But with that connectivity comes a wave of data harvested through that equipment.
From that come questions about where farmers, whose businesses have often generated much of that data, sit in the ownership and use of it.
Areas like precision agriculture, dairy herd cow information and farm production data all represent avenues for equipment and data companies to build clear profiles of product use rates, animal or crop responses and ultimately even farm profitability and farmer spending behaviour.
United States farmers were already witnessing it.
Late last year two behemoths in the agri-sector, John Deere and Monsanto, combined forces for Deere to buy the precision agriculture company Precision Planting.
Deere would in turn allow Monsanto to have exclusive, real time data connectivity between Deere equipment and Monsanto’s Climate FieldView software platform that lets farmers enter data on fertiliser, crop and spray treatments.
Massey University information technology lecturer Dr Teo Susnjak maintains some caution both around the Internet of Things and beyond to what it might mean for farmers who are the source of the data generated by this new web of interconnected machinery.
His concerns lay with where farmers sat as the ultimate source of the data flow.
“It is a huge challenge that is currently unresolved.
“Farmers do usually have some varying levels of control but who ultimately owns it and is allowed to profit from it is yet to be defined.”
He raises the question about new services or data-products developed as a result of a company having access to that raw data.
“Do those original farmers whose IP has contributed to the continuous stream of data they provide, get a share of that data-product’s earnings?”
He sees two-tier business models developing with new hardware. It is a model where the earnings from the secondary data-products potentially outstrip the revenue from the actual on-site hardware solutions.
“The FitBit health monitor is an example in the consumer sector of this already happening – you agree to pass over a lot of your personal data for their use and possible commercialisation.”
However, there was still some way to go before all aspects of farm businesses were captured and packaged for commercial gain.
“The Internet of Things is probably at the top of the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing but there are challenges, however.
“Farmers do usually have some varying levels of control but who ultimately owns it and is allowed to profit from it is yet to be defined.”
Dr Teo Susnjak
Massey University
“It is not so much the hardware – the problem is the lack of standards out there with different equipment and sensors using different communication and data format protocols.
“The protocols differ at the moment, which slows application development. We don’t have one big dominant player who can lay down the required, unifying standard.”
He drew loose parallels with the role Google's Android and Apple’s IOS platforms were able to monopolise and simplify the mobile phone market and thereby accelerate the innovation in that sector.
He believed there would ultimately be agreement among manufacturers on some sort of protocols.
Once that was achieved he was in no doubt the floodgates would open on the ability to develop applications that optimised and predicted outcomes for farm systems with seamless data access.
“The agri-sector is one that has such a myriad of different data sources.
“Once we agree on protocols, the sophisticated algorithms and very sophisticated cloud storage systems will mean we can analyse these multiple scenarios for farmers on the ground.”
Multiple data feeds from several regions on temperature and rainfall, backed with individual cow data on milk volume would provide insightful and ultimately predictive tools for better estimation of a region’s or even the country’s true milk production at any point.
It was a tool that would have been welcomed this summer after predictions of an El Nino constriction on milk volumes stand severely challenged, thanks to good rain through Waikato, Bay of Plenty and even in dry Canterbury.
In an increasingly volatile dairy market, such “real time” data would also be invaluable beyond the farmgate in estimating the effect on volume sensitive payout values.
Half a century of technological advances in analytics and processing capabilities mean he does not think the data flood will be overwhelming and farmers will have valuable, insightful intelligence.
However, his concerns lie more with where farmers sat as the ultimate source of the data flow.
