Irrigation: Harnessing The Power Of Data
Article appeared on The Australian Farmer, February 15, 2018
Over the next few months, and as a follow up to the launch of The Australian Farmer, we will be taking a look at the latest technology and innovation in a number of agricultural segments and talking to some of the leading voices in the industry. This is the third and final article of our series on the irrigation sector, this time focusing on some of the software changing the game for Australia’s irrigators.
With the rapid advance of sophistication and accuracy in agtech, the sheer amount of data that can be garnered by on-farm sensors is staggering. Big data is here, and the problem now is what to do with it. But as many farmers and irrigators struggle to wrestle the vast swathes of data into something meaningful and complex, several companies are getting ahead by doing just that.
The key is turning the data into usable information that is not only easily understood, but easily acted upon by the farmer. Precision Agriculture has created the need for Decision Agriculture. And the software that analyses the data and improves decision making needs to be easy to use.
“Unless you make a farmer’s life easy, they’re not going to use it,” says Tim Hyde, founder of irrigation tech company Swan Systems. “Agriculture is a data-rich environment, and a lot of the agtech in Australia isn’t making it easy for the farmer to use it.”
Swan Systems offers a cloud-based software platform that analyses precision data for the optimal scheduling of water and nutrients. The platform automates data collection from many different sources such as soil moisture probes, water meters, irrigation controllers, weather stations and BOM forecasts. This data is then run through algorithms that are fully configurable to whatever the farmer is growing to provide reports and recommendations.
“Our whole system is about getting rid of assumptions enabling the farmer to make decisions from data, not assumptions. Essentially we’re farmers who built software, not a software company building ag software,” says Tim. “We tried to make the process of irrigation and nutrient management easier for the farmer, not more complex.”
Another company offering a software solution for farmers and irrigators is The Yield, founded in 2014 by Ros Harvey. With a history in transformative technologies, Ros was looking at how to use real-time data and analytics to take the guesswork out of growing. For farmers, weather is the biggest part of guesswork, and The Yield offers an end-to-end system of hardware (designed in collaboration with Bosch to specifically cater for rugged Australian conditions and low connectivity), software and analytics to improve the accuracy of forecasting and help growers make faster and more confident decisions.
“Every single farmer is a scientist. Every single season they put crops in the ground, experiment with the growing process and are always constantly looking at how to improve,” says Ros. “We give them the tools to help with that science – real-time data, given in a way that informs their decision-making and allows them to record what they’ve done and analyse the past. It also helps them schedule vital activities such as irrigation with greater accuracy, which has a knock-on effect of reducing water usage.”
And as technology like this takes hold, we are getting closer and closer to a future where the software can not only inform decision-making on when to irrigate and how much water is needed, but be integrated with irrigation systems to actually automate the process. The only obstacle – perhaps fairly – is the farmers themselves.
“Any self-respecting farmer is going to want to validate against what their experience is before they build confidence to go to the next step and have total systems integration,” says Ros. “And that’s a good thing – you want people to go on that journey with you, otherwise you can overwhelm them with tech.”
Article reposted with permission from The Australian Farmer. Original article available via http://www.theaustralianfarmer.com/#!/irrigation-harnessing-the-power-of-data
