Our COO Will’s flight into Emerald for AgTech26 came down through fog so thick that the ground only showed when the plane was almost on it. He spent the day among farmers and on a panel, and the question that kept coming up was one you may recognise from your own farm. Between ag data platforms and whatever the supply chain passes back to you, there is probably plenty of data on your operation already, and the useful question is whether any of it tells you something about how that operation is going.
The panel was moderated by Kara-Glenn Worth from the TNQ Drought Hub, with Hamish Munro from Pairtree and Eitan Dan from CropX alongside Will. AI came up early, and with it water. In parts of the US, data centres and farms are drawing on the same reserves, and Eitan said, anecdotally, that some tech companies there have begun paying for water efficiency work with the farmers they share a supply with. Something like that could well reach Australia, so it is one to keep an eye on.
Nicola Jones-Crossley from Quantum Australia asked what data is still missing, both for farmers and for the businesses around them in the supply chain. Will’s answer came from both sides of his work. The gap he pointed to is regional and commodity-specific insight that shows you how your own system is tracking against others like it, which he described as the bigger picture. What exists now, from ag data platforms and the information that comes back through the supply chain, is useful for the daily running of a farm.
That bigger picture does not exist yet, and the reason is time. It only starts to mean something once many producers have contributed their data over time. Will raised it as a direction for the industry as a whole, and it is one he returns to often at Ruminati.
In the meantime, the comparison Ruminati supports today is your own figure from one year to the next. That is the part of the picture that can already tell you something about your own operation, and on Ruminati your data stays yours and you choose who sees it.
