It can be used to spot patterns, optimize operations, save money and create better end results.

There’s lots of evidence to support anyone who views this technology as a boon to humanity.

But, like most tools, it can be misused. Whether the result is boon or bane depends entirely on the operator.

That has always been the case. Hammers can build things up or smash them down, but we aren’t banning hammers or refusing to purchase them. We understand that virtually everyone buying a hammer has a benign intention. Likely, they want to build something.

But when it comes to data, there’s a dark side. How it is compiled, analyzed and managed serves to magnify its impacts, be they good or bad.

A case currently before the U.S. courts is a potent example of how this can play out.

RealPage is a property management software company, which sounds innocuous enough. It provides a service to landlords.

But prosecutors in the District of Colombia allege things have taken a less innocent turn, to the detriment of thousands of people.

They’re suing the firm and 14 of the district’s largest landlords, alleging they colluded to illegally raise rents by collectively sharing their data with the company, affecting 50,000 apartments in violation of the district’s antitrust laws.

Other lawsuits against similar firms with similar business models claim the indirect collusion also resulted in empty apartments, as algorithms told landlords to raise rents and earn more money despite having more empty apartments. The lawsuits allege that has added fuel to the housing crisis fire.

There’s also evidence emerging that data, combined with pricing algorithms, may be fuelling inflation. It’s called “dynamic pricing” and it’s corrupting the old model of supply and demand.

In an article this July in the New Statesman magazine, business editor Will Dunn equated the situation to one apple seller replacing its sign with a mirror that simply reflects the price of the other apple seller at light speed. This eliminates any incentive to reduce prices, since no greater market share will be captured, which results in higher prices over time.

That’s a vastly simplified version, but Dunn has a tale of two Amazon resellers. One listed an out-of-print textbook for $9.98. Another’s pricing algorithm raised their price for the same book slightly, looking to capture an above-average margin. The original seller, using a similar algorithm, followed suit. Things went back and forth, until the books were ultimately listed at more than $23 million each.

Against this backdrop, a little healthy skepticism about sharing data with anyone is warranted. It’s a real Catch-22 for farmers. They know their data has valuable insights that could make their operations more efficient and profitable. But that data can be hard to manage on their own and, as a result, there are plenty of firms that would love to help them with that task.

What happens to that data once it leaves a farmer’s hand and enters someone else’s system? How will it be used?

Given what we know about how large organizations — and just as crucially, some of the people that populate them — can act, caution is advised.

A farmer might share data for the purposes of making better agronomic decisions, only to find out later that same data is being used to track input use and maximize corporate profits.

It’s unfortunate that no reliable and impartial body exists to aggregate and parse the vast amounts of data that farmers are beginning to acquire.

Taken together, it could be possible to find great insights that help solve what today seem to be intractable problems, such as how to best balance environmental priorities and economic outcomes on the farm.

Perhaps an independent data repository, above reproach and owned by the farmers themselves, is needed before the pool of big data can reach its full potential for the farm.

Without it, convincing farmers to share their data banks will be a hard sell.

The post Editor’s Take: The dark side of data sharing appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

It’s a simple example of the kind of employment gaps that keep farmers up at night, and that prevent their adoption of new technology, said the manager of an “upskilling” program that can potentially fill those gaps.

“About two years ago, the industry came to us to say ‘we can’t find the unique people that we need that understand technology and technology implementation but also understand agriculture and agri-food,” said Ednali Fertuck-Zehavi, manager of Palette Skills’ automation and digital agriculture specialist program.

Why it matters: Farm equipment is increasingly technical and it takes greater technical knowledge to keep it running as needed.

Through the eight-week, 130-hour course, Palette Skills, the federally funded non-profit that has overseen the program for the past two years, hopes to train people to fill producers’ employment needs. Its latest intake occurred in August, but its website will have information on upcoming intakes.

Depending on the program for which they’re best suited, participants are trained by industry experts with hands-on, project-based learning in how emerging technologies apply to ag. Core areas include GIS (geographic information system), IoT (internet of things), drones, artificial intelligence, robotics and big data.

