What’s Missing in Today’s Agricultural Intelligence Solutions?

Last week I published a blog with a quick overview of today’s Agricultural Intelligence Market. After thinking about this more, I realized that the key missing ingredient in today’s solutions is the user or purchaser of agricultural intelligence. So what do I mean by that?

Precipitation Map for the USA. How do you use this for gaining insight? How many acres are effected by heavy precipitation? By no Precipitation?

When you think of the different ways of gaining agricultural intelligence, whether it is free data from the USDA or purchased data from a private company, what you get is a ream of data. This may be in the format of an excel spreadsheet, as the USDA is moving towards today, or it may be in the form of a PDF report that contains tables, charts and possibly maps, such as the one shown here, that provide visual views of the data. Whatever the case, the one thing that none of these solutions allow you to do is actually interact with the data. Why is this important?

Each of us brings a particular level of experience and area of expertise. To bring the greatest value to our company, firm or just our individual trading needs, we need to be able to utilize our expertise to its fullest potential and from an agricultural intelligence perspective that means rolling up our sleeves and diving into the data instead of just looking at static presentations of it. With enough time, resources and database skills, we can likely, eventually, create an interactive database to allow us to truly “investigate” the information we are given but I am certainly not one who has that luxury and I doubt very many of us do. This is a major drawback with today’s solutions.

Regardless of your need for agricultural or crop intelligence there are likely specific crops, locations or time periods that you would like to focus on. There are likely specific bits of data that are important to you. Maybe all you care about are production numbers at the country level. That would be easy to gain from almost any solution. But what if you need more? What if you want to focus on a specific state or region, a specific crop, you care about production but you also care about crop progress, crop health, yield and weather? What if you want to relate different data sets to each other? How do today’s solutions help you bring all this information together?

In fact they don’t. Not at all. In the end you are left with lots of data and no real way to inject your expertise and skills to bring real value to the information you downloaded or purchased.

Perhaps it is time to ask for more from Agricultural Intelligence providers. It is time to allow you to utilize your greatest asset. You!

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