Digital Farming
From self-driving tractors to agricultural robots to evolving software platforms, digital farming is revolutionizing the farming industry.
And someone who is leading the way is John Raines, chief commercial officer of The Climate Corporation. His team is actively working to increase the value of digital farming tools for wheat producers.
John recently spoke about the future of digital farming and the Climate FieldView™ platform in The Modern Acre podcast.
He said that for the first time ever in farming history, The Climate FieldView platform is allowing farmers to answer questions they couldn’t before and in real time.
Did I plant what I meant to plant at the right population?
Did spraying my crop have an impact?
What are the yield results?
And now, with their proprietary models, they can perform deep science analytics and give customers prospective info that can help them with seed placement (what to plant, where to plant and how to plant it) and disease management.
They’re also able to use artificial intelligence and in the near future will have the ability to take a drone or satellite image of a field and potentially tell a farmer what disease is on their farm, how much it’s covering, and help the farmer decide whether or not to spray a fungicide.
And that’s just the beginning of the type of value that can be unlocked with data science and management on the farm.
Where It’s Going Next
In the next 12 months, The Climate Corporation hopes to grow their connectivity around the world to bring more value to more farmers. FieldView has been in the U.S. for four years, Canada for three, Brazil for two, and it also recently launched in Argentina. FieldView is also available in 15 countries in Europe.
One of their goals this year is to search for more partners to drive the value of what they do, which is to create efficiency, probability and productivity and to help farmers be more sustainable and limit risk through the use of data science.
Currently, there are Climate FieldView research farms in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and York, Nebraska, that run WestBred® wheat trials that are testing disease susceptibility of different varieties and measuring responses to various Bayer fungicides.
Other 2020 Trends:
The idea of a self-driving tractor may cause some doubt, but it’s more realistic than we think. Compared to a car, tractors would not have to be wary of pedestrians or other vehicles. And with ever-developing technology like GPS, you can create a border ensuring they do not go off track.
According to MarketsandMarkets, “The agricultural robots market size is projected to grow from USD 7.4 billion in 2020 to USD 20.6 billion by 2025. Reducing the number of labor, growing population, and increasing requirement for high productivity from the existing farm areas are factors fueling the growth of the market.”
According to the Climate Congress website, “Carbon farming is farming in a way that reduces greenhouse gas emissions or captures and holds carbon in vegetation and soils.” And it’s becoming widely popular across the world as more people are becoming more environmentally conscious.
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