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29 A country institution Vol 20 No 35, September 12, 2022
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Agri data alignment overdue Richard Rennie
TECHNOLOGY
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Digital
ACK of integration between the many different agri data platforms continues to frustrate most farmers and means much of digital technology’s potential value for them remains untapped. Federated Farmers president Andrew Hoggard outlined his frustration with digital tech’s shortcomings during a webinar on the topic sponsored by Map of Agowned company Pure Farming.
Everyone wants to own the dashboard but they do not want to share with someone else’s dashboard. Andrew Hoggard Federated Farmers “The amount of duplication we still have to do – I have eight agencies I have to tell how many cows I have, with potentially two more on the way. Often they are speaking different languages both in the computer code sense, but also the terminology used, like a ‘yearling’ versus a ‘12-month old cow’,” he said. Hoggard said the doubling-up
on data entry is a bugbear every farmer would prefer to avoid, and he suspects competitive protectiveness may be driving the lack of interoperability between data platforms. “Everyone wants to own the dashboard but they do not want to share with someone else’s dashboard. It is extremely frustrating when you look at the number of companies involved that are co-operatives, owned by farmers.” There is also concern among farmers about data security and who is accessing it, and this comes despite New Zealand being one of the first countries in the world to develop a data code of practice aimed specifically at protecting farmers’ business data. He said NZ’s farm data code of practice may have been a bit ahead of its time when first developed almost a decade ago, and could be due a reset. Hoggard cited the recent requirement for nitrogen application reporting, as per government limits of 190kgN per hectare per year, as a likely confidence issue. “Farmers ask ‘Is this going to be just a tick, or is government going to play around with this data and come up with new rules and new regulations?’, so there is a concern Continued page 3
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MARKETS 18
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