America's Farmers Are Bogged Down by Data (wsj.com) 54
A decade after data analytics promised to revolutionize agriculture, most farmers still aren't using data tools or specialized software, and of those who do, many are swamped in a deluge of data. From a report: In 2013, seed and pesticide giant Monsanto acquired agriculture-data firm Climate Corporation for $1 billion, helping spur the industry's mania for data-driven farming. The hope was that by outfitting farmers with software and tools capable of ingesting and analyzing troves of data on things from weather patterns to soil conditions, they could more efficiently use their land. Many are still waiting for the technology to pay off. In the U.S., less than half of farmers surveyed by consulting firm McKinsey are using farm management software, and 25% are using remote-sensing and precision agriculture hardware. That software is a foundational technology in enabling the autonomous machinery and AI-enabled equipment of the future, analysts say, and unless farmers start using it, some will be left behind in the next decade of farm innovation. At the moment, 3% of American farmers said they plan to adopt software or precision agriculture hardware over the next two years, according to McKinsey.
Certain tools can automatically gather data from internet-connected farm equipment, but others require farmers to manually enter the information. For a specific field, for instance, that could total over a dozen crop-protection products and multiple seeds. Even those who are using the tech say they can find it difficult to draw useful conclusions from it. "We're collecting so much data that you're almost paralyzed with having to analyze it all," said David Emmert, a corn and soybean farmer in West Central Indiana who works about 4,300 acres. [...] The first generation of digital farming tools also wasn't easy for farmers to use. Software was slow, interfaces were complex and difficult to manage. "The industry does need to step up a little bit on continuing to improve the customer experience," said David Fiocco, a McKinsey partner focused on agriculture. In recent years, big tech vendors like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have begun tailoring their cloud-computing, data and artificial-intelligence services to agriculture, bringing along expertise that could help address complications that have long plagued farm data management and analytics.
Certain tools can automatically gather data from internet-connected farm equipment, but others require farmers to manually enter the information. For a specific field, for instance, that could total over a dozen crop-protection products and multiple seeds. Even those who are using the tech say they can find it difficult to draw useful conclusions from it. "We're collecting so much data that you're almost paralyzed with having to analyze it all," said David Emmert, a corn and soybean farmer in West Central Indiana who works about 4,300 acres. [...] The first generation of digital farming tools also wasn't easy for farmers to use. Software was slow, interfaces were complex and difficult to manage. "The industry does need to step up a little bit on continuing to improve the customer experience," said David Fiocco, a McKinsey partner focused on agriculture. In recent years, big tech vendors like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have begun tailoring their cloud-computing, data and artificial-intelligence services to agriculture, bringing along expertise that could help address complications that have long plagued farm data management and analytics.
Exorbitant cost for marginal gain (Score:3, Insightful)
Would be my guess as to the root cause. You know, that diminishing returns thing that accountants flet out refuse to believe in.
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I checked my email and look what's there:
"At Rivulis, we have embarked on an exciting journey in climate farming. The Rivulis Climate division is currently responsible for over 5% of all approved Climate farming projects listed worldwide.
Climate farming offers a new additional revenue stream to growers from their agricultural activity. However, applying for, certifying, and documenting climate credits is a complicated and expensive endeavor. Our recent webinar sheds light on the intricacies of the climate f
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I live in the country but not on a farm, why am I getting this?
Because you share a zip code with a lot of farmers.
Re:Exorbitant cost for marginal gain (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of this depends on what types of farms they are talking about. Only 3.2% of family farms make over $1 million in revenue [usda.gov], and non-family farms are only 2.2% of all farms, so when the article says 3% of farmers are planning on adopting these data driven software and hardware tools that may represent over half of all large farms with enough acreage to make this type of investment worth it.
There are so many potentially misleading figures given in the summary (I cannot read the article). It says less than half of farmers interviewed use farm management software, but about half of all farms make less than $10k in revenue. I'd like to think McKinsey was only interviewing full time farmers, but there is no mention of the demographics of the farmers questioned. Without that insight, saying half of all farmers use this kind of software sounds incredibly high. If they only mean mid-size to large farms, that would make more sense.
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How can 1/2 of farmers make less than 10K in revenue (I assume you mean per year) seriously that's not income how can someone live off that. To me if you are making that much you are not a farmer, you have a hobby that is farming.
Unless you are talking about farming worldwide, then that makes sense since there are probably a lot of poor farmers around the world.
Re:Exorbitant cost for marginal gain (Score:5, Interesting)
How can 1/2 of farmers make less than 10K in revenue (I assume you mean per year) seriously that's not income how can someone live off that. To me if you are making that much you are not a farmer, you have a hobby that is farming.
