Making Sense of the 4 V’s of Big Data in Agriculture
Data, data, data. It’s hard to find an article, a post, a conversation in agriculture today that doesn’t mention “data”, writes Scott Speck at PrecisionAg. But what is it, and what is “big data” when it relates to making decisions across a farm?
For small to large and simple to complex decisions, data is only as good as the information that is received, processed, analyzed, alerted, or stored. For farms to make sense of this information, it is key to look at how these bits and bytes are combined into platforms or delivery tools to inform this decision making process. The 4 V’s of Big Data — Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity — provide a framework that creates value from data for farmers to make informed decisions, as collection alone, as we well know in agriculture, is not the only key. Moving past just nice pictures, printed maps, or stored files we never open again, for this data to provide outcomes that are valuable at the farm gate, it should be able to be tested against the “4 V’s” to make current and future impacts.
The global precision farming market size is anticipated to reach USD 12.9 billion by 2027, according to a report by Grand View Research, Inc. It is expected to register a CAGR of 13.0% over the forecast period. As precision farming and digital agriculture grow, the amount of data will continue to grow, and as data grows there becomes more information from otherwise unknown conditions relating to human, agronomic, and environmental situations that have been the framework of our farms for years.
We are now creating data, based on the past data that we received, instead of just creating and viewing information or the results of decisions. It is informing decisions based on what we have been provided. “The amount of data we produce every day is truly mind-boggling,” writes Bernard Marr at Forbes. “There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.”
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