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NE South Dakota | Ag Sense a South Dakota company that provides precision irrigation equipment was on the front page of the San Antonio News this week during Commodity Classic Ag Show. The article below interviews the owner Terry Schiltz. Check out the web site at www.agsense.net
This product should be a great (ROI) return on investment for anyone with irrigation systems.
Farming moves to the cloud
Bob Owen / San Antonio Express-News
Terry Schiltz, owner and president of AgSense, a Cloud-based irrigation hardware and software solution provider, speaks on modern farming at the Commodity Classic and Trade Show at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center.
By Lynn Brezosky
February 28, 2014 | Updated: February 28, 2014 9:16pm
SAN ANTONIO — The gee-whiz days of high-tech GPS tractors, precision seed planters and text-messaging irrigation systems have been supplanted by the realization that these farm machines are collecting reams of data with potentially revolutionary uses.
“The bells and whistles kind of overtook the real reason precision ag existed, and that was the collection of data,” said Steve Cubbage, owner of Missouri-based Prime Meridian, which specializes in precision agriculture data.
Cubbage was a panelist at a session on using cloud-computing for farming — part of the 2014 Commodity Classic, which concludes Saturday at the Convention Center.
“Auto-steer was way more cool than the data at the time, and now ... guys are just waking up and saying 'Oh, I've got something here,'” Cubbage said. “It wasn't about hardware so much as what we could do with the data.”
Cloud-computing allows users to store large amounts of data online without owning a server, usually through contracts with providers.
Some providers that specialize in monitoring and making use of farm data, such as South Dakota-based AgSense LLC.
“Everybody gets caught up in 'What is the cloud thing?'” AgSense President Terry Schiltz said. “Well, it's not really a cloud. It's just a place where I can get my data and do it quicker and easier and more efficient.”
For Roric Paulman, a Nebraska farmer and fellow panelist, it's been a way of channeling data into decisions that affect everything from purchasing to planting to planning the next crop.
“We have actually pushed the window in terms of integrating those kinds of decisions down to the tractor level and also the planting level,” Paulman said.
Data from his pivot irrigation system resulted in an irrigation strategy, he said. That ultimately became part of harvest and inventory management.
“How do you pull that data out of the field, get it into our pocket and then apply that as an irrigation strategy?” he asked. “It was through the cloud.”
Data is a hot topic these days, with a key question from farmers being about who controls it and how it can make them money.
While the farmers themselves do not own the data, panelists agreed it could collectively be used for the most strategic and cost-effective use of resources. It also can let them know how their practices compare against others.
“At the end of year, we're benchmarked against everybody else and it's all cloud-based,” Paulman said. “There's some categories we're in the bottom third. I want to know about that.”
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Commondity Classic / High-tech farming moves to the cloud
