You Got Data‥‥ Now What: Building the Right Solution for the Problem

The demands placed upon the agri-food industry are becoming ever greater and ever more urgent, and food producers are turning to technology to provide solutions to maximizing production and productivity. In the last decade, there has been a rapid expansion in Information and Communications Technology that is now capable of answering these challenges and breaking free of dependence upon manual labor and levels of human skill and experience that would take years or even decades to develop. This expansion has taken place at two essential levels. At a first level, it is possible to design and engineer individual sensors that can supply accurate measurements wherever they are placed and whenever they are in place. However, it is only when an array of sensors is deployed in a spatial network over an extended period, does the power of technology become apparent as through these networks remote and automatic control of production processes becomes realized. At a second level, it is now possible to design and engineer computing hardware and software to process the enormous datasets that these sensor networks generate. Furthermore, advancements in machine learning have facilitated the creation of predictive models to divine accurate process control decisions from these datasets.