The Sunday Times in Sri Lanka has an article on the Role of Information Technology in Agriculture. It struck me as a useful reminder of the importance of information technology in agriculture here in Canada.
The bottom line is “To participate and make informed decisions in the agricultural industry a person must have ability to gather, process, and manipulate data.” Information technology is a tool to help us do that. The biggest challenge that I see is gathering data from the field. The solutions I’ve seen so far have been awkward to use out in the field. Entering data when a farmer is back in the office is troublesome too because a farmer may not get back to their office for weeks on end during peak times. When they are back in their office, the emphasis is going to be on dealing with current problems rather than entering which field was harvested when.
I believe that in order for data to be collected reliably and consistently, data collection needs to be largely automatic. I think we are approaching the time when this will be possible, but we’re not quite there yet. Two technologies I see as keys to this are GPS for time and location marking and wireless for instant communication back to the main data collection system. Another technology that may play a key role is some way of easily tracking the products that are used, something such as built-in bar code scanners or RFID chips. Until data collection is automated, there will be large gaps in any information gathering scheme.
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