I heard this quote recently at a forum on private sector involvement in agriculture and it has really stuck in my head. Partly because it is a great one liner and terrific for a tweet, but also because the private agronomist Vivienne McCollum who used it interpreted those options a bit differently than I would.
For starters, one of the things I learnt from our recent workshops about big data and Digital Ag is that we each have our personal vision of what those phrases mean. Some people have in their head visions of driverless tractors and robots swarming paddocks zapping weeds, others have visions of gates and pumps being controlled from their iPhone while they’re miles away. Others see it as a way of promoting our grain to overseas markets, or ticking compliance boxes with the minimum of effort. Will Digital Ag provide a few opportunities for increasing production or will it lead to industry wide transformational change? Who knows? Looks like we will just have to suck it and see.
There are many Digital Ag applications available at the moment that could be seen as a lolly; something yummy and fun but not really doing us much good or lasting very long. This was my initial thinking about auto steer for the tractor. I got that one wrong. I thought of it as more of a fun gimmick that wouldn’t save much money but was pretty cool. The benefits in terms of time, fuel and chemical savings are significant but nothing compared to that less tangible benefit, freeing up farmers’ brain time and minimising operator fatigue. Drones are still in the lolly phase, as we try to work out what real benefits they can have to farm profitability, although those harvest videos put to music lift tired spirits during that busy time, likewise the recent photo of that wedge tail preparing to take down the drone has really got the twitter feed humming.
What about Digital Ag as a Panadol, the short-term fix for an immediate, acute problem but not necessarily fixing the underlying cause? Grain farming is a mix of immediate day-to-day decisions (varietal choice, fertiliser rates etc.) that feed into very complex long-term decisions related to sustainability, ongoing profitability, rural decline etc. Sensor technologies, automated systems, artificial intelligence will all give us loads of information but will they be able to help us make better decisions for our future? Will our future data generation be too much of a good thing? A great example from CSIRO is in the genomics space where an entire plant genome can be sequenced in a matter of days, but the data analysis takes years to fully comprehend the latent value of that data. Likewise will Digital Ag, like so many great developments in agriculture, lead to ongoing population loss in rural areas?
Digital Ag as heroin was where Vivienne’s analogy got me a bit worried. She defined it as something you couldn’t do without, that you really needed in your life. I couldn’t shake the negative association with heroin ruining people’s lives as they struggle to fork out increasing amounts of money to dealers to support their growing habit. Hopefully that is not our future with Digital Ag although as our reliance on automated systems increases, so does our vulnerability to system breakdowns and their usually unintended consequences.
I think I might switch to Digital Ag; lolly, Panadol or coffee? Coffee is definitely something I need each day and I like to think it improves my performance.