Unless you are talking about farming worldwide, then that makes sense since there are probably a lot of poor farmers around the world.
No, that is half of all US farms as defined by the US Department of Agriculture. To make matters worse, that is total revenue, not gross profit. I couldn't quickly find numbers on average gross profit for smaller farms, but I'd guess they are around 25%. I believe the expenses of those farms making $10k in revenue could easily be $7-8k.
As you can guess, then, it includes people who do not farm as their full time profession. In fact, a majority of the 2 million farms in the US are not the primary source of income for the farmers who own them. This is why it is dubious any time you see statistics about farmers that don't classify the size of their operations.
Re: Exorbitant cost for marginal gain (Score:4, Interesting)
My dad has had years with very close to zero income. A good year might net in the low six figures, but most of that would get (literally) plowed back into the farm. A pretty common practice is to increase outlays on soil ammendments in good years, then in bad years skip doing it. Basically treat the dirt like a bank. The same thing gets done with equipment, etc.
Anyway, time averaged I'd be shocked if he's making more than maybe 20 grand a year. And keep in mind it's not like he has benefits. That's running a full time operation of around 1000 acres. There's a lot of farmers like that, most rely on a wife that has a more steady income and insurance to help limp through the bad times when they come. To make anything approaching a decent living (think well paid tradesman or white collar job) realistically you need in the realm of 10,000 acres, dependent on the region and soil quality of course. That's a big farm, with multiple employees and an office manager. Small farming is low paid thankless work, but I wouldn't call it a hobby. More like a lifestyle. Those guys do it till they drop dead, where most of us would sell the land and retire to Hawaii.
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I agree it's a lifestyle.
Around here, even very small farms can make money, provided they have equipment. That's the rub. If they don't, or don't have other land to subsidize the capital costs, the only option is renting, which in my area is decent money. I've got several neighbors with 1 or 2 quarter sections of land, and they rent those and that is probably a decent yearly income for them.
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acquired agriculture-data firm Climate Corporation for $1 billion
Or you could buy my granddad a beer and he'd look at your property and tell you to plant this there, let that bit lie fallow for now, don't do anything with that because it's prone to flooding, and move the cattle over there in summer. No need for a flood of data or a billion dollars.
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already been done: "Idiocracy"
Re:Kiss The Ground (Score:4, Funny)
Electrolytes, it's what plants crave.
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Maybe someone should explain to the idiots that Monsanto doesn't exist anymore.
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This seems like bad news... (Score:2)
Irrelevant, from Monsanto's point of view (Score:5, Interesting)
When a company like Monsanto buys a specialized smaller firm - like Climate Corporation - they're not doing it to help the farmers. They're doing it because they believe they can make more money by convincing the farmers to pay them for some service that smaller firm provides. Given the nature of business decision-making, it doesn't matter a whole lot to them whether those gullible farmers actually realize a significant benefit of that service - inertia means once the farmers have bought in, a significant percentage of them will keep paying month after month, regardless of the outcome.
I suspect most data that would actually be useful to the farmers is already available for free from the various agencies of the federal government.
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"I suspect most data that would actually be useful to the farmers is already available for free from the various agencies of the federal government." - or the farmer's almanac.
Re:Irrelevant, from Monsanto's point of view (Score:5, Informative)
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When Bayer talks about no-till farming, they're talking about spraying the entire field with glyphosate instead of tilling.
Tilling is extremely damaging to the environment. It leads to erosion, carbon release, and desertification.
I helped my mom switch her farm to no-till a decade ago. The runoff from her fields used to look like muddy sludge. Today it's crystal clear. She avoids the cost of plowing. She uses less fertilizer and less irrigation water.
Yes, no-till uses glyphosate. But so does 90% of plowed fields.
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The next frontier is so-called "regenerative farming." Not tilling is important, but it's also important to build soil health. Doing so reduces weed pressure dramatically, and reduces the need to use herbicides in general. As well intercropping reduces weed and disease pressure, and reduces fertilizer needs. In my opinion fungicide is extremely harmful to the soil, much more so than glyphosate. There are some fascinating talks from farmers who are doing this on a fairly large scale with impressive resu
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When a company like Monsanto buys a specialized smaller firm ... They're doing it because they believe they can make more money
When a company like X does Y, they're doing it because they believe they can make more money.
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I suspect most data that would actually be useful to the farmers is already available for free from the various agencies of the federal government.
Weather data, sure. But a lot of what's being done today is with automated or semi-automated sensor systems, think stuff like drones with infrared cameras and soil-based sensors to monitor the need for pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer/water applications. That kind of data isn't available from the government and provides a lot of information that you're not going to get from a weather forecast.
New headline. (Score:3)
Americans Are Bogged Down by Data
Apologies up-front for excluding other people. I can only speak from the experience I've had myself.
I kinda defy anyone to say they aren't bogged down by data at this point. Whether it's the willing (social media zombies) or the unwilling (work inundating us with a constant stream of bullshit upon bullshit because data has become it's own value and the bosses seem to expect that us techies should get auto-emails about every single data-point) we're all under the flood.
We're living in a really interesting time. The explosion of data as a value asset is growing faster than any human mind could comprehend, yet our systems are not yet "intelligent" enough to filter through the detritus and hand us, the lowly fleshbags, only the parts we need to accomplish what we want. So where is the true value in all that data? Probably somewhere in the future, when automation gets smart enough to stop inundating us with every variable expecting us, as end users, to have all the answers that the system automation was supposed to be providing us.
Or we'll just crapflood every aspect of our lives until get to the point where we wake up, plug into the data stream, zombie out for sixteen hours, then fall back asleep. Which seems to be the direction everything is pointing now.
I'm glad I tapped out of farming right before the automation creep started making everything yet another computer controlled nightmare. Thank god for my bicycle or I'd never get a break from the constant digital hellscape.
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And yet I don't know a single farmer who would ever go back to not having auto steer after having it! And nearly everyone running the latest generation of Deere, Claas, and CNH combine settings automation would not go back either. Definitely gains there from "digital," both quality of life and actual profit.
Like everything (including Teslas and self-driving cars), it's incremental innovation.
We're considering buying into Climate Fieldview in part because governments (and buyers) are increasingly pressurin
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And yet I don't know a single farmer who would ever go back to not having auto steer after having it! And nearly everyone running the latest generation of Deere, Claas, and CNH combine settings automation would not go back either. Definitely gains there from "digital," both quality of life and actual profit.
Like everything (including Teslas and self-driving cars), it's incremental innovation.
We're considering buying into Climate Fieldview in part because governments (and buyers) are increasingly pressuring us to keep verifiable records of all farm operations and inputs, and Climate can record this information automatically right from the machine.
Like with all things, I'm sure there are some benefits. But this article wouldn't exist if it were all sunshine and roses. The data-spew is a flood that most of us aren't equipped to handle. When automation creates more work, nobody's better off.
Which is especially hilarious as I just got out of a meeting discussing how automation made a job take times longer per transaction for the CS reps because of the growing data-spew. Somebody failed some part of understanding what automation is supposed to do. Which
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Farm automation is quite a bit different than that. Even with the technology we have currently, I, with three other people, can farm land that a hundred years ago would have required many times that more people, take longer to do, and be much harder. Although in some ways I don't call that progress.... back then maybe 20 families lived on my farm and all had good lifestyles and sociality. Work is good and too many people aren't interested in it. Don't get me wrong, farming is plenty hard these days and
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Farm automation is quite a bit different than that. Even with the technology we have currently, I, with three other people, can farm land that a hundred years ago would have required many times that more people, take longer to do, and be much harder. Although in some ways I don't call that progress.... back then maybe 20 families lived on my farm and all had good lifestyles and sociality. Work is good and too many people aren't interested in it. Don't get me wrong, farming is plenty hard these days and I work long hours that are physically demanding even if I do have computers doing some things.
The same could have been said of my time, when we were down to three guys working what would have been a 20-30 man operation a decade or two prior. All I'm talking about is the subject of this article here, stating openly that farmers are being flooded with data. Everybody is. The data as asset philosophy is flooding us all.
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I own a small 1/4 section farm and my tenant farms it. The money I make from my tenant farmer is less than 1% of my day job income, so I wouldn't notice if it was gone, but I'm glad someone else is doing the farming and not me.
When the family farm I used to work started renting the land to one of the big corporate farmers, they made more money in three years than they made in the previous twenty trying to farm it themselves. And yeah, everybody that worked it felt a billion times better.
I'm sorry about your shitty boss, my boss has a healthy respect for data and doesn't ask us to spin gold out of it. In fact he encourages our users to wipe out old data.
Our boss is unfortunately locked in by upper management to this "make everything look bigger, better, MOAR" without any thought at all about what it does to the people running the actual business end. It's a company philosophy from the top that on
Crap article (Score:2)
The piece has all the quality and substance of an AI written article.
Farmers are using technology... (Score:3, Interesting)
> decade after data analytics promised to revolutionize agriculture, most farmers still aren't using data tools or specialized software, and of those who do, many are swamped in a deluge of data.
Here's a response from an actual farmer about analytics and data driven farming. This was prompted by the fertilizer bans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Tough Market (Score:5, Insightful)
I've known some people doing startups in agriculture and a big issue is farmers aren't that interested.
