Braintree Business Development Center hosted the Northeast Ohio Agribusiness Forum at Der Dutchman Restaurant in Bellville Friday morning. Dr. Scott Shearer, Professor and Chair at The Ohio State University Department of Food and Biological Engineering was the featured speaker with the subject “The Role of Big Data in Agriculture and the Opportunities to Feed an Increasing World Population.”
Shearer discussed the Global Agriculture Productivity (GAP) report released by the Global Harvest Initiative. “The ramifications of this report are pretty substantial,” said Shearer. “What it’s suggesting here, combined increase in population, and also growing middle class worldwide, they’re suggesting that we are going to have to double agricultural production in 40 years.”
Shearer said the National Science Foundation referred to “Big Data” as “large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and/or distributed data sets generated from instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources.”
As for the agricultural impact, Shearer explained that with collected data and technology improvements, something as simple as planting corn can become high tech. Not only can a farmer use a Seedsense monitor to view how accurately seed is dropped into the furrow, but a secondary sensor can report how much down force is on a row unit as it travels through a field, as well as how much additional force is required for a row unit to engage soil. Additionally, planters are available that allow for planting multiple types of corn at the same time, with an auto-steer capability that ensures the rows are accurate.
“This isn’t futuristic. This is today. It’s on the market,” said Shearer. “Technology is causing us to rethink things totally.”
Drones, also known as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), may also have agricultural applications, noted Shearer, who said that Woolpert of Dayton, Ohio is experimenting with UAS in agriculture. “They are counting corn plants when they emerge,” added Shearer. “They created a map of every corn plant that grew.”
Autonomous, or unmanned, tractors are also being explored. “We could plant 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as long as the conditions are favorable,” noted Shearer.
“Today we are generating about half a kilobyte per corn plant of data,” added Shearer, who noted that the corn, wheat, and soybean crops in the United States all totaled up to approximately three petabytes of data per year. Shearer speculated that a 50 percent market penetration of UAS imaging could be a 2.2 billion dollar per year business and generate approximately 18 petabytes of data per year.
“Just generating the data doesn’t get you where you need to be,” noted Shearer. “You have to analyze the data and help producers make decisions.”
Shearer’s presentation evoked quite a bit of discussion as attendees mingled afterward.
Edward Klesack, a local farmer and regular Northeast Ohio Agribusiness Forum attendee, commented that autonomous tractors are something he would perhaps utilize on his own farm.
“That would be perfect for my farm. I could contract with someone that owns the stuff to come out to my 100 acres of beans, plant it, spray it, and harvest it when the time comes,” said Klesack. “It would be much faster and less expensive by hiring them to come in than it would be for me to own, maintain and keep the farm equipment.”
Pam Mack, a local grower, said she found the presentation interesting.
“I’m always intrigued by technology and the advancement of technology. There are pros and cons of it, of course. The pros would be that they get more yield by the innovation of the tractors, and they want you to get more yield because of the population increase and the demand for food,” said Mack. “The downside of that would be employment, and what the innovation would do to workers. If you have drones or automated tractors out there doing a job, you don’t need physical laborers.”
Shearer said he often gets mixed responses from producers. “There are those business people really engaged in technology that say, ‘Man! We really need access to this,’ and then on the other hand there are some producers that their mouths drop open and they are thinking to themselves, ‘How am I ever going to compete in this world that’s coming?’”
The next Northeast Ohio Agribusiness Forum will be held April 25, 7:30 a.m. – 9 a.m., at the Der Dutchman Restaurant, 720 State Route 97 W., Bellville. The topic will be “Centralized Operational Web Based Technologies Promoting Animal Traceability.” To register to attend, call Bob Leach or Terrie Bonfiglio at 419-525-1614 or email Bob Leach at bleach@braintreepartners.org.
“There are those business people really engaged in technology that say, ‘Man! We really need access to this,’ and then on the other hand there are some producers that their mouths drop open and they are thinking to themselves, ‘How am I ever going to compete in this world that’s coming,’” said Dr. Scott Shearer.
