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West Central Indiana | Marc, you're animation is dead on!!! And I really have to agree with Tim Taylor. If we're not careful we're all going to be working for either Ma Deere or Monsanto in a few years. Deere has their hands in everything these days it seems and if we don't voice our opinions and more importantly our ideas and visions for the precision ag movement, then we are going to be rolled over by the big companies with big budgets.
Don't get me wrong, I think Deere has some great and interesting ideas and it appears that their vision of vertical integration mirrors that of nearly every other large industry, but there are also a lot of smaller companies and indiviuals out there with some great ideas for integration of data and processes across multiple brands and platforms. We just need to make sure that we get those ideas out there where they can be heard, feed back important information like problems and successes that we have with different systems so companies can work together.
The biggest stumbling block we have right now is that it seems like we've almost taken a step backward in the in the area of open architecture. All of the iron companies are wanting a piece of that electronics pie, so they're now designing their machines with their own proprietary monitoring equipment. It makes perfect sense from each of their respective sides of the fence, but what if you throw an off-brand piece of machinery into your farm's lineup? Now you can't log data with that machine because it's monitoring system is integrated into the actual operation of the machine, and unfortunately that monitoring system doesn't communicate with the ACME Super FarmDataLOGGER 6000 ver 2.0.0003 system that comes with the rest of your machines. For the longest time Deere didn't communicate with anyone else, now Case IH is coming out with a new display that has to be in the combine to control the combine. Deere's advertising that they can communicate with off-brand controllers, and that they can import/export shapefiles in APEX, but your JD planter can only be a year old to communicate with the new GS2 display and do variable rate planting. How are we going to log insurance data if our hardware doesn't talk to one another?
It is definitely an exciting time to be in this business, but I my hope is that we can get our message to the big companies so that they can see past the end of their noses. | |
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more use for precision ag than just in the field...
