Farmer Focus: Could AI help us make more informed decisions?
John Pawsey © Phil Weedon This autumn continues to be chilled. Not in a nippy way, but in a non-stressed way.
We’ve been able to approach autumn sowing in an almost lackadaisical manner, with sunshine on our backs, perfect drilling conditions and just enough moisture in our Hanslope series clay soils to get seeds chitted and away. It’s difficult not to feel positive.
See also: Can probability weather forecasting improve farm decisions?
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Equally pleasing for those of us of the organic persuasion, the Right Honourable Dame Angela Eagle DBE MP has just delivered from her eyrie the Organic Action Plan for England.
Simply having the government mention the “O” word gives our sector the confidence it needs to grow. Congratulations to all those involved.
I have also been extremely lucky to join the Gascoyne Estate farming team on a visit to Dyson Farming in Lincolnshire to see its circular strawberry-growing operation. Mind-blowing in so many ways.
I had many takeaways, but possibly the one that resonated most came from Dyson’s commercial director, Steve Barker, who said they were “moving away from gut feeling and hunches and more towards data”.
Although I believe following our instincts is important and, given the workload we all face, increasingly necessary. But not interrogating our decisions is a mistake, particularly when we lack the resources to fund the detailed analysis.
I can tell you all the things I think regenerative organic farming does for us at Shimpling, and although we have independent data to support most of those claims, there is still too much that I “feel” we are getting right without any real rigour behind that feeling.
But we now have a tool in AI that can do much of the digging, interrogate the data and feed us the detail, helping even those of us short on time, resources or inclination to put more rigour behind the claims we make and, ultimately, make better-informed decisions.
