University of Arkansas collects precision ag data

From every byte of every streamed television program we see, to the tweets, photos and stories that roll past us on social media, we live, breathe and drown in data.

According to Visual Capitalist, 463 exabytes—that’s 463 followed by 18 zeroes—of data will be created daily by 2025.

Agriculture is no different. Modern production equipment such as planters, sprayers and harvesters are equipped with technology to gather data for the individual producer’s use. Corralling that data for research is difficult because it’s scattered across the state and often, equipment may have proprietary software that prevents the data from being easily imported into usable formats.

However, a new partnership between the Cooperative Extension Service and Ag-Analytics, will collect and analyze large volumes of ag data with an eye to creating better decision making tools for farmers, that will in turn, help farmers improve their yields.

Ag-Analytics is a farm management platform that specializes in the analysis of precision agriculture data. The platform will collect data and put it in a format that can help growers and researchers make decisions.

County extension agents are asking Arkansas growers and producers to participate in the data analysis. Farmers can sign up online to participate and opt-in to share data confidentially with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture at https://analytics.ag/uaex.

The information gathered on individual farms will be integrated with hundreds of terabytes of satellite, soil, weather and other data. The data will remain confidential, and personally identifiable information will be stripped from the data sets.

Sign up is free, and farmers who participate will also obtain access to Ag-Analytics resources such as historical and current weather conditions, satellite imagery and data, and insurance estimates.

Primary efforts will involve high-resolution yield modeling for Arkansas cropping systems, particularly in regard to variety performance, climate and crop interactions, as well as nutrient response management and decision tools development.

The data collected will inform researchers’ work, and in turn, Ag-Analytics will use the research to develop modeling tools that producers can use to help project their yield based on different variables.

The project is being funded in part by a $5,000 grant from Microsoft Azure for cloud-based services.