Of course the agronomic decisions may be the ones farmers will use to project their cost-benefit analysis. After all, that’s how the technology is being sold, and digitizing does allow for integrating multiple layers of production information so farmers can be on top of crop emergence, plant health, disease, pest or weed issues, and crop maturity.

These visualized layers of data can assist with all kinds of field decisions from timing of chemical or fertilizer applications as well as swathing or harvesting, or it can be used to evaluate new existing or new inputs, crop hybrids and management practices.

And, of course, field decisions at bottom are actually business decisions too.

“The old adage is that farmers know their land like the back of their hand, but digitizing puts it onto a platform where they can look at many different layers of agronomy and break down every single one,” says Todd Woodhouse, an agronomist with Bayer CropScience. “They can make comparisons and measure the return on investment of every decision they make on the farm. They could put numbers on a spreadsheet, but to visualize it and have those numbers at the same time is much more impactful and conclusive.”

That’s the major reason that John Tjeerdsma, who farms in southern Ontario’s Simcoe County, decided to try the digital platform Climate FieldView (from Bayer CropScience) this year. “I want to make the most money off each acre because I am small, and I don’t have economies of scale, so being able to get real data and analyze that in different ways is what I was looking for,” Tjeerdsma says. “I can layer on our seed populations, fertilizer programs and inputs, and see the results on the yield maps and have that all in one place.”

Tjeerdsma says it will also help him manage the variety of soil types from heavy clay to light soil that he has across his 300-acre farm.

Better conversations at the bank

The digitized farm can also provide visualized financial information that can be broken down field by field, crop by crop, and enterprise by enterprise, so a farm owner or manager can have better informed conversations with their accountant or lenders. Those advisors in turn can see the data, so they’re more confident in their clients’ decisions and in their ability to hit their plans, with ultimate benefits to the financial health of the operation.

“The higher value of putting your farm into a digital system is so you can look at it through a spatial lens,” says Devin Dubois, CEO of FieldAlytics, a digitalized, farm management platform. “There are a thousand different responses to the information you see. There’s still a role for agronomists to look at that kind of information and make a recommendation, but there’s also a role for your financial advisor to look at it and talk about cash flow, or how to save money. As an example, you might suggest reducing inputs, and that’s an economic decision, but how does the accountant know that’s the right thing to do because it also sounds like a poor agronomic decision?”

When a farm looks at its position from just overall margins on the farm or crop type, it’s hard to know what they need to manage on a more micro level, says Dubois. “An accounting answer is going to be different than an agronomic answer,” he says. “Having a digitized, analytical platform means a farmer can have all of his or her professional team, whether it’s an agronomic advisor or a financial advisor, look at the same information and respond to the same issue from different angles.”

Helping to transition or expand the farm

Over time, going digital promises to help a farm build up a historical picture of the operation that can then help with expansion or transition planning.

“I don’t know if we fully understand the value of this information going forward, but I’ve had the question, I’ve been farming for 25 or 30 years, and if I decide I’m going to retire and my farm is for sale, is there more value to my farm if I sell it with 30 years of this data?” asks Marvin Talsma, product manager for Climate FieldView, which is a subsidiary of Bayer CropScience. “I don’t know if we know that yet. I think we’re still young and early in this age of getting to that point.”

But when a farm wants to expand, digital information can be a huge asset in figuring out whether it’s a good or a bad decision.

“If a farm is going to the bank to look at purchasing another parcel of land, and it has this information, it can show how that farm’s decisions are made,” says Talsma. “We don’t provide some of that profit analysis within our platform, but we do have partnerships with other providers that provide that level. Then they can do different levels of profit analysis by farm, or down to the acre.”

Because a lot of digital information is publicly available, it’s even possible to scout out the performance of a particular piece of land ahead of time.

“When farmers are considering a piece of land to buy or rent, they can map from ahead of time and actually see if it’s productive, whether it has run into problems, and make decisions from there,” says Woodhouse.

Family farms transitioning to the next generation have never before had such an opportunity to build up a comprehensive historical record of their farm. Not only can they work out the value of the various parts of the farm more accurately, but the information can also help the next generation secure financing.