Farmers are extremely hard working and skilled in a lot of areas, but they're also fairly conservative. If you're an ambitious and adventurous kid growing up on a farm you don't become an ambitious and adventurous farmer, you leave the farm and do something else.
The kids who are left, they may have the smarts and grit to make it as a farmer, but if they were the type to jump into new technologies then they wouldn't have stayed on the farm.
Re: Tough Market (Score:2)
Eh, my experience has been the real young guys actually are pretty tech savvy and willing to try new things, but remember these are typically inherited operations. You might have an older family member you need to convince to sign off on a purchase, or you might just be looking at some new gizmo thinking "man that's neat, but dad's never going to understand this shit."
You'd be surprised the number of drones flying over the heartland now. That's a technology that has proven itself, and it's being embraced be
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Eh, my experience has been the real young guys actually are pretty tech savvy and willing to try new things, but remember these are typically inherited operations. You might have an older family member you need to convince to sign off on a purchase, or you might just be looking at some new gizmo thinking "man that's neat, but dad's never going to understand this shit."
You'd be surprised the number of drones flying over the heartland now. That's a technology that has proven itself, and it's being embraced because of it.
Oh drones are big for sure, but it's probably taken a while for it to become a proven tech.
To be clear, I'm not trying to criticize farmers, I think it's a profession where caution is rewarded. Try a fancy new piece of equipment near harvest time, lose a couple of weeks, and suddenly you don't get one of your fields harvested before the snow. Try some weird high value crop and it turns out the soil or climate isn't quite right and you lose a pile of money. Get distracted with some fancy analytics tool and y
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Farmers are also notoriously cheap and watch *every* penny. So they are naturally leery of companies that offer "free" equipment up front and try to lock them in on the back end. They have seen this scam many times before.
I would say that... (Score:2)
American farmers are bogged down by climate change.
Weather patterns (Score:3)
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why would the farmer analyze his own weather patterns, surely there are online services that do that.
I'm guessing it's analyze the extremely local weather patterns w.r.t. his or her particular fields.
Ever wondered how much you should water (or fertilize) your garden after a particular rain (or with a particular rain forecast)?
Now imagine your garden is spread over acres and you might not have even seen part of it for a few weeks.
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Data is not knowledge. (Score:5, Interesting)
People who extol the modern age with its phones and...phones, and...more phones...live in a fantasy world. Challenge them to do something with their phone, they'll send out a request for someone else to come and do something for them, with a totally unrelated and much less-advanced technology. Someone shows up to deliver something in an ICE car; maybe they'll be rescued from a disaster in a helicopter designed in 1965. Etc.
There are a few companies that are actually applying information technology, but they are still dishearteningly rare.
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Some tech is getting better. I love using a computer for word processing, vastly better than my old Selectric, which itself was vastly better than my old manual typewriter.
With that said, word processing in 2023 is not improved over what it was in 1993, 30 years ago. OK, we've got better spell checking now, but that's about it.
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A horse-drawn carriage from 1890 was probably smoother and more durable than one from 1750, but it was all the same Stone Age crap to someone born riding even in the first automobiles.
The past few decades have been frozen in amber, if not backsliding. All this money and talent pissed away chasing data and manipulations of data, it's all so much marketing gibberish. And people are so brainwashed, they will insist otherwise: From inside their shrinking hou
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Perhaps because rural hicks couldn't survive in an urban area. A 12 year old gang member strutting their stuff would make them have to wear the brown pants.
That 12-yo gang member wouldn't last 10 minutes putting up hay in this heat.
Some folks take pride in the work they do, and it's an intrinsic value of farming.
There is also nothing like waking up on a cool morning, a cup of steaming coffee in your hand, and looking out over the land at sunrise -- the dew covered fields, the smell of fresh cut hay and the quiet stillness. You can't get that in the city.
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Some people take pride in whittling a dowel into mini totem poles. It doesn't really matter. The small farmers are an ecological waste compared to a company that actually knows what they are doing with maximizing returns from the soil. The government could do a lot with the money wasted on farm subsidies.
Drought (Score:2)
Imagine that... (Score:2)
So the hugely profitable companies that hire the few people who can do this aren't giving away their expertise to farmers? And the farmers aren't suddenly learning to both be programmers AND farmers on their own?
Crazy... who'd have thought that throwing untested or regulated "solutions" at something important like our food sources might cause issues? And that the free market is an excuse to externalize everything possible, and to see what they can get away with before they're punished.
So Big Data isn't a panacea? (Score:2)
Who woulda thunk.
What Data is For (Score:2)