Farming has always been smart – the landscape has been shaped by the ‘smart’ decisions of generations – hedgerows and field boundaries often traced the line between differing soil types for example, or ancient woodland is on poor or difficult soils that couldn’t be farmed.
There is no doubt that farming, and the technology it utilises, is changing. The term ‘smart farming’ is increasingly used to describe the trends towards collecting and using increasing amounts of data, carrying out operations with increasing accuracy or creating detailed maps to help with management decisions. Future wise it even goes one step further with autonomous vehicles and machinery undertaking the work remotely.
GPS
The building block of modern smart farming is most certainly GPS, without it a whole host of other technologies would not exist, at least not in their current form. Many were around before GPS, but were complex, expensive or impractical – think controlled traffic and the Dowler Gantry tractor as an example.
Whether it is a simple light bar guidance system being used for parallel passes across a field, or a fully integrated RTK guidance system giving 2cm repeatable pass to pass accuracy, the initial target is the same – to be smart and reduce overlap and increase efficiency.
But move away from simply steering a machine accurately and use GPS to record the location of something in a field and suddenly the possibilities are endless and there is the possibility of mapping pretty much anything you can think of. Such as soil samples, soil type, yield, crop inputs, where the combine unloaded and in which direction, or even where the tractor driver stopped for 10 minutes. The only thing it can not tell you is whether they stopped to change a shear bolt or to have a quick sleep.
Suddenly, with all of the data that it is now possible to collect, the ‘smart’ part is not the ability to collect it or draw highly accurate maps; it is what do with all them and what do they mean.
What are the next steps?
To really utilise the technology we have available to us, we need to stop and work out what it is we need to do, or know because the technology is now smarter than us and it can be easy to spend more than the technology will make in return. Simple technology such as GPS steering can have instant paybacks from efficiency gains, less machinery wear or operator fatigue, but the more complex technology such as yield and soil maps can leave us with more questions than answers.
One thing is for sure with modern smart farming – we can spend a lot of time collecting data and producing colourful maps that dissect the farm up to how it would probably have looked on our ancestor’s farm maps, or to drive in arrow straight lines with little overlap – like they used too. The difference is we are doing it over a larger area, faster, for longer and under increasing pressure to reduce inputs, increase yields and produce the end product cheaper.
Farm smarter, not harder – the horse was swapped for a tractor. Is it time to swap the driver for a robot?