“Long-term, growing crops is a quest for continuous improvement, and history can repeat itself if you don’t know the history,” says Woodhouse. “I don’t know any farmer who has a history of every farm they have ever had, and if they are transferring it, usually the person who takes over carries it through their knowledge, expanding on maybe what their parents told them. But if they can have all that digital information, and be able to go back over the history to see what worked and didn’t, where they had to take a few steps back, and see what they had to do in a particular situation, it’s just going to make the next generation that much more successful.”

Risk management

Accurate and detailed tracking of everything through a digital platform makes for a better transparency, which is increasingly important to ensure food safety, security and consumer confidence.

Farmers can even turn parts of their farm into a research site. With the ability to measure and record responses to their own on-farm trials, they can experiment with different crops, hybrids and inputs on different fields, and under various conditions or situations to fine-tune their efficiency and wring the most yield out of every acre.

“If you take the time to set up and put in different hybrids and fertilizer blends that you’re using, you don’t need to put flags in the ground anymore because we can reference it with a digital system,” says Talsma. “If farmers make a mistake, like forgetting to turn on the fertilizer on their drill or planter, they will have a strip or two in the field where they’re not putting fertilizer down with the seed. To me, it’s not a mistake. It becomes a trial as long as we can map and measure it. That’s what systems like FieldView are all about, it’s being able to map, measure and act on what you’ve learned.”

Tjeersdma likes to do trials on his farm, and says another reason he likes the FieldView platform is because it’s intuitive and connects everything through cloud technology, so he spends less time having to manually program in data from different sources as he had to in the past. This year, when he suspected that he might have some N deficiency problems in his crops, he was able to identify the issue by applying more N in a small area and tracking the response through satellite imagery.

“In that trial area, I could see on the satellite images throughout the season that it went from a red, orange area that’s not looking too good to green, which was healthy and doing well,” he says. “It picked it up right away and so I knew that what I was doing there was making a difference.”

The other big advantage is being able to get more eyes seeing what they are seeing. “It goes back to the interactions that farmers have,” says Talsma. “Because they have so many partners that they’re working with, they have more eyes on it and that’s a huge advantage to learning from what they’re doing.”

How do you digitize the farm?

There are likely lots of other uses for the digitized farm that nobody has even thought of yet. So what’s involved in getting a farm into a digital platform?

Maybe not as much as many farmers think, and it may be an ideal project for wintertime when they have all their annual data in and a bit more time to learn and play around with a new system.

The very first step in digitizing the farm, regardless of what platform a farmer is using, is to map its boundaries. That’s generally a simple process of searching for the farm location through satellite maps that are pre-loaded into the system (similar to searching Google Earth) and then drawing digital boundaries.

In FieldView this is done by simply clicking on the corners of a polygon feature that appears once the farm or field has been created and named in the software, and tracing the outline of that field or farm property. Once the field is mapped, within a day or two the system will populate the farm map with historical satellite imagery going back three years such as vegetation, topography and soil data.

There is a lot a farmer can do with this initial information before he or she begins to add additional data like yields, seeding and fertilizer maps collected on the farm itself.

“If I am starting today, I’m going to start with my yield and my soil,” Talsma says. “Those are the two places where, as we start to gather information and data, we can have a significant impact going forward.”

Most digital systems will provide Normalized Difference Vegetative Index (NDVI) maps that basically show how much biomass is in different areas of the field.

“That NDVI image has a high correlation to yield. So, even if you don’t have yield information, you can use that imagery to see areas of the fields that are higher- or lower-yielding,” says Talsma. “You can go out and soil test in a more strategic way based on the zones that can be identified, then create a fertilizer plan based on what you get back from the soil test. That imagery is not going to tell you what you need to put on, but it can help identify zones that have higher or lower nutrient levels, or areas with higher or lower organic matter that you can explore.”

Then the farmer can begin to load in their own farm’s data. If they have monitors in their seeding or planting tractors, or their sprayers or combines, they are already collecting historical data that can then be manually transferred into a digital farm management platform.

“With Climate FieldView we have an intuitive website that when they put their USB stick into their computer, it compresses the files and brings the data in, then sorts it into planting, seeding, application or harvest data,” says Talsma. “It helps the farmer to bring that historical information in.”

It’s now also possible for that data to be uploaded live in real time as the farm operator seeds, sprays, fertilizes, combines or does any other field operation, and they don’t need to have the latest, most expensive equipment.

If they are using FieldView they can purchase a device called a FieldView Drive that will plug into any piece of equipment from 2005 and connects via Bluetooth or iPad in the equipment which automatically collects and uploads the data as it collects it into FieldView.

“Through the winter months, farmers could set this up, put in the varieties or hybrids they plan on growing and an app collects data as they seed in the spring while the tractor is travelling across the field. The same thing goes for the sprayer or combine; all the data is being collected live,” says Talsma.

What’s the cost?

Talsma says that an annual subscription to FieldView, for example, is $149 and there’s also an upfront cost of around $500 to $750 for a decent iPad to collect live data. The cost to adapt equipment with the FieldView Drive to collect live data and export it automatically to FieldView is around $329.

“Depending on your size of operation, how many seeders or planters you may have in the field, you’re looking at about $1,000 per piece of equipment that you want to collect data in for an initial upfront cost,” says Talsma, who adds the farmer also gets as much support as they need from the Climate FieldView activation team to get them up and running.

Once it’s set up there isn’t much more to do on an annual basis, except updating boundaries if they change, or information about new varieties or hybrids for the upcoming season.

Talsma says the best advice for someone starting out on the digital path is, don’t be afraid of the technology but take it in small bites.

“Don’t do it on your own. There are a lot of experienced farmers out there to rely on and get their feedback, and people that work for FieldView, or whatever you’re looking at in this digital space, will help you get started and answer your questions,” says Talsma.

Tjeerdsma says he found it straightforward to set up his system and he liked the interface with the iPad because it’s something his 71-year-old dad, who he farms with, will be able to use as well. “My dad uses his iPad every day,” he says. “Once I get him onto the system, it will be easy for him to pick it up, which was another reason for using it.”

The post Digitizing the farm appeared first on Country Guide.

But cloud technology is here. It’s happening, and it will create huge opportunities in farming, so we better start to understand a little more.

The cloud acts like an invisible, enormous filing cabinet accessed via the internet. Massive amounts of data can be manipulated and stored there, and it can contain unfathomably complicated programs.

It is much, much more than a cool way to save photos, and it is already changing how we can use data, allowing analytical platforms to organize a large scope of information like never before.

And already the cloud is changing agriculture. Software programs have come on the scene to manage and download farm data from anywhere — data plunked in the cloud and accessible at the office computer, or on advisers’ computers.

These platforms allow for software programs to use this data. For example, Affinity software is part of a program called Compass and it allows farmers to do their crop planning, including what-if scenarios, and to figure out which products and inputs to use.

Using the cloud, this particular software holds and can share field maps (not to mention connecting to software systems offered by equipment manufacturers). It can also access soil test information, input prescriptions and treatments and crop records, and it can track crop inventory in the bin.

Importantly, it also has a comprehensive accounting program in it that can link with management information and can then be password-linked with an accountant.

And, because it is a Microsoft software program in the cloud, even if the Affinity company disappeared tomorrow, the whole Compass program would still be there.

What a powerful capability!

Yet the implications of the cloud become even broader when you start looking at how companies like Amazon (AWS), Compute Canada and Microsoft (Azure) have created sort of virtual machines that they provide and look after, with all the software installed ready to use — and all accessible via a web browser.

These very powerful “virtual machines” allow for massive amounts of data to be processed by artificial intelligence (AI, for short, but a new meaning of those two letters for those of us in animal agriculture). They also allow for what’s called “deep learning.”

Initially released in 2010, Microsoft Azure is one such cloud computing service for building, testing and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres.

University of Saskatchewan computer science professor Tony Kusalik was raised on a farm in southern Alberta and he explains: “The idea with MS Azure and similar facilities (Amazon AWS) is that you don’t need to download the program, and you can use the cloud for more than just storing the data. You can actually do the computation in that virtual space, the cloud.”

There are two ways this can be done. The first is with a program that runs somewhere else (not on your local computer) with software that is accessed through something like a web browser. You don’t have to maintain the software to use it. “You simply start up a web browser, go to the website, enter your information, toggle some button, and the software runs on the computer out there,” says Kusalik. “Soon the results are available and you can look at them, download them.”

