Farm technology implemented to save the environment but data segregation is hurting it
Chilean agribusiness known for its commitment to driving sustainability in their industry and committed to becoming the industry leader in sustainability implemented new standards across their production sites. Critical data elements needed to drive better decisions across key management teams was delayed or outdated causing teams to revert back to traditional observation techniques.
-Background-
Fruit producer adapted an agricultural resource management plan to reduce water demand, improve land maintenance and increase overall plant health visibility. Using digital monitoring sensors across each production site and hard wiring each device to newly deployed wifi towers to capture real time data into a software vendor cloud environment. Information availability in the software application was missing for key reporting requirements that were available on visibility dashboards prebuilt by the vendor. Management teams complained that they were not able to drive decisions from tool and had to revert to manual observations across 20 sites increasing cost and delays to critical decisions for water and plant management.
-Methods -
Walker Stevenson conducted a two hour lunch workshop with the owners then completed interviews on for pre-audit of the project plan and key deliverables Management approved to deploy the technology. Then we validated with the hardware and software vendors to ensure the client had properly installed both and were running on the necessary bandwidth levels to support real time data transfers. Then we conducted an independent review with the software vendor policies for data management, integration and governance to ensure they met industry requirements.
-Results -
The project audit revealed that the client had installed the monitors correctly across their production sites but did not deploy the wireless hubs properly to ensure the necessary coverage across the production sites while the software application was properly installed and had more than enough storage to run it. The vendor cloud storage environment was build on a traditional data warehouse architecture and with weak data governance since other clients could see the data openly.
-Conclusion-
The client installed the needed wifi towers across the production sites then purchased a data lake-house subscription to capture their own data and segregating it from the vendor public cloud warehouse. The client was now able to see their software dashboards running at >95% across all sites and ensure 100% data privacy. Within the first six months after making these changes the client was able to reduce their overall water consumption by 40%.