Editorial
Editorial |
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Down on the FarmThe trials of selling IT to farmersby Jon Fairall |
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During the last month, I've been to a smorgasbord of conferences, covering many different facets of the industry. The aim, of course, is to learn more. This can be a daunting process, because one realises that there is an awful lot to know in the world; all learning a little teaches one is that one knows very little. About the only comfort I draw from this is that we are all in the same boat. Fans of the French philosopher Rene Descartes claim he was the last human being to know all that was known in the world Ð and he has been dead a long time. I started thinking about knowledge, and the limits of knowledge, in response to a group of presentations at a conference held at the Australian Technology Park called Geoscience in Agriculture. The import seemed to be that the average cow cocky had better turn himself into a computer nerd in very short order, or risk losing the farm. In general, the argument seemed to be that farming being what it is, and farm prices being what they are, there isn't much hope for Australian agriculture unless farmers can make dramatic improvements to their efficiency. And the key to improvement is, as with everything else, an increase in the use of IT. A large component of this is precision farming, the idea that a farm paddock can be micro-managed. Farmers can used GPS-equipped yield monitors to determine exactly how much grows where, match this with data about the geology and morphology of the paddock itself and then use GPS-equipped applicators to supply appropriate amounts of fertiliser, or in some other way manage the various parts of each field differently. This argument is fine as far as it goes, but as IT salespeople will tell you, selling complex computerised gadgets to farmers is not easy. There are plenty of reasons why this should be so. The instruments, typically, do not work nearly as well as their vendors would like to believe. They do not deliver the benefits that are claimed for them. But most profoundly: farmers do not want to use them. I suspect the relationship between farmers and IT will always be a difficult one, because the way farmers and IT people think is very different; that difference is rooted in the different kinds of problems each must confront. If we insist that one way of thinking is better than the other, we may well wind up with a result no one wanted. There is a fundamental assumption behind the precision farming argument, and that is that farming is amenable to scientific rationale. The argument goes: the amount of yield from a field depends on the inputs. Determine the inputs, vary them appropriately, and the yield can be what you want it to be.
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The question here is: is it likely that a farmer Ð or anyone else, for that matter Ð knows all the factors that affect a plant's growth? Ð equally importantly, or how many of them can be manipulated? For most farmers, the answer to both questions is: no. A farm is not a laboratory. It's not as if one can decide, this year, to do X, while keeping all the other conditions on the farm the same. One does X, but all the other conditions change, year by year, season by season. So was one's bad luck this season due to X, or to the weather, or the timing? It takes a lifetime of trial and error to sort out such problems. As a result, farmers are deeply conservative. They incline to do the same thing, year after year, in good years and in bad. It's a strategy that makes sense. If your father, or your neighbours, manage to keep afloat by following a certain set of rules, then you might too. IT is, of course, exactly the opposite. The past is a poor guide to the future; the wisdom of your father is highly suspect; and it's dead easy to do experiments. It is small wonder that farmers and IT people look at one another with mutual incomprehension. Nevertheless, the problems faced by agriculture are very real. The challenge facing both farmers and IT professionals may well be to find ways to bridge the gap between them. It seems to me that there is at least one ray of hope, even if it comes from an unlikely source: space-based imagery. One of the bridges between farmers and IT professionals may lie in data. In particular, spatial professionals can now give farmers a 40-year history of objective information about the state of farm fields. They can supply imagery from spacecraft, and match that view with other data, such as rainfall, crop yield, agricultural prices and so on. Agricultural specialists will be able to take this data and translate it into information a farmer can use. Empirical data about the response of the field to the weather as well as to various management strategies may be able, finally, to offer knowledge to the farmer in a way he can understand. This has the great advantage over other methods in that rather than relying on a theoretical model of how fields or crops should behave, it provides knowledge about how they do behave. In effect, I am suggesting that we should apply the tools of spatial IT to the way farmers actually think.
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