SAN DIEGO—Drones and data are like the Bigfoot of American agriculture: They’ll turn the industry on its head if they turn out to be real.
For the second year in a row, delegates to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s national convention packed a workshop on the prospects of using unmanned aerial vehicles to fly over fields with cameras and sensors. Backers say drones can provide precise information on crop damage, yields and the effectiveness of inputs.
This year, crowds also streamed into a presentation on “big data.” Specifically, who owns the information collected by modern farm equipment, and can farmers sell it like a cash crop to interested parties?
The drone presentation came from Kevin Price, who left his job as an agronomy professor at Kansas State University to head up research and development at RoboFlight LLC.
Price, who spoke at last year’s convention as well, said studies have projected drone technology will be an $82 billion industry by 2025. He said 80 percent of the initial applications will be in agriculture.
“This is a disruptive technology, a technology that will revolutionize the way we work with agriculture,” Price said.
But Price said technology adoption is stalled by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is developing rules and has not yet fully approved drones for commercial use. The FAA recently granted an Idaho company, Empire Unmanned, the first exemption for commercial ag flights.
Meanwhile, multiple companies are developing small unmanned planes or helicopters that can carry cameras and sensors.
“The technology is developing extremely rapidly,” Price said. “It’s changing so fast that what I tell you today will be replaced in a month or two.”
Kansas entrepreneur Jason Tatge led the workshop on data. His company, FarmMobile LLC, sells a “plug and play” device that can capture the data coming off of planters, tractors and harvesters.
Farmers can keep the information or sell it to ag tech companies or others, Tatge said.
“You control who has access to it,” he said. “It’s really the Wild West for these data rights. The opportunities for it are enormous.”
Tatge acknowledged no one knows how much farm data is worth, although he heard offhand that a company might pay $3 an acre for information.
“Nobody wants to be the first one to pay for data,” he said. “It’s a complete chicken and egg thing right now.”
The Farm Bureau and several ag companies agreed in November 2014 to a set of principles that declare data belongs to the farmer. Also last fall, the Farm Bureau produced a set of videos that explain the business and personal privacy pitfalls that accompany “big data.”
Source: www.capitalpress.com