The problems of connecting the farm – and how ICT Strypes is helping
Early civilization was defined by agriculture. Modern civilization? By technology. And as farming has industrialized, the business of feeding people has adopted new tools and processes too. It might not be obvious, but agribusiness today is deeply technology-aware, with a long list of automated processes and data-driven applications in its tech stack.
But getting the most from that technology isn’t easy. In truth, farming businesses have IT challenges far beyond those facing the average office or factory. Imagine your IT infrastructure being exposed to the worst of weather, sharing space with hordes of animals, in rural locations that often lack connectivity, electricity, even roads! From humid greenhouses to crowded cowsheds, the problems start with the environment. And amazingly, that’s the least of the sector’s issues.
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Technology for agriculture is fragmented, with different apps covering separate tasks without much interoperability. That creates problems when integrating data for a bird’s-eye-view of the business – because few farms can afford a fulltime IT department. Decision timelines differ too: those with a belief that farm tools should be solid, reliable, and trustworthy may find it hard to partner with a year-old startup. And that’s before the growing concerns around cybersecurity. Data about next season’s predicted harvest yield may not seem especially secret, but in today’s market it’s competitive intelligence … value you shouldn’t give away.
The ideal situation for agribusinesses is “platform thinking”: technology as an integrated, interoperating system that grows and scales as the business does. With that in mind, let’s look more closely at the challenges modern agriculture faces when adopting technology – followed by where a partner like ICT Strypes can help.
Let’s cultivate our understanding!
Challenge #1: Ploughing through a diverse tech stack
While it may not be the “glamorous” side of the software industry, applications for managing farm processes are a US$2.4bn sector1, serving a market of over US$4.8 trillion2 worldwide. And it’s growing too, at a projected 3.45%.
With intense global competition – Spanish belpeppers are enjoyed in Malmo as often as Madrid; exotic salads are on tables as often in temperate climates as tropical ones; Dutch flowers are exported to five continents – the everyday concerns of a farm manager are the same as any downtown executive’s: quality control, profit margins, driving down costs and maximizing resource use.
Agriculture, however, relies more than most businesses on integration of hardware and software – sensors monitoring greenhouse temperatures, timers linked to feed machinery, drones gathering information overhead and irrigation networks that keep crops nourished, and the applications that need all this data to function. And many decisions include external data too – weather forecasts, emerging risks to plant and animal health, seasonal variations in markets.
The result? A mass of closed, proprietary solutions in the sector – it’s packed with different platforms and systems, each taking time to learn and skill to use. And every system not integrated is a cost sink. If your soil moisture sensor can’t interoperate with your irrigation system, it means using manual labor on a task that could be automated.
So much like life itself, the ecosystem of agrisoftware has many different species, each occupying its own niche. All adding to the costs for a farming operation, as new solutions are bought, learned, maintained, and replaced. With costs often rising as a proportion of revenues when they should be falling.
This is perhaps the biggest challenge: the fragmentation of solutions and how best to connect them into a smooth whole. But it’s far from the only one. Let’s dig deeper.
Challenge #2: Planting a culture of data management
An industry buzzphrase is “precision agriculture”. Just as a factory manager wants to get the most nails from an ingot of metal, farming profits depend on maximizing growth and yield – whether of a herd of cows or a grove of pineapples – by optimizing things like feed volumes and fertilization schedules. (One ICT Strypes customer even looks at the happiness of animals, since cheerful cows produce more milk!)
The approach demands accurate, real-time information, 24/7/365 … and it doesn’t stop there. Because even if every sensor and timer is set up correctly – no easy task with the issue above – the data still needs to be analyzed for insights and action. And getting different datasets on the same page is yet another skillset that costs money.
What if the data feed from the Meteorology Office is in a different format to the one used by your IoT applications? Or you need to adjust a feed cycle daily, but the data to do so is only collected weekly?
So data needs to be as integrated as hardware and software: a single version of the truth that takes all factors into account. Of course, this challenge isn’t unique to farming. But with the profit model of agriculture being typically high-mechanization and low-manpower, few farms have people to spare on solving this problem.
Challenge #3: Harvesting a bountiful ROI
Another key challenge: planning cycles in farming and software differ. Technology vendors often focus on the next big innovation or whizzy new platform, on timelines of mere months. But in agriculture, where a solution might span thousands of acres and animals, implementation and integration are resource-intense and costly. And even some enterprise-scale businesses remain family-owned. These people aren’t thinking only of the next quarter; they’re thinking about the next generation.
All of which affects Return on Investment, particularly for small and midsize farms. Many have tight profit margins and a high cost base that a new investment like software would interrupt. They need to be certain any new technology will pay for itself, no different to a new tractor or milking machine.
