Growers know you can collect a lot of data, but the real question is can you do anything with it? Proagrica, a company dedicated to providing decision support for the ag industry, believes they may have a solution to getting actual answers from all that information.
The company feels food production is a prime beneficiary of their technology and software for connecting and interpreting data, due to the complexity of the production process.
“We have seen the same technology prove itself in other sectors and I’m excited to be able to see how the agricultural sector can benefit”, says David Wilson, CEO of Proagrica. “We are literally just scratching the surface and I see the technology, under our Agility brand, providing huge opportunities for businesses to increase productivity, whilst creating the insight to allow whole supply chains to improve radically.”
Proagrica has currently launched Agility Crops focused on the arable sector. Providing real-time insight into input usage, its timing and resulting impact on productivity, Agility Crops covers over 800,000 Ha of cropping across the UK. For the first time, in-season analytics is available, providing the opportunity for real-time solutions, rather than waiting for full-scale surveys to provide a retrospective view, which can only be used historically.
“The platform has the capability of harnessing information from many different sources”, comments Wilson. “At present, it relies on Farm Management Software but we are working on connecting with many other sources such as weather stations, machinery, disease predictors which in time will combine to create enormously beneficial intelligence systems enabling farmers, their advisors and those across the supply chain to increase productivity and resilience within their businesses”.
“In this new era, that we have termed ‘Evidence-Based Production,’ concludes Wilson, “we feel that we are in a unique position to provide an independent solution, creating opportunity for all farmers, agronomists, suppliers and processors to increase efficiency and productivity to meet the undoubted challenges we face.”