tymshft

Big Data on the Farm

If anyone refuses to believe that farming has changed over the last 100 years, Bernard Marr discusses farming in the context of Big Data as a Service (BDaaS).

Another is agricultural manufacturers John Deere, which fits all of its tractors with sensors that stream data about the machinery as well as soil and crop conditions to the MyJohnDeere.com and Farmsight services. Farmers can subscribe to access analytical intelligence on everything from when to order spare parts to where to plant crops.

This is how farmers, or agricultural engineers, or whatever talk today.

Turn your data into information you can use with Operations Center. You can see agronomic data from your machine in near real-time, including average yield, total yield, average moisture, seeding variety and rates, and more. The Field Analyzer tool lets you compare these layers side by side. And you can easily share planting and yield data with trusted advisors and receive variable rate prescriptions from those advisors.

And yes, the “as a Service” trend will die down in a few years, but we will continue to see the use of computer sciences and other sciences (remember the GMO people) in agriculture. After all, agriculture has been spurring technology advances for a while – ever since 1862, “when Congress passed legislation to establish a national network of colleges devoted to agriculture and mechanics. These are known as the ‘land grant’ system because each state received an allotment of federal land to pay for its new school.” Yes, I know that we were in the midst of a Civil War at that time, but everyone realized that Northerners and Southerners alike would have to go home to the fields afterwards.

Your assumptions about time are not universal

From Olga Mecking (European Mama):

In his book, “The Shadow of the Sun”, Ryszard Kapuściński writes about differences in the perception of time between African or Western cultures. In the West, the buses run after a schedule. In Africa, it runs when it is full. In some cultures, time is linear, from birth to death, it shows a process, a progress, a development. In other cultures, time is cyclical and always follows the same path: the four seasons, a woman’s monthly cycle, holidays and celebrations.

More here.