In the process, it seeks to develop a full suite of professional skills, including project management, fundamentals of business development, problem-solving and team building.

The program is looking for students who are unemployed or underemployed in a range of fields and who may be able to bring their skills to the agriculture table. It’s open to post-secondary graduates with a minimum of three years’ work experience.

The program’s goal is to match agri-food employers with the agriculturally and technically informed candidates they would consider hiring, said Fertuck-Zehavi.

“We see if we have someone in our talent pool and we match them.”

Palette Skills developed the program through consultation with agriculture-based academic institutions and a variety of agri-food employers.

They found that academic excitement over a new innovation didn’t necessarily line up with the needs of farmers and ranchers. Farmers may not know how to implement new ideas on their operations. This is where the fundamental idea of “filling gaps” was identified.

With the feedback from their consultation, the organization built its automation and digital agriculture specialist program.

Program details

Participants may choose from three streams based on their goals and existing work experience: agribusiness and sales; industrial, technical and professional; and data analyst and programmer.

Possible careers available to agribusiness and sales graduates include precision agronomist and crop input sales rep. This stream has attracted participants with experience in project management, human resources, marketing, business development and even law.

Those participants spend a portion of their time learning online and another portion learning the basics of farming. The ideal employee would be one who could bring new concepts and new ideas to the fray, said Fertuck-Zehavi.

“If you train them in the main expertise of the agri-food sector, they take all this transferable knowledge and they can solve problems that we have in the sector in new, exciting ways,” she said.

That can have far-reaching implications.

“Having good agri-business management talent is essential to make those operations able to compete at the international level,” she said.

For those who want to participate in the industrial, technical and professional stream, post-program options might include precision agriculture specialist, remote sensing technician or automation technician.

It’s a broad stream requiring creative and critical thinking. Students with backgrounds as varied as engineering, soil science and genetics have finished the program under this stream.

If the goal can be distilled to a single sound bite, it would be “solve problems.”

It’s a matter of identifying challenges in current systems and solving them through current or potential technologies, said Fertuck-Zehavi.

“How do we make sure that what we have right now is working in the best way? Some farmers have processing facilities that cost them $10 million, but they only use a small portion of that capacity. Ideally, the graduate would have the talent to implement it properly.”

Graduates of the data analyst and programmer stream may find jobs as ag tech software engineers, precision ag programmers and agribusiness applications developers.

This is the stream that requires the most experience in computer programming, said Fertuck-Zehavi. Some challenges relevant to agriculture will require the ability to develop software-based solutions.

“Even though they did analytics and are excited about analytics … [if they] don’t have any programming experience, they won’t be able to go to the data analyst and programmer stream,” she said.

“If you don’t have those reserve skills, you still need to go through so much growth before you’ll be able to apply for those jobs and be successful in them.”

Farmer voice

The constant input of farmers has been key to the program, which recently finished its third cohort of attendees, said Fertuck-Zehavi.

“We involve the farmer constantly in providing training, reviewing our curriculum and providing real-life problems and case studies and we’re providing data that each stream is working on — those real-life challenges that we currently have in the industry.”

Funded by the Government of Canada through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Palette Skills is a non-profit organization that develops employer-driven upskilling programs that help mid-career workers find a place in the workforce.

A version of this article first appeared in Alberta Farmer Express.

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With the advent of GPS integrated data loggers and yield maps, farmers no longer need to guess when it comes to applying expensive inputs, said precision agriculture expert Alex Melnitchouck.

“Yield is an integrated result of over 140 base factors influencing the development of a field crop,” said the chief technology officer at Alberta’s Olds College.

“Soil is probably the most precious resource and yield information the most precious data on the farm. It’s something that provides integrated information about all those factors all together acting as one whole.”

To take their farms to the next level, producers will need to collect and interpret comprehensive yield monitoring data, said Melnitchouck.

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Data driven agriculture is the future of farming, but there’s a steep learning curve.

“If you want to plan your fertility program, if you want to know your low and high yield potential zones, if you want to use variable rate technology for fertilizer application, or you need to know what’s in your soil, but you also need to know how much your crop can remove from the soil, then start using yield monitoring data,” he said.

