Tractor manufacturers tend to have an eagerness for digital transformation that often exceeds the enthusiasm to be found at ground level, mainly, it would appear, because this is the direction in which they would wish their businesses to develop.
John Deere makes no secret of this and has set out to re-orientate the company towards a provider of agricultural management services, with tractor production as a side line, much like Caterpillar, which will run your quarry for you, rather than just sell you a bulldozer.
Case New Holland is also pursuing this course of a digital matrix in which its tractors are operational nodes that provide both data to a management system and respond to instructions based on the farmer’s interpretation of previous inputs.
As part of building this brave new world, the company has released its latest piece of software or, as its marketing department announces it, “new advancements in its precision technology stack”.
Digital with everything
Known as FieldOps, it is described as “a versatile farm management tool that helps farmers expand their productivity from anywhere, anytime by taking their farm operations data and details and simplifying them into one platform that’s easy to use, understand and connect”.
To the board of CNH and the software engineers, this is important news for there has, no doubt, been a lot of time, effort and thought gone into creating it, yet its relevance to everyday farming in Ireland, and much else of Europe, may well be open to question.
The fundamental flaw in this great drive towards static office management of dynamic farming operations is that farmers, on the whole, prefer to pull on their wellies and go take a look at the land, rather than mull over charts, maps, graphs and overlays, and all the other accoutrements of digital farming.
Yes, the case can be made for micromanagement of machines on large scale farms, or where there is a mix of enterprises.
Contractors will also benefit from a greater awareness of their fleet location and status, and it is quite plausible that a more disciplined approach to making machinery decisions would increase productivity, but by how much?
Limited scope on stock farms
Ireland is predominately a land of stock farmers, and by all accounts the adoption of digital management for herds has been greater than for machines, as it is the animal which actually generates the income.
If a farmer has 200 cows but just two tractors, it is fairly obvious where the investment in time to adopt to and utilise digital management is going to go.
Tractor companies will boast of their telematic capabilities and the off-board software that goes with it.
However, in a recent off-the-record chat with two sales engineers, it was agreed that it is on-board driver aids that catch the attention of operators, rather than systems reminding the farmer by texting to top up the Adblu in a fortnight’s time, as useful as that may be.
Another issue that is starting to attract criticism, is that of the increasing amount of energy required by data centres which store the data used in these off-board digital applications.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) tells us that the power consumption by data farms in Ireland now outstrips that of urban household consumption.
In this competition for energy, can agriculture fairly demand that more be devoted to gaining a slight efficiency in tractor productivity, while families are being asked, or even forced by high prices, to economise?
It would not appear to be the greenest way forward, and all manufacturers delight in pointing to their environmental credentials.
Shareholder expectations
Will the constant updating and development of off-board digital management ease off as its expected popularity fails to materialise?
There will always be those who do find it of use, accounting for the last corn seed in Kentucky for instance, and the more intense growers in Ireland will take to it, especially for pesticide and fertiliser application recording, but it is heading to become a niche product for the timebeing.
Among all this musing over its practical application, there is another angle to its promotion and that is by selling themselves as tech businesses rather than good old fashioned metal bashers, manufacturers can help keep their share price afloat.