KoneAgria 2017 exhibition at Tampere
”KoneAgria is an agricultural technology exhibition for agricultural professionals.”
While I’m certainly not an agricultural professional I still found a lot of goodies.
I set out early on Friday 13th, October 2017 with the morning train to Tampere. After a thankfully uneventful two-hour train ride and a minor weirdness event with Tampere’s public transport route planner I got to the exhibition site. It was pretty apparent right from the start that this was an all-out, big machines, real agriculture thing. They sure grow those combine harvesters big these days.
I had set my primary goal to meet with Pekka Isosävi from Valtra with whom I’ve exchanged emails on a prospect of a meeting and an interview. So far with limited success due to summer vacations and understandably more pressing business affairs on his part. He invited me to meet him at the exhibition and I hoped that a face-to-face meeting would nudge things forward a little bit —and he did not disappoint.
My other goal was set on meeting Katja Alhonoja or some of her colleagues from Yara, with similar intent as with Pekka since our correspondence had experienced a bit of a hiatus since last summer. I had not planned any other specific meetings or goals, other than that of the usual fact-finding and respondent-hunting: looking around, going about, seeing what’s what and who’s who.
As I was orienting myself to the layout of the exhibition, pretending to be rather lost and clueless plus superbly feigning an inability to read a simplified exhibition centre map, I came across a stand quite unlike the big machinery exhibits around it. There was an engine cowl of a Valtra tractor and behind it, where a cockpit of a tractor would be, a workstation stand with several screens, electronics enclosures connected by a lot of wires going about on the sides, few actuators at the bottom shelf and a sign ”Maatalouden Internet” (Internet of agriculture) hanging above. This must be the place.
I was greeted by Ari Ronkainen from Luke who kindly walked me through the system at display: a simulated tractor working on a field equipped with not only automatic steering but also with a seeding implement and an automated liquid fertilization system, all combined (please note that I may have mistranslated the terms here). The seeding was automated according to exact instructions and the fertilization was as well automated to precisely match the requirements of the field and the plants. This was all pre-programmed with a planning software that had written work instruction files for controller unit aboard the tractor, with the calculations for fertilization based on farmer’s own experiences and observations, soil samples, scanning and remote sensing like multi- or hyperspectral imaging with drones and/or satellites. All of this meant that the fertilization and the planting of seeds was done simultaneously in one go and the fertilization was precisely mixed from several different liquid components to match the need of the plants, saving fertilisers and avoiding over-fertilization. But this was not just another computer simulation: the system had actually been used just recently in planting of winter wheat (I think it was, but I could be wrong) and what was on display was the electronic systems and the computers used to control the tractor and the implements.
Since I seemed to have appeared to Ari as a reasonably sane person —despite the odd angles in my thesis plan— Ari introduced me to Mikko Laajalahti who was there as a secretary of Agricultural Automation of Finland (AAF). I have to admit that I didn’t recognise his name as I should have since he is —among many other things— the co-author of Alkutuotannon kyberuhat (with Jussi Nikander) that I believe I’ve mentioned in a previous post. Also, that paper is likely to be the only one of it’s kind in outlining the cyberthreats emerging in digitalization of agricultural production in Finland. You should read it.
We talked a while and Ari & Mikko gave me a few tips on what to look into, like Farmworks farm management and planning system, plugfests, EFDI (very much a work in progress), AgGateway (a non-profit consortion in U.S.) and Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF). Ari also mentioned that how different systems appear to reflect the cultures and the requirements of their origin environments, as in the case of Farm Management software that has everything one could want from it —if one is in the business of growing corn in the United States. Not so much if the user is growing grass in Finland, as some of the required information and data structures required by farmers growing grass are simply not included in the software architecture in the first place.
— To me, this appears to highlight the need for a farm management and planning system that could respond either to a very wide range of requirements —or to a very specific requirements of a smaller market segment. I could imagine that so far farm management and planning systems have been built to respond to the requirements of, say, middle European farms or their counterparts in the U.S., leaving the farmers with different requirements to their own devices, literally. There have likely been attempts to remedy the situation by smaller operators with development of their own farm management systems. These would be a good fit to the requirements of their own environments, but this approach is likely to create a no small number of systems that can not be integrated or used in conjunction with other systems available. Combined with vendor locks, farmers could easily end up struggling with a host of different systems that can’t “talk” to each other and not seeing the big picture of how their farms are really doing as a whole.
As if meeting Ari and Mikko wouldn’t make me feel extraordinarily lucky, Liisa Pesonen, a senior scientist at Luke and the director of Efficient utilization of crop production data project whom I had previously shortlisted as one of the most relevant researchers on the subjects of precision agriculture, data management and data ownership, was also present at the Maatalouden Internet stand. Not to mention that her reaction to my short introduction of my thesis was so accommodating and positive that I’m still wondering whether my work will warrant such a warm welcome. Well, I better deliver the goods, then. :) We had a chat on data ownership in agriculture and she kindly gave me a tip that I should look into a farm called Toivon tila at Salo. That farm is according to her very active in many development projects, keen to take advantage of digitalization in their work and eager to openly share the knowledge of their experiences. Since their apparent positive attitude towards sharing information and new technologies they would make an excellent interview respondents in my work. I hope that I can get back on Toivon tila in a later post. Liisa also pointed out the day’s seminar presentation “Täsmäviljely ja digitalisaatio - uuden ajan työkalupakki viljelijälle” where she was presenting a commentary on Jussi Knaapi’s main presentation. See more on Jussi’s presentation below.