The other is through the sort of facility provided by MS Azure and Amazon AWS (and many others) that is more like having your own computer, but not really.

Think of it as a virtual computer that will have a certain CPU, number of cores and a set amount of RAM, just like a real physical computer, although this virtual computer is out in the cloud.

“You can have it pre-provisioned with the software and databases you want, or you can have a basic machine that only has the operating system installed and you provision it with software and upload data,” says Kusalik. “Or you can have a ‘bare metal’ machine where the first thing you do is load on an operating system,” says Kusalik. “A purchaser (user) specifies what he or she wants when he or she makes the purchase. But one does all this via the internet and the actual, physical computer supporting it all is somewhere beyond the horizon.”

Here’s what it makes possible. If you want to use some advanced computer software that requires particular types of hardware or more computing capability than you have locally, now you can rent the necessary hardware on the cloud for the time you need it.

Kusalik likens it to a situation that other farmers will be able to relate to. He has a small trailer for hauling lots of the things he often has to haul, but then he purchased a used tractor in the Medicine Hat area and needed to get it to Saskatoon.

He has three options. He could buy a nice tandem axle trailer and go get the tractor himself. Or he could hire a trucker to pick up the tractor and transport it for him.

But there was also the third option. He could go to his local Flaman dealership and rent a tandem axle trailer. “I’ll hook up the trailer to my pickup, drive down to Medicine Hat, get the tractor, and when the tractor is safely here in Saskatoon, I’ll take the trailer back to Flaman and say ‘thank you,’” Kusalik says, adding “There’s a few details I’ll need to take care of, such as making sure that I have the correct trailer connectors on my pickup to connect to the wiring in the trailer.”

He will also need to treat the trailer carefully, just like it was his own equipment, and he’ll have to be sure he picks the right trailer, so it has the capacity to carry the tractor, “but isn’t overkill.”

Cloud computing services provided by MS Azure and Amazon AWS are like this last option.

Currently, these cloud-based computing services are exceptionally expensive and so are relegated to research and leading-edge companies. But Kusalik says it will likely get progressively cheaper, until the point when a farmer could go into an equipment dealership and be given or buy this service when they purchase a combine, says Tony Kusalik. “Typically, the issue is getting the data up to this platform,” he says.

For now it’s helping scientists like Kusalik learn new ways to help farmers feed the world.

This past summer, president and chief legal officer at Microsoft, Brad Smith, announced that the company is broadening its AI for Earth program with an expanded strategic plan and committing $50 million over the next five years. The goal, via Microsoft Azure, is to put artificial intelligence (AI) technology into the hands of individuals and organizations working to protect our planet, so agriculture is a big part of it.

With its mandate to improve and expand work on climate change, agriculture, biodiversity and/or water challenges, AI for Earth is trying to help monitor, model and manage the earth’s natural systems. “Building on cutting-edge work in Microsoft Research, we’ll help farmers put AI to work not only to better analyze soil and rainfall conditions, but also to use predictive analytics to improve agricultural yields and reduce adverse environmental impact,” says Smith’s announcement. “With the world’s population continuing to grow, these changes cannot come fast enough.”

So far, Microsoft has sponsored over 36 selected researchers and organizations and given them access to its cloud and AI computing resources. In Australia, AI for Earth has already helped Tasmanian ag-tech company The Yield create a system that uses sensors, analytics and apps to produce real-time weather data, right down to field level.

The idea is to help growers make smarter decisions that can reduce their use of water and other inputs while also increasing yields.

“As we look to the future, we’re committed to working with farmers around the world,” says Smith. “We envision a future with broadband connectivity for every farm, and internet sensors for every acre of land.”

This past fall, two University of Saskatchewan computer scientists were selected for these grants, valued at $10,000 each. The research teams also are allowed to use the latest Microsoft technology to create new ways to analyze plants and automatically identify traits related to plant growth, health, resilience and yield. This will help researchers better analyze plant genomics associated with crop traits, such as flowering time, yield, and resistance to stress from drought.

Kusalik and Ian Stavness, associate professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s department of computer science, will get access to various kinds of virtual machines from MS Azure, some with an operating system and various useful software packages installed, and some bare metal machines they can populate with software.

