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back to article Grounded: Can big data do for agri-business what it's not doing for retail?

Like fusion energy, big data has consistently promised amazing results – always at some indeterminate point in the future. We know grocers track every purchase, index them against our loyalty cards (translation: database index keys), and develop rich models of consumer behaviour that have, despite all of the millions of …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    anecdotally

    "Droughts of increasing frequency and severity threaten farmers everywhere across the nation"

    My brother is more of a smallholder than an-out-and-out farmer, but never mentions a lack of water for grass nor animals as a problem. He tells us when the fires get close though.

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  2. James Micallef Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Excellent article! It's great to see this technology being put to a really useful application rather than 'try and sell more stuff'

    One question about this phrase though: "farming will only get harder as the planet warms and the soils dry" - I don't think that's correct. Warmer planet = more evaporation from the oceans = more rain. With changing climate patterns, there will be places that get drier and places that get wetter, but I would expect global rainfall to be higher, at least offsetting any extra losses through evaporation from soil.

    And in any case, it's great to be having technologies such as these described in the article that allows optimal management of farmland on a seasonal basis (ie on a far quicker timescale than climate variations which take decades)

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  3. David Pollard

    Innovation bears fruti and veg

    Charlie Paton's seawater greenhouses seem to do the trick wherever there's sun, seawater and a bit of unused land.

    http://www.globalwaterforum.org/2012/05/28/seawater-greenhouse-a-new-approach-to-restorative-agriculture/

    1 0 Reply
  4. jake Silver badge

    I suspect the Brown Swiss in the icon would report:

    Farms? In Berkeley? Mooo!

    More seriously, farming ain't exactly rocket science. Humans have been doing it for over ten thousand years. Marketing, on the otherhand? That's a steam-age thingie.

    1 2 Reply
  5. P.B. Lecavalier
    IT Angle

    How?

    That's very interesting, but I would like to know how does that magic operates... What is the data that one must provide? I seriously doubt that taking a picture of the field is enough to optimize on a meter square basis. But then I understand if those startups are a little secretive, for the time being.

    Anyway, I'm very happy the author boldly pointed out how much 'big data' has been otherwise one huge mammoth buzzword.

    0 0 Reply
  6. Alan Bourke

    Is big data really just about ...

    "Is big data really just about gathering enough information about a consumer to target ads to them that they’ll block as unneeded and annoying?"

    In my case I try my utmost to stop them getting the data at all, before I even start with the blocking as unneeded and annoying.

    Present company excepted of course. Ad-blockers off on nice sites like the Reg that don't take the piss.

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