Interoperability, What does that mean for farmers?

Now imagine you’re a farmer on a large property, managing a livestock and cropping operation. Every decision you make will affect the health of your crop or the well being of the livestock. You, as a manager have a plethora of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, apps and software solutions to try and assist your decision support. BUT in reality for you or these farmers, nothing synchronises or talks to each other, making it hard to understand what the big picture is (as you have a jumbled pile of critical pieces).

This is the issue and challenge of “Interoperability”, effectively one would expect that collaboration or connectivity of solutions should enrich each others services and provide a total picture. But in reality it is very costly and hard to build the Plug or ‘API’s’ and so interoperability is not a high prioirtiy for the solution provider, compared to developing the solution for the problem.

As agtech and digital solutions are being built by experts in specific niche fields (identified problems), these individual platforms are forming granular pieces of the larger operational jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of the puzzle is within its own right, a critically important part of the picture due to its offering of data collection, analytics or user experience methods and IP.

Until interoperatbility is solved, these pieces can’t form the complete picture that farmers or the solution provider envisaged for that service or solution.

By Farmers having the choice of choosing solutions that fit their operation and management approach, creates a myriad of possibilities of collaboration partners. The endless possibility of partners and collaborations is the root cause of why interopertability has not been overcome. As there are too many solution provider to guess or select which upstream and downstream partners a farmer may want, thus there are very few connections made.

At Pairtree we have spent a considerable amount of time looking at this problem from both the farmer and the solution provider perspective. Whilst the issue is complex and not truely solved at the moment, we have a plan.

Our plan is to create a platform that is specifically designed to integrate any digital solutions data with another, and then display this data through a series of dashboards.

We see that by Pairtree playing its small role and empowering the broad spectrum of current and future solutions, we can SOLVE the issue of Interoperability. If we were to try and compete against others and re-create the wheel (so to speak) then we are not solving the interoperability issue, but just creating a platform the integrates with others.

As a farmer I know the size of the interoperatability issue that everyday farmers are struggling with and we are committed to delivering the solution that ‘ensures the centralisation of data that is related, but not yet connected’.

Stay tune for more Farm and Supply chain data issues discussions. If you have a question or topic, please feel free to contact me.