Yield variability across fields can be extreme, he said, noting 500 to 700 per cent variances aren’t unusual. Yield monitoring data and yield maps are critical for knowing the productive potential of each part of a field.

“And it’s significantly under-utilized,” said Tyler Lefley, CEO of Dark Horse Ag Ventures, a company that helps farmers with yield maps and data interpretation.

“Precision agriculture has been so focused on measuring inputs that we kind of forgot about measuring the absolute product of those inputs in our yield.”

Small changes in farming practices can have a large economic impact, said Lefley.

“There are a lot of questions that can be answered on the farm level in terms of return on investment. Farmers can really utilize this in correlating their yield to their practices.”

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Two fundamental data layers are needed when it comes to planning fertilizer rates, added Melnitchouck — soil nutrients in each part of a field and nutrient uptake.

“If you don’t have enough nutrients in the soil to achieve your yield goal, you need to fill the gap with fertilizer,” he said. “If you know the yield potential across a field, the only way to analyze that yield potential in bushels per acre is utilizing yield monitoring data.

“If you know your yield potential, and you take soil tests, you can calculate precisely what fertilizer needs to be added. If you don’t analyze field variability — you just apply a blanket approach — you can under-fertilize in some areas or over-fertilize in others.”

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Data into dollars

Melnitchouck predicts that air drill technology will evolve to the point where a rig will be able to take previously collected yield data and automatically adjust fertilizer rates as it moves across a field.

But even using present-day mapping technology, farmers can increase fertilizer efficiency by 20 to 25 per cent, he said. That sort of improvement would take producers most of the way to the federal government’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions of 30 per cent by 2030 (compared to 2020 levels).

“In this case, you just use the right technology for the right purpose, and you will get that result with no restrictions,” said Melnitchouck.

Although yield monitor technology on modern combines collects reams of data, it is often in a raw state that needs “cleaning” by a trained professional before a yield map can be generated, said Lefley.

Even new combines don’t collect perfect data. There will be false readings, outlier numbers and anomalies, but getting good data is worth the effort.

“If a farmer really … has a really calibrated combine, the need for cleaning can be minimized,” he said.

The end goal isn’t the highest-possible yield. It’s making every acre as profitable as it can be, said Lefley.

“So how do we measure profitability across a farm?” he said. “We can rank every field on the farm based on profit and figure out answers to questions like: Is that five-year lease worth renewing? And alternatively provide insight on the cost of missed opportunities.”

The trend toward automation in agriculture is undeniable, said Melnitchouck.

It may take another decade for technology to mature, but farms will increasingly use data to drive change.

“The farming industry is not interested in yield data by itself or soil data by itself. The farming industry is interested in something that solves a certain problem,” he said. “When you look at yield data, you can potentially solve several problems at the same time.”

– This article was originally published at the Alberta Farmer Express.

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The Vancouver company, one of Canada’s “big five” telecommunications firms, on Thursday formally launched Telus Agriculture, billed as “a new business unit dedicated to providing innovative solutions to support the agriculture industry with connected technology.”

“From farm to fork, by digitizing the entire value chain and linking these technologies together for the first time, we will facilitate a secure exchange of information to allow farmers and ranchers, agribusiness organizations, the agrifood industry and the consumer to make smarter decisions,” Telus CEO Darren Entwistle said in a release.

The new unit is set up to serve three distinct markets, Telus Agriculture Canada CEO Chris Terris said in an interview, referring to production agriculture; agribusiness; and quality assurance and traceability in food and consumer packaged goods (CPGs).

Telus, whose acquisitions in ag tech and farm management consulting so far include Irricana, Alta.-based agronomy and farm management firm Decisive Farming and Vancouver software developer Farm At Hand, among others, also expanded that roster again Thursday.

The company said Thursday it has closed deals for Florida-based AFS Technologies — “a global leader in sales and distribution solutions to the consumer goods market” — and Agrian, a California company with a “unified management platform for precision, agronomy, sustainability, analytics and compliance.”

It also announced Thursday it has a deal in place, pending certain conditions, to take up another Canadian company, Okotoks, Alta.-based Feedlot Health Management Solutions, billed as “North America’s premier feedlot consulting service.”

