The
Mallee Farmer
Why I’m excited about Precision Ag Precision ag (PA) is part of the buzz word bingo that the farming community get to play. By Chris Sounness, Chief Executive Officer, BCG Every month or so a new idea or concept will pop up and discussion will invariably follow about how it will revolutionise farming. The reality is that the impact of some ideas will only be revealed over a long period of time. Just think about the overnight sensation that is no-till - 40 years in the making with many of its benefits only kicking in after the other pieces of the puzzle came into play. Nearly every innovation we’ve had builds on something else. While the person at the cutting edge feels they have reinvented the wheel, at best, they are standing on shoulders of giants who have made existing technologies work in the paddock, leading to more productive and profitable farming. Precision ag is going to be slightly different. It will still involve the observation, impact assessment and timely strategic response to fine-scale variation in causative components of an agricultural production process, however it is all about doing it in a site specific way, rather than paddock scale. PA technology is now coming into its own as the computing power needed to handle all the data becomes available. However, the reason why precision ag is exciting but different to previous farm innovations is the amount of value that may be available to the agricultural value chain, and the fact that it will be the farmer who holds the power, and equally, the responsibility. As far I can work out, the farmer is going to be solely responsible for delivering any benefits from precision ag to the value chain. This is because the farmer will have to be willing to collate and share their data. Currently the value chain partners are not presenting a very compelling case for the farmer to do this.
Yield maps are a simple way to illustrate this. This technology has been around for over 10 years and many people who work along the agricultural value chain have indicated that access to compiled sets of yield map data would be extremely useful.
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Currently though, very few farmers are utilising their yield maps and if they share them it is generally only with their agronomist. Perversely, the development of yield map technology – which has been used as a major harvester selling feature and has been funded by research development dollars extracted by the harvester manufacturer in sale price – is not considered useful by the person who has paid for it. Something is not quite right. Until this value proposition is put in a compelling way, and farmers see the effort in harvesting and sharing their yield maps as valuable as harvesting and selling their grain, I cannot see precision ag going too far. At BCG we are grappling with this problem and over the coming months will test this idea that precision ag data is valuable as a decision-making tool. To make this argument compelling, the proposition will need to value the farmer’s time in collecting and curating the data. It will also be necessary to recognise that while a farmer may be happy to make data available to some parties, for a whole range of reasons, they may not want to share it with others. And this should be easy to do. Ensuring the farmer has control over their own data sets will be integral to adoption.
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I look forward to talking to our members about precision ag and how we can work together to ensure the farming community gets rewarded if they put in the effort toward making PA the overnight sensation for value chain partners as no-till has been for the environment.
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