BIG DATA is here and farmers can harness its powerful capabilities to improve their businesses.
That was the message from Young, NSW, farmer and precision agriculture (PA) specialist Adrian Roles at the recent Birchip Cropping Group expo.
Mr Roles said there was often confusion among the grower community about how to make use of the vast data set generated by their operation.
But he said once farmers had taken the plunge and made the effort to understand their data, savings became obvious.
“For instance, one of the big drivers of yield on my place is pH.”
“I invested in a pH mapper that is simply fitted to my equipment and I have got the pH map, which can help me with management decisions.”
“Data sets like yield by variety by soil type are playing a big role in helping me determine my rotation.”
In terms of input management, Mr Roles cited the example of when the selective herbicide Sakura came on the market.
“It was quite expensive in comparison to trifluralin which we would use for the same job so we did the tests and we found a yield advantage of 3.9 tonnes to the hectare with Sakura, compared with 3.5t/ha with the trifluralin.”
“This demonstrated it was well worth us spending the extra money on the Sakura given it would also allow us one less in-season selective herbicide application.”
Mr Roles said he saw a big role for farmer groups such as BCG in allowing farmers to profit from big data and PA.
“I see groups like BCG gathering information and collating it to distribute among its members.”
“For instance, they could do benchmarking, where farmers get results on how they are managing certain parts of their business and how they compare to other growers and find out what specific areas they can do better.”
“Perhaps they have got a good rating for water use efficiency, but haven’t got the most out of their nitrogen inputs, there are many the data could be used for, it could be very powerful if you work as a group.”
