Farmer Focus: Artificial intelligence relies on good data
Joe Mault © Richard Stanton Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Landex Annual Conference through my commitments with working at the college.
Landex is a membership organisation of land-based colleges and universities coming together to improve standards of education in the sector.
The conference was very similar to others I have been to: a plethora of interesting guest speakers and government ministers paddling justifications for policy decisions.
See also: Data collection for dairy herds: What to consider
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The ministers focused a lot of their addresses on skills shortages, however, it is worth noting that nothing connected to food production was considered within the UK skills strategy as a priority area.
This I find very frustrating, considering the backdrop of the geopolitical issues we are seeing across the world.
Outside of the ministers’ contributions, industry speakers concentrated very much on two areas: artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainable farming.
From the perspective of the former, the guest speakers centred on how to make a teacher’s job easier, rather than replacing the person in the classroom (which is a relief).
However, although it is great to see technology advancing our offering, I believe it is important that we hold onto the practical skills that AI won’t be able to teach us.
In terms of the agri-industry, it seems that it is going to play a bigger role than most of us think – the abilities that are coming out of the tech industry to streamline food production is impressive.
Yet AI is only as good as the data you put into it, and this I found most interesting.
Data from our industry are assets as much as the livestock we farm. Companies and supermarkets want to be able to sell their goods (using our raw ingredients) with data to back up their claims of being net zero, for example.
I found one of the guest speakers from the Sustainable Farm Network very interesting, as the data they had been collecting over a number of years showed how most of the carbon found on-farm was in the soil, rather than trees.
Obvious to many, I’m sure, but what was key was having data to back this up.
Data showing carbon-negative farming has a value to the processor and should not be given away in processor agreements.