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Avoiding the Software Conundrum – Part Iv: the Future of Farm Data Management

Avoiding the Software Conundrum – Part Iv: the Future of Farm Data Management
Although Maryland soybean farmer William Layton adopted a state-of-the-art farm data management software two years ago, his father, Joseph Layton Jr., still carries a notebook every day to track crop conditions, yields and other data from their farm.
 
“He has written records dating back to the 1970s,” says William.
 
The image of the Laytons and their contrasting styles of recordkeeping speaks volumes to the progression of farm data management. The younger Layton considers himself an early adopter of new technologies, having been among the first U.S. soybean farmers to utilize no-till and then successfully implementing Granular for data management in the software’s early days.
 
Now imagine what’s yet to come and how that may look for the Laytons in generations beyond Joseph and William.
 
Over the past four weeks, we’ve looked at farm data management systems as they are offered today and the impact they are having on soybean farms big and small. We’ve looked at their benefits and challenges, and now we’ll look to the future.
 
In his recently released paper, “ The Age of Digital Agriculture ”, Mark Young, chief technology officer and product lead for The Climate Corporation, closely examined how digital data collection, tracking and analyzing is changing the way the agricultural industry — specifically farmers — function.
 
Speaking directly about his company’s farm data management platform, Climate FieldView, Young writes: “Through Climate FieldView, The Climate Corporation aims to help farmers get all their data in one place, help farmers gain valuable and easily actionable insights from that data, and then use those insights to optimize farm inputs to achieve increased farm productivity, profitability, or both.”
 
He continues, “By opening our product infrastructure and establishing partnerships with third-party innovators offering complementary products and farm insights, the FieldView platform is now able to aggregate data from third parties as tractors pass through fields, drones fly overhead and equipment pulls soil samples. These insights add to the dozens of unique ‘data layers’ that FieldView provides on its own.”
 
Young acknowledges that what FieldView offers today is just the beginning of what’s possible.
 
“Farmers will for the first time be able to quantify all of their decisions on their operation. Want to know how a new seed performed? Check the data. Want to understand the effects of your fertility program? Check the data. Want to know precisely where you have disease pressure and apply a prophylactic treatment? Check the data,” he writes.
 
“Today these tools are just getting started, but soon we’ll have machine learning and data analytics applied to be very prescriptive about ways the farmer can improve their operation. That is real value, and that will drive change in how farmers run their farms.”
 
Daniel Barker, Ph.D. in the Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Department of Agronomy, says that the future of data management software lies in “near future offerings or enhancements centered toward prediction algorithms,” such as weather.
 
“Weather effects all farming operations,” says Barker. “One challenge is to have weather prediction models that are more accurate over time; however, the weather seems to be more unpredictable each growing season.”
 
Among the biggest hurdles in improving prediction models Barker cites is in the quality of data collected. “Currently, data management software is good at collecting large quantities of data, but has little to no methodology for flagging poor quality data.”
 
When data collection challenges are solved, Barker says the ability for data management software to predict weather patterns and changes will have a major impact on how future generations of farmers operate.
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