“Over the course of the last year, Telus has completed several key acquisitions, assembling a suite of assets that is unmatched in the agriculture industry,” the company said in a release.

“Together under Telus Agriculture, our team now has the expertise, experience, and relationships to connect every participant in the agriculture value chain, from seed manufacturers and farmers through to grocery stores and restaurants.”

Terris characterized the acquisitions to date as a “quilt,” in the sense that the whole is expected to be of greater use than the sum of its parts, better connecting farmers and livestock producers to the food side of the equation.

Outside Canada, the new unit’s acquisitions so far also include:

• TKXS, a North Carolina-based firm offering “specialized software, program management and data solutions deliver(ing) critical information to agribusinesses;”
• U.K. software firm Muddy Boots, whose products link “production and food quality data to create a smoother flow of information to help improve decision making and production;”
• Hummingbird, a U.K. company, offering “advanced imagery analytics;” and
• AGIntegrated, a Pennsylvania company which bills itself as “the integration leader in the precision agriculture industry,” using APIs (application programming interfaces) to simplify data flow between platforms.

In all, Telus Agriculture said, the unit now supports over 100 million acres of farmland and employs over 1,200 people across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Mexico, China, Brazil, Germany, Slovakia and Armenia. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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“Some people find that offensive. Don’t look at it that way,” Mitch Rezansoff said. “It’s just managing the farm the way any other business would. It’s knowing the cost of your production intimately.”

Rezansoff, executive director of CAAR, demonstrated a “whiteboarding” exercise during the efficiency-themed Manitoba Young Farmers Conference in Winnipeg on March 5, hosted by Keystone Agricultural Producers.

He encouraged producers to “aspire to be best in class” by having a long-term strategy, evaluating annually and evolving over time.

Keenan Wiebe, who farms near Starbuck, was Rezansoff’s guinea pig. They’d met beforehand and spent around three hours sifting through every aspect of the farm and looking for inefficiencies.

Rezansoff and Wiebe divided tasks by season — preparation, seeding, protecting and nurturing, and harvest. Rezansoff asked about the farm’s plans — business plans, crop rotation, water management, standard operating procedures, human resources, quality of life and others.

They listed strategies — business and agronomic development, customer and vendor management, data collection, emergency response, waste minimization and so forth.

They also went through metrics and efficiencies in logistics, machine utilization, labour, input utilization and risk mitigation.

The catalogued areas of waste: idling hours versus productive hours, transport hours, repair and maintenance trends, planned acres versus actual, duplicated activities and others.

As they identified the plans, strategies and efficiencies in place, Wiebe saw patterns begin to emerge. For instance, they found many items that “Dad always looked after.”

He and his brother came on as shareholders in the farm recently and expected their dad to begin slowing down, so ‘Dad always did this’ wasn’t going to cut it.

They also found many items that related to each other — the fact that they sell straw is related to nutrient management, for instance.

In the end, Wiebe said he’d developed eight priorities for 2020.

“That obviously starts with having more good farm business meetings,” he said.

As family that farms together, they need to differentiate farm and family time, have an agenda, be accountable and transparent, he said.

They needed to know their roles so they don’t have overlapping jobs or miss tasks.

They needed equipment and soil health strategies, Wiebe said. They should consolidate record-keeping and pursue agronomic and financial management. They’d also prioritize improving their annual review process.

“Everyone is good at putting plans together,” Rezansoff said. “How many actually take the time when harvest is done to sit down and have a very thorough analysis of — based on what we had planned — how did we do?”

Evan Shout showed ways farmers can get creative on data analysis in their operations — beginning with the humble tax return and financial statement.

“It’s the No. 1 source of data,” said Shout. “Yet when I say ‘big data’ everyone goes to combines, drills, variable rate, agronomy. Nope. No. 1, financial statements. If you have them, you have data. You can do data analytics.”

Shout is president of Maverick Ag Ltd. and CFO of Hebert Grain Ventures, a large grain and oilseed operation in central Saskatchewan.

