Less Data and More Decisions

As a grower or investor in farmland, your eyes may glaze over at the dizzying array of "smart" new technology products that claim to enhance your farming operation with better yields, less input costs and improved use of irrigation infrastructure. Each year a new company launches another satellite or a constellation of satellites that can be your eyes in the sky and can help you monitor your farming operation. You may have signed up with a current vendor and received imagery that show each of your fields. This type of service can be very helpful, but you may find yourself spending a lot of time pouring over daily or weekly digital snapshots of your fields. Your potential data pipeline may be like drinking from a fire hose.

To help us manage the flow of that fire hose of data, we can look at how other industries that manage their mountains of data. Credit card companies for example manage more than a billion daily transactions worldwide. As a credit card holder, you don’t want to review every transaction in real time. Instead, you only want to get automated warnings when purchases are made that are outside your normal patterns. In the past you may have received warning for purchases in foreign counties. Sometimes they are valid transactions when you are traveling, but other times they may have been fraud that the system has caught before you even had a chance to check your card statement or balance. The smarter the system, the better it can differentiate what is a real problem and what are normal patterns of business.

You probably want your farm data pipeline to be similar in that it alerts you to potential problems before you may have traditionally noticed them. Similar to a soils report that color codes the soil components that are extremely high or low and need attention, a data pipeline needs a more complicated system to examine the last observation and see where there is change and to see if that change is abnormal for this time of year on your fields.

One example of a smart service that informs row crop operators of on farm problems is Irrigation Insights by Valley & Prospera. This service can sift through its aerial imagery and locate potential plugged sprinklers, pivot leaks, overwatering and underwatering. You get access to the imagery via your smart phone or other device, but even more important is you get text messages when the system locates a potential problem. Now that is a smart pipeline, one that does not need constant monitoring, but just notifies you of major anomalies. All of this at a cost of a few dollars an acre sounds like not just another technology, but a right-sized solution that helps growers operate a farm better and makes scouting your crops more efficient. This service is available in the Columbia Basin, Eastern Idaho, Nebraska and Texas, but keep a look out for expansions in 2022.

Another example of a service that pinpoints problem areas is in permanent crops that use drip irrigation. Traditionally, crops like almonds have been challenging to monitor from aerial imagery since unlike row crops that provide continuous cover and a smooth return signal, an orchard from a bird’s eye perspective is a mix of trees, bare ground or cover crop. This confuses the signal and makes it difficult to get repeatable measurements, especially in the second half of the season when using deficit irrigation. Companies like FluroSat and Netafim have designed a system to focus their signals at the individual tree level. By only comparing the signals towards the centers of each individual trees, they can get repeatable measurements and help growers make better informed decisions on irrigation scheduling.

These types of systems empower growers with less data and more information for decision-making. This follows a philosophy at Scythe & Spade that sticks with everything we do, simplifying complex agribusiness issues. We are always on the look out for new techniques and partners who can make better sense of the mountains of data that we have.