A new solution might promise a 20% return. But if replacing existing infrastructure means the same percentage rise in costs, or frequent maintenance requirements eat into staff resources … the answer’s going to be No.
This makes the sales cycle slower. There are more obstacles to overcome, more questions to be answered, more problems that bring down the business case – and sometimes destroy it completely. All because of the difficulty of adding new solutions into an already-complex mix. Let’s look at that next.
Challenge #4: Growing complexities in the field
Like software/hardware solutions in any sector, agricultural technology often comes with a steep learning curve. Staffing levels in agriculture (a key metric is FTE-per-hectare, the number of people you need to look after a specific area of land) tend to be low, and people work long hours, leaving little spare time for learning in front of a laptop.
It’s also rare for farming solutions to be fit-and-forget. Sensors operate in wet, windy environments; GPS-guided vehicles have to negotiate muddy fields and winter cold; irrigation and feeding systems are prone to blockages and wear.
Agribusiness works your capital investments hard, because there’s no other choice. All this needs frequent manual intervention, driving up costs.
In addition to no fit-and-forget, there’s no one-size-fits-all in farming either. What works for a family-owned business of a few hectares won’t scale up to a market leader managing thousands; the needs of each business are fundamentally different. So most solutions need to be customized by the vendor, taking yet more time.
The key challenge here is finding a vendor that understands the specific needs of a specific type of farm, with proven experience in building the solution. And there’s one more thing …
… Challenge #5: Hackers digging into your secrets
The last challenge is one many small and midsize farms don’t realize is an issue: cybersecurity. And it’s not just a case of a rival farmer stealing your yield predictions for next Summer’s corn harvest. With today’s farm increasingly connected – applications sharing data and storage outsourced to the cloud – what used to be a minor hacking annoyance can now affect the operation of an entire site.
If 1,000 cows are fed according to software scheduling, what happens when that application goes down? That’s a lot of hungry cows. And remember: in the USA, those 1,000 are likely to be managed by a single farming family.
These risks need mitigating. And in agriculture, the network has many more endpoints than a typical business, making the attack surface look much more attractive to a black hat. In some sensor and IoT systems, security isn’t even part of the design, since the individual device is small and cheap. But if you’ve got 10,000 of them monitoring every plant in a huge greenhouse? That’s a real problem.
There are ways to deal with this, and keep every endpoint as secure as any server or site. So far, security might not be the biggest problem farms are dealing with – but the issue is getting more important, so make sure your vendor takes it seriously.
Nurturing solutions for the farming sector
At ICT Strypes, we believe we have the answers. Thanks to a philosophy we’ve used successfully with hundreds of companies: Nearsurance.
In brief, Nearsurance combines on-the-ground business analysis – putting people alongside your own team so they can understand its IT requirements in depth – with outsourced coding resources, based in our technology hub. It’s local where you need it and remote where it makes sense
Here are some wins for farming businesses in our portfolio:
To solve the cost issues of maintaining robots across a site, Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics lets you “see” the condition of your entire installed base of machinery and plan for preventive and corrective maintenance ahead of time. Smoothing out costs while reducing human resource needs – with Cost of Ownership falling dramatically.
Providing a team of remote developers as part of a long-term contract lets you outsource issues like bugfixes, patches, updates, and upgrades, testing each change against requirements to maximize your uptime. Making the most of your technology investment.
Re-engineering existing applications and infrastructure for modern times, including data integration into the cloud, helps connect different farm tasks and makes data easy to understand with visualization and analytics applications. Meaning you’re not throwing money away on obsolete systems.
Making the most of the Internet of Things. A complex web of servers, sensors, and software can easily get out of hand; ICT Strypes can keep it firmly under control. So the data across your network – atmospheric conditions, temperature swings, growth cycles, plant and animal health – is all there for you, at all times.
Securing the farm. Just as you have a perimeter fence for your livestock or acreage, your IT needs a protective barrier too – for all applications, data, and services, no matter how diverse. Bringing multiple systems inside a consistent security stance keeps your private assets, private.
The case for ICT : technologists who know agribusiness
That’s why if you’re in the farming business, we’d invite you to look at ICT Strypes. We’ve completed over 150 projects for the agricultural sector, from solutions for individual sites to software infrastructure for machinery suppliers. It adds up to broad and deep experience in what matters to your sector – including the specific challenges above.
Whether you need Remote Diagnostics integrated with a cloud service, a custom application that brings together diverse datasets, infrastructure to support your database workload, a refresh of your software to improve how it works, or a security audit to keep your business and its assets safe, we’re here, with offices across Europe.