Influencing Modern Agriculture with Data

Data is important for organizations as they utilize analytics to improve decision-making, study repeated customer activity, track buyer satisfaction and identify opportunities for new products and services to meet growing market needs, giving them routes to implement new systems. In modern agriculture business, the market is continuing to evolve, allowing farmers to embrace data-driven solutions.

One of the many uses that modern farming and agribusiness has for data science is increasing productivity and innovation. To increase profits, agribusinesses, farmers and growers must leverage data and innovation to improve productivity. Technology such as soil sensors, GPS-equipped tractors and weather tracking are now available, giving those who utilize them unprecedented visibility into operations that are difficult to track. Access to these statistics gives farmers insight into exactly when, where and how to plant crops and harvest them, down to the granular level.

Access to today’s data also gives farmers a greater understanding of environmental issues and changes. Predictions regarding formerly unpredictable and intense weather changes that greatly impact the agribusiness supply chain are now available at the touch of a button. With this knowledge, farmers can prepare ahead of time for anything from a simple storm or a natural disaster and can maximize on loss prevention. Monitoring the health of crops in real-time and resource management are other environmental-related statistics modern technology can assist with.

Improving management of the supply chain using modern data analytics is another big strategy used by agribusinesses today. While it is very siloed and could be improved in the areas of collaboration and communication, the introduction of precision agriculture technologies, such as data analytics, have made a huge impact. Farmers are now able to follow and collect data on their crops and other products as they move through the supply chain, giving them so much more control and room to communicate with retailers, distributors and more.

Lastly, and arguably the most important, modern science has allowed agribusinesses to track and work on reducing their waste in ways never seen before. Waste reduction is essential for businesses to remain profitable, and according to Proagrica, “through the incorporation of a data analytics strategy, agribusinesses gain the ability to answer sales-related questions through data from a single platform, creating the opportunity to make timely, evidence-based decisions. They also gain visibility of pricing, which allows for decisions to be made based on profitability. Additionally, the right analytics will uncover opportunities at the customer level and inform the sales team in order to increase market share.”

Data is essential to every aspect of our society and continues to influence changes to the daily lives of people everywhere. Enterprises such as big science, medical care, businesses and even our central government would not be functioning bodies without statistics. While we see amazing progress thanks to data in the world of agriculture, an important next step would be to continue to implement these tools toward more action in saving our planet.

This contributed blog post was written by Emma Mitchell from the Tehama Group Communications.