Big Data will soon be making big waves on Australian agriculture and is set to revolutionise the way farming information is gathered and shared. This involves the ability of capturing and storing large volumes of information and analysing them to solve complex problems and gain business insights.
According to Jonathan Dyer, winner of the prestigious Nuffield Scholarship 2015, big data from across the industry will help farmers make important decisions, including how and where they will plant or fertilise as new technological platforms take off in the near future.

“It is now possible to collect large amounts of sensory and spatial data on-farm at very little cost – some examples include weather data, harvest yield information, soil type maps, soil moisture and temperature probes and machinery performance data,”

According to abc.net.au, ‘Big data’ is the term used to describe massive collections of information that are gathered in the digital world and stored in a database to be collated.
Mr Dyer is a grain grower from Kaniva, Western Victoria and has travelled on research trips to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Mexico, and Israel. He will release his report later this year.

“We [farmers] deal with the natural world in all its infinite complexity. We can collect data on farm, whether it is yield data from our crops, seeding or fertilising. If you collect enough of it, you can start to analyse it just in your farm office. To a lot of farmers, that is probably big data, because that’s a concept they’ve not been used to. You can compare with five or six neighbours and compare how your crops are performing and start to learn that way,”

-Mr Dyer.

Big data provide essential insights that are useful in analysing patterns and behaviours. An example is the way social media platforms gather details about millions of individual users and providing consumer snapshots to advertisers, so they can tailor effective campaign ads for their target audiences.
Mr Dyer believes that big data can also be used for other purposes, such as in agriculture. He also predicts that one company would eventually build the dominant farming application for big data, the same way as Google has become the world’s dominant search engine.
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