Diganta Adhikari, PhD, Global Head of On-farm IoT and Agronomic Data Platforms at Syngenta Group’s Computational Agronomy, is responsible for evangelizing and establishing the Internet of Things (IoT) strategy for digital agriculture, as well as optimizing grower returns with the data generated. Because of developments in IoT and effective computer modelling capabilities, growers may now get real-time insights at a very low cost. Even though the data adds value by expanding the pool of historic data, failing to act on near-real-time data is a missed opportunity.

Millions of data points are collected from the field, but we’re just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do to give the grower very detailed insights in real time. Data interchange in agriculture has proved especially difficult, with growers and manufacturers needing to cope with numerous data formats and spending substantial effort translating data while preserving the meaning of the data. We, as an industry, must work together to solve some of these challenges.