Agricultural Engineers leveraged big data to improvise productivity

The Institute of Agricultural Engineers at its annual conference questioned whether big data would revolutionize agricultural productivity like how the introduction of the tractor did. AHDB’s senior knowledge transfer manager, Ben Williams stated there are several claims that the benefits of data include improvement in productivity and efficiency along with the prediction of consumer trends.

He furthermore stated that “the titles we give to projects are often misleading so instead of measuring it by size we can evaluate data based on its value. It is important to understand the underperforming part of a business for that data must be captured and customized.”

The AHDB project used EID tags to master the linking of sire to sow to piglet. From the New Year, they are expecting to collect slaughter data for the individual animal and this will be linked by a proxy to sire lines. This linking will align the data through a single report. When a product generates data then the cost to move that data from one system to another must be eliminated. To realize the full benefit of the technology and software it needs some more development. By using this technology one can improve marginal gain across various things like feeding efficiency, labor, and fertility feed.