JUST like any other business, the farming business also needs information so that the farmers could make intelligent decisions in each and every step of the agriculture supply chain. And just like any other business, information starts with data as the raw input that will be processed.
The opposite, of course, is guess work that would often result in dumb decisions.
Perhaps in the old days, the farmers would base their decision making on their past experiences and nothing more. That is as far as the production side is concerned, because the marketing side is another story altogether. As we know it now however, the production side and the marketing side are just two components of the agriculture supply chain.
Looking back, I think that no one would have imagined that all the technological advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) would eventually become applicable to the farming business.
Actually as I see it, computerization being the outcome of ICT would eventually benefit not just office automation but also home automation, factory automation and farm automation. Looking at what is already in the horizon, it is already apparent that farm automation will eventually utilize Big Data, data analytics, the internet cloud and the Internet of Things (IOT). What that also means is that automated farming will become cloud based and web based.
In the old days of client-server architecture, it would have been a problem to fund the acquisition of both clients and servers, particularly if the former will be procured in the form of Personal Computers (PCs).
In those days, any business that needed to run a computer network would have to put up their data centers that were actually very expensive. Nowadays however, any business could just make use of the internet cloud, in effect sparing them the costs of building and maintaining their own data servers. The costs of maintaining clients have also gone down, considering that nowadays, tablets and smartphones could already be used.
As we already know, agriculture related historical data is already available from various private and public sources, but these are not yet processed into useful information. This is where Big Data comes in, using data analytics.
Historical data is not enough however, because we still need to collect new data to augment and update the existing data sets. This is where IOT comes in; by way of millions if not trillions of small devices that could feed data into servers that would in turn host massive databases. As earlier mentioned, all of these servers will be hosted in the internet cloud, fully accessible from any device that would act as the clients.
From what I know, farmers in Israel have full access to all the information that they need in order to make intelligent decisions in connection with their farming data. From soil data to wind data to humidity data to rainfall data to market data, they have access to it all.
Included in soil data is the salinity and fertility, among other information that the farmers need to choose the best crop to plant in a particular hectare depending on the season and the time of the year. Included in the market data are the prospective prices of the crops assuming that these would be harvested at a certain time in the future.
All throughout the growing season, moisture data is detected through sensors that could also be instructed by a server to deliver either plain irrigation water or water mixed with liquid fertilizers.
If you are familiar with the programmable and addressable features of cable television, you will understand that these are the same features that are used in delivering water to particular crops in specific areas of the Israeli farmlands.
The system is programmable because it could be programmed to deliver water if and when the moisture of the soil reaches a certain dryness threshold. It is addressable because the water could be delivered to any section of the farm grid, in a way akin to the addressing technology used in internet protocol (IP).
That is the technology in Israel that has been in use for so many years now, probably using Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). I could only imagine what will happen now, if and when PLCs are combined with IOT.
Here in the Philippines, PLCs are already being used to automate manufacturing processes, and I would not be surprised if some modernized farms are already using these for washing, cleaning, grading and sorting and even all the way to packing.
Unlike a factory wherein the controls of PLCs are limited to the confines of the factory buildings, the open farm areas would tend to be wider and it would really need IOT to gather data in all areas.
How far away are we from using smart farming in the Philippines?
The good news is that the technologies are already here as I earlier enumerated. The bad news however is that there does not seem to be enough appreciation of these technologies yet.
My wish, however, is for our country to start using these technologies not for the sake of using technology per se, but for the sake of food security on one hand and for the sake of eradicating hunger on the other hand./PN
