What technology can do for farmers in today’s day and age is incredible when compared to what there was even just 10 or 20 years ago. That being said, adopting technology can also have setbacks when it comes to cost, availability, ease of use, and more.
At this year’s CropSphere conference, Brian Tischler, farmer from Mannville, Alta., and founder of AgOpenGPS showed the crowd just how easy it is to create your own data and to be able to obtain the information you need for your farm operation.
“There’s a lot of big companies out there, offering quote, un-quote to store your data and systems, and they’re all cloud based and that’s for a reason … They want to aggregate that data [which] is extremely valuable,” Tischler explains. “So as a farmer, you should be asking, ‘well if they’re all doing it, and they’re knocking over each other to do it, well maybe I should be hanging on to this data and aggregate it myself’ and then find out the value of it, and I think you’ll be surprised, if it’s good data, and it’s time series data, [that has] a time stamp to every piece of data, it’s extremely valuable.”
During his breakout keynote session, Tischler showed his DIY remote crop monitoring systems that sets back a farmer just over $30 and can wirelessly transmit the information using a low powered radio via gateway to your house by using a router. From there, you can use it to compile the data over time and use it to your advantage
Farmer and innovator shares insight into the future of autonomous agriculture
In the future, he says if farmers start combing their data to share with each other it becomes a “huge knowledge resource” for those in specific areas whether that be at the small town level to provincial or even national.
“The other possibility is that (because) the data is valuable, there’s the potential in selling it or leasing that data … the limits are kind of endless.”
Listen to AgOpenGPS’s Brian Tischler and RealAgriculture’s Jessika Guse full interview about data and the tech we have at our fingertips below:
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