Birchip Cropping Group want growers to take the lead

A leading farm research group believes growers need to step up and take control of their digital data destiny, focusing on improving logistics and efficiency rather then the benchmarking tech companies focus on.

While big data is often seen as boring and not of immediate value on-farm, Birchip Cropping Group, CEO, Chris Souness warns if farmers don't get involved, their data will be driven by business and industry, costing growers in the long run.

"We want farmers to know more about the value of the data they collect," he said.

"How do we get a value proposition that if farmers do provide data they get some shared value.

"At the moment a John Deere or Case know a lot about a farmers tractors use, but they realise they need to know more about other operations to get the whole picture."

Mr Souness said farmers created a massive amount of data in their day to day business that industry was keen to access, however farmers need to drive the digitisation process.

If the farmers don't get involved, industry will go around farmers

- Chris Souness

"If the farmers don't get involved, industry will go around farmers," he said.

"We are seeing a few signs of that, they (the platforms) are generally clunky and made of publicly available information.

"It results in the farmers not getting the value."

Mr Souness warned not only could farmers miss out, they could be left worse off if they aren't controlling the farm digitisation and data process.

If all the data is going to do is reinforce your heuristic decision making, your gut feel, there isn't any real insights or different understanding, it's hard to see value in it

- Chris Souness

"If we look at every other industry where digitisation has gone through it, generally people who have resisted and hoped it would go away have done pretty badly," he said.

"If it is farmer-centric we have a chance."

Mr Souness said farmers switched off from data and digitisation because it was either boring, complex or frightening.

"It's a question of interest, how do you get farmers interested in a topic that can be seen as fairly boring, and is often painted in a bad light," he said.

"People watch the news and see Facebook or Twitter, there is never any good stories about how you can use data.

"There are lots of concerns about privacy of data, so people say it is too hard, too risky and they won't play in this space."

Benchmarking is boring

Mr Souness said if farmers don't see a short-term benefit in data collection, they are less likely to see value in longer term use of the data.

"Most of the people trying to get farmers excited keep on talking about benchmarking being the hook," he said.

"But if all the data is going to do is reinforce your heuristic decision making, your gut feel, there isn't any real insights or different understanding, it's hard to see value in it.

"This is where the tech companies are often heading and the farmers are rightly sceptical of the value proposition."

Mr Souness said what really drives farmers decision making, it is logistics.

"If you look at the leading companies in the world, how well they do the logisitics is driving their profitability.

"Farmers are likewise, the ones that can use their machinery most efficiently, their labour most efficiently are going to be the ones who are most profitable.

"There is a lot of evidence to show machines and computers can do logistics decisions far better then humans."