Stavness will use Microsoft Azure cloud computing resources to create new ways to analyze images and videos of plants and crops. The AI capabilities will allow the team to automatically identify traits related to plant growth, health, resilience and yield.

“Having a computer recognize these traits has potential to increase speed, reliability, and precision of trait identification and will provide new opportunities for crop breeders and farmers to directly compare large numbers of individual crops with differences in genetics, growing environment and crop management,” says Stavness.

Kusalik has been using Compute Canada services and is trying out other platforms, including Azure. His team’s goal is to uncover the relationships between plant genes and desirable traits. “We hope the new Azure AI cloud computing platform will help us to enhance deep learning to recognize complex patterns in plant genes so that we can find desirable ones,” says Kusalik. “Finding the links between plant genes and favourable crop traits will help breeders speed up their breeding programs.”

This “deep learning” will find associations between genetics and performance in the field, says Kusalik.

It’s also enabling and improving the process behind scientific research like plant breeding. With access to Azure they’ll be able to test more graphic processor units so they can evaluate which kind works best. They will also be able to figure out how to set up bare-bones virtual machines faster and as easily as possible. “This means in the future a student can walk in with an experiment and in 10 minutes the very complicated program will be ready to go,” says Kusalik.

Improving the processes should eventually play out in better and more availability of cloud-based programs and information. And eventually, this type of computing power will become more affordable and accessible. Theoretically, a farmer might someday be able to walk into a John Deere dealership and along with the equipment will have a long checklist of what’s available computing-wise and get it right there, says Kusalik.

Kusalik, Stavness and their teams of researchers, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students and undergraduate research assistants are part of an innovative research and training program at the Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) that is working to transform crop breeding and provide innovative solutions to national and global food security. The university’s P2IRC is managed by the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) and is funded by the Canada First Excellence Research Fund.

GIFS research is focused on three areas, namely seed, root-soil-microbial interactions, and digital and computational agriculture, with the underlying focus to not only do research for developed agriculture but to help find solutions for farming in underdeveloped countries as well. Founded by PotashCorp, the U of S, and the Government of Saskatchewan, GIFS has attracted over $100 million in funding to date.

The post Cloud farming appeared first on Country Guide.

Cloud computing is coming to the farm. For more information on what cloud computing is, how it might benefit your farm, and what you need to think about before you send your data to the cloud, check out this interview with Kim Keller.

Kim Keller is co-founder of Farm At Hand, an app that allows farmers to manage everything from field records to parts lists with their smartphones. Lisa Guenther caught up with Kim on her family’s farm during spring seeding to get the scoop on cloud computing and why Farm At Hand is free for farmers.

The post VIDEO: Moving your farm data from field to cloud appeared first on Country Guide.

Controller area network (CAN) bus systems originated in the automotive industry, enabling multiple controllers to operate and exchange information tied into a single circuit or “bus.” It’s the same system that made it possible for a mechanic to read a car’s diagnostic fault codes, or for a driver to raise all four windows at once.

It has also been a part of tractor technology for a decade, replacing wire boxes, harnesses and the tangle of wires necessary for one machine to “talk” to another.

Despite not being new, however, the CAN bus system was cited in April 2013 as one of many technologies that are changing agriculture.

“With CAN bus, everything essentially travels on two wires, so we’re all on the same network and everything can talk to everything else,” says Ben Craker, senior global marketing specialist with AGCO. “If you look at connectors for implements today, there might be seven or eight different wires in the implement plug going to the tractor, and there might be three or four going from the terminal on the machine into the wiring harness, and that’s just because there’s generally two different networks on the machine where all of the communications are going on.”

Just as a mechanic can read diagnostic fault codes on a car, farm machinery mechanics can now do the same with a tractor, thanks to CAN bus technology. But the system also provides the opportunity to glean much more, such as data on fuel consumption or on idle versus work time, or engine direct hours or odometer readings, or temperatures or a host of other performance factors.

Increasingly, that kind of information is helpful, whether you’ve got a single tractor or a fleet to monitor and maintain.

“Anything electronic is going to be on this one whole network,” says Craker, who specializes in telemetry and fleet management issues. “It used to be that everything was on its own wire, so if you wanted to communicate with one electronic component on a machine… you had to have all those wires come together into a master control box that would convert everything, and it was really a lot more difficult to do. It was more of an analogue approach than a digital approach.”

