MANY of us know South Korea is home to Samsung, a company at the leading edge of technological development.
So it was apt that one of the sessions at the World Dairy Summit I recently attended in Daejon was on information and communications technology and smart farming.
Just as interesting were some of the discussions in the International Dairy Federation business meetings before the summit. A lot of the talk focused on the technology space and, in particular, the challenge at the farm level with data standards and shifting data around in the farm setting.
We have been having these same discussions in New Zealand. In fact, some of the solutions we’ve generated in that field are possibly ahead of other countries.
Unfortunately, that work has stalled of late.
If we expect farmers to comply with customer and societal demands on proving adherence to various standards then we need to rev up this work again.
Farmers need to be able to shift their data from one platform to another in simple ways, to be able to easily share data with others without the need to produce multiple reports or fill in reams of paper forms for many different groups asking the same sorts of things.
But it’s not just a compliance thing, it’s also about making your business run smarter and faster and giving farmers time to do more things they want to do.
The key to the whole concept of sharing data is obviously trust and speaking the same language. We have had two approaches to that.
On the trust side it was about creating the NZ Farm Data Code of Practice.
Firms would apply to get this seal and farmers would then know the firms that achieve it have good security for the farmers’ data they hold or generate through their products or system.
It actually covers a bit more than that but, for the sake of simplicity, let’s just stick to that.
Next, through the NZ Farm Data Standards, we agreed on what the terms and wording of various things would be.
So, for example, you are not going to be able to share data between two computer programmes if one has rising two-year-old youngstock and the other just calls them heifers or something like that.
The farming terminology needs to be standard and the tech geek computer language also needs to be standard.
I was on the working group that helped put all this together then was on the board that oversaw the running of the two.
But, as I mentioned, progress has stalled.
At the same time but under a slightly different group work was going on around a project that started as a data locker but then changed to a data linker.
That was where the farmer-facing ability to shift data from one place to another would happen.
Again, it has been happening for a while but nothing really concrete has landed as yet and this has all been developed with your levy money – both DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb NZ.
At the same time we have commercial platforms such as Agrigate from Fonterra and LIC. It makes business-to-business connections to share info and turns it into actionable data or metrics.
So, while it sounds similar to the data linker, it is actually a step above.
Data linker won’t replace it or compete against it but data linker could provide the platform for other companies to create similar data aggregation/dashboard type programmes that could compete against Agrigate.
Take that slightly messy NZ situation and broaden it to the world and you get an inkling of how confusing the international scene is.
The worry I see is that some firms with some key products or key points of contact with farmers can lock farmers into using only certain products or services if they want their data shifted easily and smartly.
I use this analogy. Imagine if you could connect devices to your home wifi network only if they were the same brand as your router.
That’s where I fear we are headed in the faming space.
I want to buy the best product/device/service that suits my needs and if it meets the right standards then ideally it should be able to work with or put data into other devices or systems.
So what needs to happen is that all the interested parties come together and chart a path forward and it would be damn handy if farmers were to give them the appropriate encouragement.
