Thursday, March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL: Agrigate delivers collective wisdom

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In the words of John Clarke (alias Fred Dagg) New Zealand dairy farmers “don’t know how lucky they are”.
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The new data platform Agrigate comes under that heading though it is due to good management rather than luck.

Two big farmer-owned co-operatives, Fonterra and LIC, with a common shareholding have developed the data platform to improve the speed and quality of onfarm decision-making. Rural professionals, themselves understandably delighted by the opportunities, have pointed out that Agrigate could happen only in NZ.

Or, if it was developed overseas, farmers would have to pay handsomely for the service. That aspect of payment, which Agrigate said would be delayed, optional and in the nature of cost recovery, seems to have upset some dairy farmers.

“Typical … the companies collecting our data and selling it back to us,” was a theme on Twitter.

Intuitively, the complaining farmers acknowledge that data aggregation has value in the modern era – they have grown up with milk collection figures, test results, pasture plate-metering and the like. They probably remember that oft-repeated business maxim – you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

But it is the comparative and therefore predictive dimensions in aggregated data where wealth lies. The farmer’s brain is never going to hold the all observations, measurements and outcomes that hundreds of nearby farms generate but they will build up over time on Agrigate.

An analogy could be the wisdom that old farmers have after a lifetime’s experiences and consequences. Put all of those old-timers together in a local hall and the comparison begins to make sense. Getting on for 200 years of NZ farming has resulted in a unique, Kiwi way of doing things.

Observation, adaptation and co-operation are among the best attributes and for breathing new life into these enduring themes Agrigate deserves a warm welcome.

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