Are We Capturing The Right Data?

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Over the past decade the amount of data gathered from a farmer has gone up dramatically, but how much of the data collected is actually quality insights? CEO of Arable Jim Ethington says one important consideration is whether the data collected is the right data for the purpose we are trying to use it for.

Ethington... "One of the big challenges that I see out there is, you know, is that data timely enough? Is it accurate enough? Does it actually sort of match the use case that I'm trying to use it for? Or is it going to be wrong one out of 10 times or two out of 10 times? And that's the rub, which is if that's not significantly better than what the farmer's doing already today, they're probably right eight out of 10 times or nine out of 10 times. So you're not helping them. And I think that's part of what makes it confusing or convoluted. And I think all of the discussion about sort of AI and where it can go, you know, the same premise applies, which is that whether you're training a machine learning model, a statistical model, an AI model, and we can debate sort of where the lines are between those, you're going to run into the same challenge, which is that if you're training a model on data, if you're operating that model live in production off of this data, you are still susceptible to what is the quality of that data going in and what is the quality of the output coming out? And I think that's been one of the things that has been a struggle. And you know, the flip side is, okay, well, why don't we just, you know, have all really good data for these decisions, and that's the hard part."

As more companies find cheaper and better ways to valuable data acquisition, Ethington sees a lot of optimism over the next 3-5 years.