At SEMICON West last month, Doug Davis, senior vice president and general manager Internet of Things Group Intel, said the IoT has a key role to play in feeding the planet. He said the IoT can boost agricultural yield while reducing waste and water usage. He cited the example of Malaysia rice farming, where technology has enabled three harvests per year instead of two, while saving water.
And speaking at the co-located Test Vision 2020, Kaivan Karimi, vice president and general manager of wireless solutions at Atmel, said that field-deployed moisture sensors have cut water usage by 37% in Arizona farms.
In a column posted August 9 in the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims elaborates on these themes. “Farms are about data as much as dirt,” his headline puts it, and he writes, “The world’s largest producer of autonomous four-wheeled vehicles isn’t Tesla or Google, it’s John Deere. And the cab of one of these self-driving tractors is now so full of screens and tablets that it has come to resemble the cockpit of a passenger jet.”
Mims quotes John May, CIO at the company, as saying John Deere has 2,600 employees who write software. And complementing the tractors from John Deere and its competitors are wireless sensors and spraying machines—“as if they were 20-ton print heads for 3D printers”—that can apply seeds and nutrients with precision.
Embedded software is clearly a big part of the picture for self-driving tractors, but farming increasingly makes use of data-analysis software as well. Mims cites one farmer using software from a Google-funded startup called Granular to replace Excel spreadsheets. Mims quotes Sid Gorham, CEO and co-founder of Granular, as likening the firm’s software to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
As Mims concludes, “…the way we will feed the 10 billion people whom demographers project will eventually inhabit this world will be by managing every acre of our farmland with the same precision that allows a company like Apple to deliver tens of millions of iPhones within weeks of each other.”