He shared ways they at Hebert had used data analysis to optimize everything from human resources to the A to B line in the field.

Hebert Grain Ventures employees go through personality profiling when they join the team, and are asked to list their least favourite, tolerable, and favourite tasks.

“As managers we make assumptions,” said Shout. “Don’t make assumptions.”

A woman who worked as a bookkeeper, it turned out, wanted to drive a tractor sometimes — not a million-dollar rig, but some kind of field work. She now does all their rock picking at seeding, and half their swathing. She’s not very busy in May and September anyway.

Shout said they got some resistance when they implemented John Deere’s Harvest Smart, self-driving tech on their combines so they tested it for a few days. In the end, Harvest Smart was 15 to 20 per cent more efficient than even their best operators.

Yet some workers don’t use it, and as Hebert has over 400 acres of barley still lying in the field, Shout said that could have been the difference.

“This is where data analytics are going,” Shout said.

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To be fair, it’s often true. After all, you’re practising a craft that’s 12,000 years old and the foundation of human civilization. Without farming we’d all be hunting and gathering our next meal with no time to ponder art or engineering. One would be a fool to turn one’s back on that much-collected wisdom, especially when managing a complex biological system.

In recent decades however, farmers generally — and Prairie farmers particularly — have proven to be an adaptable lot ready, willing, and able to embrace change.

The zero-till production system is the clearest example of this dynamic at work. From the dawn of agriculture until the mid-20th century, there was only one way to grow annual crops, and that required tillage and lots of it. Farmers tilled to kill weeds and spread crop residue and set a seedbed — multiple passes every season.

Then some dreamers thought there might be a better way, and began to experiment. The Prairies and northern U.S. Great Plains weren’t the first place to try these techniques, but they were the first place that worked out a practical way of growing crops without tillage.

Perhaps it’s a function of that old saying, “familiarity breeds contempt,” that we aren’t all perpetually in a state of amazement at that fact. This is an evolution that only happened because the farm and research community made it happen and the new system was a game changer in many ways. It made farms more biologically efficient, more economically efficient, and received widespread adoption within a relatively short time frame. This most conservative of industries can turn on a dime if given a compelling enough reason.

In less dramatic, but no less important, ways we’ve seen this before. Take canola as an example. Originally introduced as rapeseed, and produced for industrial lubrication purposes, it really shouldn’t have amounted to much. But in the early 1970s researchers like the University of Manitoba’s Baldur Stefansson and the University of Saskatchewan’s Keith Downey began to wonder if it wasn’t possible to modify the plant’s oil profile for human consumption. By the early 1970s they’d found success and the process of building a new crop was underway.

That wasn’t always easy. The early growers had to learn the agronomics of this new crop, while simultaneously creating a new market for it. The vast swaths of yellow flowers that greet us every summer now make it clear they were successful, but those early challenges were significant. When they were overcome, however, the industry again proved ready to adapt, adopt and improve.

Today the business isn’t standing still, and innovative researchers and farmers continue to look for better, more productive ways of doing things, and new crops to expand their portfolio of growing options.

In the area of new crops, our Brandon correspondent Alexis Stockford looks at the trials and tribulations of growing one of the newest in this issue — the South American “super grain” quinoa, which is actually genetically most closely related to weeds we’ve been trying to stamp out for generations. She talks to producers about what it will take to grow this crop from just a few hundred acres a year to something more significant.

A bit further down the development track, there’s the industrial hemp sector, which has made great strides since its legalization and reintroduction in 1994. Processors such as Winnipeg’s Manitoba Harvest have created a significant market for human food products. Canada is now a major force in hemp production globally, and is a significant supplier to the U.S. market, where the crop is only recently legal to grow, having been erroneously swept up in drug-related hysteria.

On the technical side, developments continue as well, with two interesting threads emerging, from polar opposite ends of the spectrum.

Over the last 20 years, the University of Manitoba has emerged as a leader in natural systems agriculture under the direction of professors like Martin Entz. Often they’ve been dismissed as dreamers, but the truth is, they’re doing very important work in understanding the biological foundation of farming, and it would appear that young farmers in particular are beginning to pay attention.

