Big data and big agriculture

1. Summary

The opportunities brought about by data collection and analytics have touched every market, from health care to retail. And while the farm may not be the first place people consider as a prime target for IT and cloud services, opportunities clearly exist. In fact farms are heavily reliant on small improvements in operational efficiencies and processes in order to increase crop yields, manage risk, and create greater profit. This is particularly true for large-scale agribusiness where commodity crops are involved and small process adjustments have large impacts in terms of production.

This report reviews a host of data driven services, which can have a valuable role to play on the farm.

Key findings include:

• As the global population increases, weather volatility grows, and petroleum dependent agriculture is increasingly sensitive to fossil fuel pricing, there will be more incentives to leverage new technology to increase crop yields and manage risk.
• Opportunities for big data applications in agriculture include benchmarking, sensor deployment and analytics, and using better models to manage crop failure risk.
• Key challenges for companies entering the market include proving the effectiveness of data centric technologies to improve yield as well as building trust with farmers.

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