Farm Journal’s Smart Farming Week is an annual week-long emphasis on innovation in agriculture. The goal is to encourage you to explore and prioritize the technology, tools and practices that will help you farm smarter. Innovation today ensures an efficient, productive and sustainable tomorrow.
Whether it’s planting, spraying, soil sampling or harvesting, data is everywhere on the farm.
“Historically, what we’ve done is look backward at what happened, but that doesn’t tell you what is going to happen,” says Mike Tweedy of Pattern Ag.
Today, data isn’t just being collected. It’s being mined, processed and integrated with a world wide web of information.
“We’re getting to the point where growers expect us to help them take data and turn it into insights. But more than that, they want insights that are actionable,” says Andy Folta, Bayer U.S. product marketing manager, Climate Fieldview. “They want an output for the data they’ve been collecting for years or decades.”
That includes insights discovered with the help of artificial intelligence.
“I think we have a lot of opportunities to push insights into actions,” Folta says. “With AI and some of those predictive models, we can bring opportunities to the grower or their trusted adviser and say you should look at this specific practice on this specific field.”
Bayer and Climate FieldView isn’t alone in its pursuit of digital farming solutions. NASA is also working to turn satellite data into actionable decisions for producers.
“The science NASA has funded has gone into so many different agricultural applications. Google Maps and a lot of this stuff had its foundation off of NASA data,” says Alyssa Whitcraft, executive director of NASA Acres. “Initially, Cropland data layer developed in a partnership between USDA and NASA. Foreign ag statistics and WASDE reports also have a huge component of satellite data that feeds into them and is powered by NASA observations.”
Improving satellite resolution and increasing computer or computational power is now helping scientists at the space agency look at other solutions for agriculture.
“Now we’re looking at precision nitrogen recommendations or pest and disease mitigation, those different kinds of capabilities,” Whitcraft says.
One way BASF is using satellite imagery is to track a field’s biomass development overtime. They’re using these layers in a new platform called Xarvio, which could help speed up the trusted adviser’s recommendation process.
"[Xarvio] is going to turn that information into a recommendation without having to go through five years of trial work on farm,” says Scott Kay, vice president of BASF.
The platform will be available for agronomists and retailers to support recommendations for farmers.
“The more data points we can get, the better chance we have of making the correct choice — especially when a variety or a hybrid is involved,” says Chris Conner, general manager of Waters Farm Supply.
More Smart Farming content for you:
Here’s How to Bridge the Data Gap With Your Ag Retailer