In the meantime, innovative farmers are also starting to make practical use of the plethora of high-tech tools developed over the past few years, in new and interesting ways. They’re experimenting with intercropping, prescription input applications, drone aircraft and vast new possibilities in data management. There’s little question in the minds of many that this will be transformative.

If you think the past 40 years have been exciting, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The post Editorial: New opportunities appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

But how might big data be managed? What information will be available to whom? Technology, for example, frequently fits the category of “private but available for a price.”

The general question appears to be “who can do what” with respect to agriculture’s big data. Who can collect the data, who can transfer the data to whom and who can use the data?

The answers are not clear. University professors are suggesting that laws (trademark, patent and copyright laws, for example) do not fully address the questions. They suggest that perhaps state trade secret laws could be applied. They also emphasize that property owners enter into agreements with others before the information is shared by its owners.

Another recent suggestion has been that laws be enacted limiting how often imagery data can be collected, shared and used. But how would such limitations ever be enforced? Images have been taken from space for decades. These images were not a concern in the past but are drawing more concern now that technology is providing extremely detailed images at lower cost.

Various concerns have been suggested as to why big data needs to be controlled. For example, those with access to the data and information can have an advantage in the market over those who do not have such information.

Contractually controlling information is one approach; regulatory control is another approach. Is the more realistic approach to do whatever is possible to assure everyone has access to the data?

The National Agricultural Statistics Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been collecting and publishing data for decades. The Economic Research Service of the USDA likewise has been analyzing that data and publishing results. This information helps everyone in agriculture understand the current state of the industry.

Concerns have been expressed that the trend, for the past several decades, is less information available to the public, including producers. To counter that trend, there have been efforts to maintain transparency in the agricultural commodities sectors.

Is another alternative for agricultural big data to have government do its best to collect and publish the data? Note that this suggestion does not mention that government “analyze” the data.

However, big data is no longer a national issue. It is a global matter.

A satellite that can provide a detailed scan of a North Dakota field can, just as easily, scan a field in France. A Brazilian firm that hires the service of a private satellite firm to scan Brazilian fields can, just as easily, pay to have U.S. fields scanned. USDA public information can be retrieved just as easily by a Kazakhstan livestock producer as a North Dakota rancher. This information is going to be public on a global scale and solutions need to address that.

The information age is upon us. We have been in the computer age for nearly 35 years, but computers are just tools, no different than a tractor. How we use computer technology to gather, analyze and use information is no longer a question for the future; it is here today.

David Saxowsky is an associate professor with NDSU’s department of agribusiness and applied economics. His teaching includes agricultural law, food law, farm and agribusiness management, and water law.

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Connected Farm

This app focuses on mapping field boundaries, locating irrigation pivots, marking flags, and entering counting information. Scouting attributes include an extensive list of weeds, insects and diseases. Also, allows you to log the severity of a problem, crop conditions and capture photos to integrate with scouting attributes.

Flag This

This app enables you to communicate an action that is location specific, so that users are able to flag a location through GPS that requires scouting for plant symptoms, draining standing water, fence repair, etc. Flagged locations can then be saved and stored or shared via email. This app was developed by the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association Inc.

Weed Identifier

Designed specific to Canada, this app allows you to identify and map weed pressures.

Voxer

Voxer is a push-to-talk application that basically converts your smartphone into a walkie-talkie. You can connect a number of devices and keep your team on track.

My Shed

A free application that provides you with engineering parts manuals, assembly diagrams, and parts number lists for your machines. Create parts lists and share them with your dealer, access tool box reference guides, and lubricant/fluid selector guides.

Crop Nutrient Deficiencies

This app assists growers in determining fertility issues in their fields by nutrient type or by browsing photos of crops to find the image that most closely matches the fertility issues they are seeing.

Farm at Hand

An app built by farmers, for farmers. It is a complete farm management app, free and Cloud based that allows you to manage your entire operation from seed to sale.

iHerd

IHerd is a cattle management app that can categorize herds, record herd management data, herd numbers, manages movement between properties, offers tally counting, tracks transfer of cattle, records and manages medical treatment and dosages.

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