UTILITY VS CONTROL CURVE
In the same way that the relationship between employment and Inflation are connected in the current Agtech environment so is the Utility vs Control of farm data related.
I believe the best way to describe this relational curve is to give a practical example and so I will use my experience using the IoT GPS tracking collars. In the first instance with the devices installed all the data was being send via the magical cloud to the manufacturer and the information was being provided back to me through the user interface, in this case a mobile phone app. The programming sent me alerts via mobile phone for drops in movement, temperature and for breaches of the imaginary fence. At first I was thrilled by this new tool in my hand to monitor animals any time of the day. I had full utility of the data for the prior 24 hour period to execute as close to real time monitoring as possible.
Over time though I started to develop questions about animal behaviour and wanted to look back further than 24 hrs and this was not an option. It was here that I recognized that to gain the utility of the data through the mobile phone app I had sacrificed all control of it over to the manufacturer.
This may not be a problem for many but as I was now running a research trial that had stemmed from my project it had now become very problematic as the data was essential for observations and assessment. I am very fortunate that I had developed a good relationship with the manufacturers and after some discussion, I was sent my data in a massive CSV file.
Upon opening the file I discovered myself in a situation whereby I had swung from one end of the Utility vs Control Curve to the other, I now had full possession, ownership and control of the data but no ability to process or visualize it to gain any useful insights.
This then lead me to once again relinquish control of the data set this time. It was during this time that my data was nearly shared without my permission, highlighting the importance of data ownership and control.
I am grateful in hindsight for the early recognition of this situation as it has enabled me to assess and seek a solution that satisfies both my desire to have ownership of farm data and maintain utility at the same time. We still use the real time phone apps for day to day but we have also set about creating our own farm database to collate and store our farm data, we have utilized a data messaging platform to create uniformity of data enabling it to be integrated with other datasets and by successfully layering PowerBI over the database we can now run whatever query that we might have about any aspect of production in which we have entered data for giving us full utility.
We have effectively started to push out the belly of the curve and the potential is very exciting!!