• More Country Guide: Connecting the dots

What’s coming?

CAN bus has simplified that process, and a whole new window is opening. Tractors were the logical first step for CAN bus systems, and in the past five years, combines, balers and even sprayers have joined the list of important farm machinery systems where these controllers and software programs can create efficiencies. One manufacturer has even fitted its combines with an automatic controller that can make in-cab adjustments to the sieve, fan and separator settings. 

Craker calls CAN bus technology an incredible opportunity that’s possible through the design of new software and controllers, and the emerging capability of sending, sharing and storing that information.

“A lot of it has to do with the terminal costs and software development which have come down to where the technology is a little more commonplace,” says Craker. “It used to be if you wanted to adjust the concave, you had to go out there, turn a wrench and manually adjust that, so there was no way for a machine to control that. But as sensors and electronic controls have come along, now we’re able to press an electric switch in the cab to move your concave up and down. And then we move to a switch to actually being on the terminal, and once it’s on the terminal, we can start writing software to monitor different sensors on the machine to automatically adjust that kind of thing.” 

Next will be sprayers. Craker notes that most sprayers already have five to seven standard section controls to avoid over- or under-applying, along with variable-rate application capabilities. Those systems have been a part of RoGator and TerraGator models for several years. What’s new is that CAN bus technology can oversee those section controls.

For Craker, the take-home message isn’t as much about how advanced CAN bus technology is. It’s the connectivity and the enormous potential that it brings to the industry. He credits the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF), formed in 2008, as a key driver in working with the equipment industry to standardize an interface that enables different precision ag systems to communicate with one another, regardless of manufacturer.

Seven manufacturers and two equipment associations united to create this international platform, bringing together more than 150 members. The key focus of the AEF now is on ISO bus technology, which would negate the need for different monitors for different implements.

“CAN bus is the underlying technology that makes it all work on the machine,” says Craker, adding that ISO bus is the “next step” in data management technology. “It’s all the connectivity and getting the information from that machine’s bus to the Cloud and, for example, on to mobile devices, that are the new and exciting developments.”

Increased efficiency

What’s also enticing about the CAN bus systems is the increased efficiency a farmer will enjoy, and how that will free up time in the work day. Chris Carrier, marketing manager with New Holland, sees CAN bus technology opening the door on systems that are currently in development, including telematics to streamline information gathering. From his perspective, the remote troubleshooting, or being able to remotely view displays inside the equipment, is a major development.

“You can see where companies are now able to remotely access a display inside the tractor,” says Carrier, who oversees New Holland’s precision land management technologies and T7 series tractors. “Then from a support standpoint, the person at the other end of the phone is better able to help the customer with their issue, rather than the customer explaining what’s on the screen.” 

Carrier also believes the processing of data will be the next big thing, including the use of the Cloud — and there are signs of that already taking shape.

“We’ll be able to build service plans around that,” Carrier explains. “Now the technician is able to see what that fault code is before he goes out to the farm, so at least he has an idea of what he’s coming out there to fix or at least he has the right parts.”

But Cloud-based sharing of data and information will also contribute to subsequent model enhancements. As technicians and dealers begin to aggregate data from a larger number of machines, they can apply that knowledge to tweak specifications and enhance the existing technologies. 

“The whole strategy here is to keep everything connected,” says Carrier. “The CAN bus system already collects a tremendous amount of data in the field, and now we’re going to be able to process that data a lot faster and get it to where that’s going to be the real game changer.”

Foraging in the future

Balers have already made that next step to the ISO bus system, enabling an operator to monitor quality parameters such as moisture, with the potential to apply a preservative to reduce mould.

“It simply allows the baler to talk to the tractor and the tractor to talk to the baler,” explains Craker, again noting the potential for software development on existing technology. “We’re looking at expanding that, looking at what we could do with sensors on tillage equipment, so you could monitor depth and help keep your implement level. Hardly anybody ever goes out and levels a disc after the initial setup, but if we can get some sensors on board, we can make it easier to monitor, we can then start controlling that implement better and get better, more consistent performance.”

This article first appeared in the 2014 Soybean Guide

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