Farm tech profit quandary

The latent profit potential in digital technology and big data remains untapped while farmers baulk at sharing their production data, according to Australian Farm Institute general manager research Richard Heath.

“There are significant trust barriers” which he said prevents farmers sharing data with supply chain participants such as marketers or processors, or even information sharing networks designed to deliver financial gains.

“There needs to be a good a value proposition to get over that trust barrier, and that requires data. But farmers aren’t providing data because they don’t have trust in sharing data,” Mr Heath explained.

He said the US farmer-to-farmer data sharing subscription service Farmers Business Network is a good example of the sort of value proposition that could help foster confidence in data-driven tech take up.

The Network bills itself as an independent body that “levels the playing field for farmers by democratising farm information and enabling transparent national access to manufacturer direct prices on farm inputs… from 55 million acre-events of real world data from the FBN community of farms”.

Essentially farmers sign up by agreeing to share agronomic and purchase data in return for analytics that can help them adopt best practice, covering seed performance, yield benchmarking, fertiliser performance, breakdown of input prices and so on.

“The network claims its farmers get a 15 to 40 per cent saving by using that data, though changed purchase decisions, or farming practices, and so on,” Mr Heath said.

But data sharing services like the Farmers Business Network will be harder to establish in Australia than in the U.S, he said.

“With the sheer quantity of farmers in the U.S there is much lower threshold for the percentage of needed to contribute to get good data and meaningful results, which then gets other farmers on board. Australia will need a far higher percentage of farmers to contribute to get meaningful results.”

A similar scenario can be viewed across the supply chain.

“The value proposition at a farm level for getting digital ag to work is still undefined,” Mr Heath said.

Australian Farm Institute is convening the national initiative  P2D – accelerating precision agriculture to decision agriculture.

The project will conduct a nationwide survey of primary producers and support industries to assess the technology as well as red tape and connectivity challenges. All 15 Rural Development Corporations (RDCs) have signed on to support P2D, which will be funded by the federal Agriculture Department’s Rural R&D for Profit program.

P2D will comprise a series of smaller projects. Mr Heath said a key component will be its investigation of the legal aspects of data access.

“There is virtually no legal precedent For breaches of ag data anywhere in the world,” he explained.

“One thing that is certain, and that is data doesn’t have a property right. It isn’t an asset that you can own, but you can control access to it.”

P2D investigation of data access will be led by Leanne Wiseman of Griffith University and Jay Sanderson of the University of Sunshine Coast.

“Farm data has become one of the most valuable things a farmer can harvest because of its ability to predict business outcomes and increase farm profits,” said Associate Professor Wiseman.

“However, recent surveys suggest that concerns around protection and privacy are the biggest barrier to data sharing.”

She said new government regulations for unfair contract terms for small business consumers has increased the onus on technology providers to make their terms-of-use more user friendly, including those relating to data access.

“There’s a golden opportunity here to ensure that future terms-of-use contracts are designed to meet the needs and concerns of farmers.”

The P2D project aims to develop targeted advice to farmers around data access and to develop ways to remove barriers to data use and boost adoption of digital technologies.

It’s a loudly buzzing phrase often uttered breathlessly by marketing types, but what exactly does it mean?

Mr Heath said while ‘big data’ isn’t a perfection conceptual description “I don’t know if there is an easy alternative.

“It does manage to get across the difference between where we’ve been and where we are headed.”

He said if you think of ag’s previous tech wave precision agriculture as ‘little data’, with farm level information collected by yield monitors, big data can be thought of the as the aggregation of the little data.

“Once you combine information from many farms and many regions it becomes genuine big data and the analysis of that can derive totally different things than the analysis of what the small data at a farm level would, just based on the scale,” Mr Heath said.

P2D is holding consultation workshops across the country, which will focus on region-specific industries, but not the exclusion of other contributions.

P2D will also conduct a nationwide farm survey around digital technology in agriculture, which has been likened to the Grains Research and Development Corporation’s seminal no till survey in 2008.

Remaining workshops: