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Eat Their Dust: Farmers Set To Reap Big Benefits With The Internet Of Things

Oracle

The next time you’re driving down a country road and see a bucolic scene of a farmer tending his crop in a shiny tractor as hawks circle above, keep in mind that the tractor is likely programmed to drive itself, the farmer is on a mobile device checking soil moisture or nutrient levels in different areas of his land, and that information is being relayed by sensors placed throughout the field. And those hawks could very well be drones.

Welcome to modern farming. Or the vision of what farming could become in the era of the Internet of Things.

“Precision farming”—using technology and data to monitor plant health, optimize irrigation schedules and amounts, monitor heat and cold, pinpoint and address pest threats, monitor nutrient levels in soil, and much more—has been around since the 1990s.

Many farmers already use global positioning and autosteer systems to maximize the number of rows in their field (and therefore increase yields), and to enable them to work at night or in the fog. Hooked up to “smart” equipment that precisely disperses pesticides or plant seeds, this technology is saving farmers serious money and time.

The Internet of Things has the potential to take precision farming to the next level. Seeing this potential, investors poured more than $2 billion into agtech companies in the first half of 2015, which is almost as much as was invested in this sector in all of 2014, according to agtech investment news site AgFunderNews (which is affiliated with an online investment platform).

Drones Monitor Crop Health

A big chunk of this year’s agtech investment is going to satellite imagery and big data ventures, but drone technology is attracting more and more interest. In fact, the winner of the Innovative World Technologies category in the 2015 SXSW Accelerator competition (sponsored by Oracle) was SLANTRANGE, which provides farmers with in-depth information and analytics on crop health using low-cost drones.

In July, Forbes hosted an invitation-only AgTech Summit in drought-plagued California, bringing together leaders in the tech and agriculture fields to discuss the world’s biggest agricultural challenges and the ways in which technology can address them. The possibilities for IoT applications were a big topic.

But possibilities and reality are very different things. The Internet of Things may be today’s bright shiny new thing—brimming with promise and a magnet for investors, only to soon get skewered for failure to deliver.

For the last two years, research firm Gartner put the Internet of Things at the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” position on its annual Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, indicating we should expect to see a wave of stories about negative experiences with first-generation products, followed by a period of disillusionment with the movement.

Of course, hyped technologies tend to spawn a lot of business ideas—good, bad, and silly. Some of the failures will be good ideas that are just before their time. Some will be solutions in search of a problem. Then there are the great solutions to big problems that still won’t get traction in their target market.

For an agricultural IoT solution to avoid becoming another of those great ideas that never takes root, technology developers should keep these things in mind:

  • Farming is a very low-margin business. Average farm gross income in 2012 was about $200,000, but average production expenses were $156,000, according to the US Department of Agriculture. And like any business, making decisions based on data rather than instinct (even if that instinct is rooted in decades of experience) can potentially avoid some high-dollar mistakes.
  • Tangible ROI is crucial. Farmers need to understand exactly how agtech will benefit their business’s bottom line. Without clear and compelling communications and evidence, farmers won’t bite.
  • The technology must provide useful information. Lots of data is fine and good, but what’s needed is analysis. Pretty maps will get farmers only so far.
  • Ease of use is critical. The tools need to be intuitive. Farmers are incredibly busy running complex operations; this is no desk job.
  • What happens to the data? Does the farmer own it, or does a technology company, farm equipment company, or seed company own it? How will that data be protected—or used by third parties?

The reality is that IoT technologies aimed at the consumer world—such as self-driving cars and smart refrigerators—may grab a lot of media attention, but it’s the B2B applications for IoT that can create far more value, according to a recent report by McKinsey & Company.

And farming is, well, fertile ground.

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