomm video interview with Pat Pinkston discussing the Conference.