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High tech farming

Darren Wright

Darren Wright

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I was at a tech conference this week and one of the sponsors was John Deere. I attended the talk by their project lead for their analytics side. They have some pretty cool stuff going on as far as the services they are making available to farmers.

Their tractors are approved to be fully self driving, which is scary and cool. The accuracy of the gps is within one inch of actual location. They can track every seed planted and its exact location. When they come back to treat or fertilize, they can do very precise applications using that information, reducing chemicals used. They can do soil sampling during the planting process to do more precise dosages for areas that need more or need less.

When spraying weeds, they can use image recognition to know what is a crop and what is a weed to apply herbicide directly to the weeds only.

Currently their analytics database is about 50 petabytes in size. :eek: This grows daily as they retain data for farmers to compare year to year yields and other data point. All of that comes at a cost, he said about $10 million per month in just cloud costs. :thud:

After looking at some annual usda reports though, farming is about $3 billion a year, in the US alone, and they support farmers world wide, so is probably chump change. Then there is all the marketing info they can get and sell from that information.

I’m sure they aren’t the only ones doing this, but was a cool session to sit through and see/hear about all of the possibilities.
 
For a completely different reason we were recently looking at some of the low cost mesh network technology, and it looks very possible to DIY a pretty decent soil sensor system for a medium sized setup. The tech that's now available is very interesting.

At this point I wouldn't personally trust JD as far as I can throw them with their proprietary stuff as they've really gone all in on the pay to play and you can't fix anything yourself anymore; which is pretty much contrary to my entire existence haha. BUT the basic concepts are getting to where almost anyone with a bit of tech skills could get 70% of the way there on the key attributes. Which is pretty interesting in and of itself. I'd also have no compunction about re-inventing basic concepts that JD uses :D
 
Where did the hoe go? Fascinating technology but we will pay in the end. Follow one farmer on ytube, farmerws over 10,000 acres. He does have the gps on his Huge tractors with self driving. Neat.
David
 
David Johnson said:
Where did the hoe go? Fascinating technology but we will pay in the end.
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More of a shovel man myself.. :D The reality is that some of this tech is hugely valuable.

The key for farmers in this scenario IMHO is to avoid getting locked out of your own data and support systems. A friend who was much wiser than me explained it as "don't worry so much about how hard it is to get your data INTO the system, worry about how hard it will be to get it OUT". The problem is that a lot of folks, even in tech much less farmers who have a myriad of other problems to deal with, don't have the time, energy, resources to manage a lot of this very well. The challenge gets worse the bigger the systems get as well.

Is it solveable? yes definitely. Will it be solved? that's another question altogether.
 
Frank Fusco said:
Darren
Seems to me that would be of value only to giant factory farms. Unlikely it will affordable soon for others.
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Well, yes and no. He did make it clear that it's to help increase/support sales. And as I said, its main reason is analytics. Just think what one could do with all that data. You have collection more detailed GIS data, down to the inch in most cases, farmers making data updates to what types of fertilizers/chemicals used, types of seeds/crops planted, timing of their plantings and treatments. All of which goes to target marketing data to sell to the folks selling products.

This system works across all other areas of Deere's product lines, not just Agricultural, so also commercial/construction/heavy machinery and Forestry. So then you do get into tracking of construction and changes done to grade on job sites, harvesting and planting of trees in the Forestry side of it. It's a do all type of system.

Deere does produce tracking devices for even my little tractor. They are an add-on, but use your phone to help communicate with the internet and upload data. I haven't quite figured out what I'd use it for. Maybe if I was doing construction or a job that plotting my locations would be useful. :dunno:
 
Darren Wright said:
Well, yes and no. He did make it clear that it's to help increase/support sales. And as I said, its main reason is analytics. Just think what one could do with all that data. You have collection more detailed GIS data, down to the inch in most cases, farmers making data updates to what types of fertilizers/chemicals used, types of seeds/crops planted, timing of their plantings and treatments. All of which goes to target marketing data to sell to the folks selling products.

This system works across all other areas of Deere's product lines, not just Agricultural, so also commercial/construction/heavy machinery and Forestry. So then you do get into tracking of construction and changes done to grade on job sites, harvesting and planting of trees in the Forestry side of it. It's a do all type of system.

Deere does produce tracking devices for even my little tractor. They are an add-on, but use your phone to help communicate with the internet and upload data. I haven't quite figured out what I'd use it for. Maybe if I was doing construction or a job that plotting my locations would be useful. :dunno:
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Interesting. Something like that would have helped when I was building the fences for my newly purchased farmland. Finding corners and lines was a by-guess and by-golly thing. Nobody ever shot me for doing it wrong but it is possible future owners might find themselves in a dispute with neighbors over where the property lines are.
 
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