Since I had plenty of time before the presentations I moved on to Valtra’s exhibition stand where I met with Pekka who was at the moment demonstrating Valtra’s SmartTouch armrest. Although he was quite busy, he made the time to catch up with me and how he could help me along. He described to me how Valtra’s new tractors now come with telemetry capabilities (older ones with CAN buses can be retrofitted) and how they can be connected to Valtra Smart service to provide a remote view of a tractor’s systems. This is done by adding a listening device to tractor’s CAN bus and then sending the data to the cloud service. To give me a better understanding of the system, he introduced me to Olli Honkamäki who could demonstrate the system for me in actual use.
Before moving over with Olli who was busy at the moment, I asked Pekka about the market penetration and adoption of precision agriculture technologies in Finland and yeah, the numbers are still unfortunately low. It appears to me that agriculture is a tough sector to introduce new technologies, but considering what I’ve seen, I think that it would be within reason to anticipate quite a few changes within a few years. But let’s get back to business with Olli and Valtra Smart: with his tablet, he opened a map view of central Finland, where we could see all the tractors and service cars connected to the system. He picked a tractor and we could see where it was and what it was doing: he could see all of the telemetry data generated by the tractor, about 30 different signals in total and cross-reference them as he saw fit. For example, he picked engine revolutions per minute and graphed them together with engine oil pressure —with just a couple of taps on his tablet. He told me that the service was developed over the course of 10 months with Cinia Solutions and has had a great reception: almost without exception, tractor owners that he had demonstrated the system to would liked to have it installed and working right away. I could easily see why: service crew could see near real time what was happening with the tractor and could remotely diagnose and troubleshoot it, give instructions to the user and if necessary, pick up the correct parts from their warehouse even before leaving. This would mean substantial savings in down time. Likely the investment in subscribing to the system could be returned in just one service call when compared to old way of calling service to the field to perform diagnostics, then having them to drive to warehouse to pick up the parts needed and finally back to the tractor to install the parts. This kind of service has previously been a domain of the like of large truck fleets, but it is appears to me that this type of service is now being popularised in agricultural machinery service. In addition of being very useful to the service crews, the owners of the tractors could see in the application the situation on all of their machines right away with their smartphones, tablets or computers, near real time. Also, the data generated could be used in AgriSmart cloud service to further enable precision farming.
I have to admit, I was quite impressed. I asked if it would be possible to interview Olli on this and he was positive that it could be arranged —I hope that I can write a follow-up post on this in near future.
I made my way to the seminar where Jussi Knaapi, a freelancer journalist for Koneviesti gave a presentation “Millä tasolla täsmäviljelyn kärkiyrittäjät liikkuvat niin Euroopassa kuin Suomessakin?” (rough translation: On what level are the leading European and Finnish precision agriculture farms currently operating?). Jussi has written a lot on precision agriculture over the years and has an extensive hands-on experience on the subject, so I’ll see if I could have a chat with him on some future occasion. He mentioned that the presentation materials he used, at least the parts from Van Den Borne Aardappelen should be freely available for download and I found them —or at least something very much like it— here. As I can’t reproduce his presentation in it’s entirety in this post, I make do with some of his points that appeared to me as the most interesting ones —and I may have missed or omitted something important. Please let me know in the comments!
For this presentation he used the material from Van Den Borne Aardappelen as he had visited their farm and it appears to be a great example on how precision agriculture/smart farming can greatly enhance agricultural production. Contrary to usually held belief that in order for precision agriculture to have any effect the field sizes need to be enormous, it has now been proven that precision agriculture can produce great effects on very small and irregularly shaped fields. Jussi highlighted the importance of noting the location, time of the observation and the accomplished actions, which enables the continuous observation, leading to analysis and further actions in accordance to long term goals.
Jussi mentioned some technologies that enable the farmers to get deeper in to the field, like soil scanning with EM38-MK2 or Veris scanners that can produce a soil composition maps (EC potential maps) and portable gamma/X-ray spectrometry devices that are becoming available (read: cheaper) and can produce a great deal of information on soil contents like the amount of specific nutrients. While EC potential map of a field may sound like a bit academic at first it becomes a lot more interesting when compared to a harvest yield map, which usually strongly correlates. This can also be combined with a fuel consumption map that can further highlight areas of interest, especially if the ground is level. Other maps can be obtained with sensors like Yara’s N-sensor, drones and satellites. Composited maps can then be used as a base intelligence for precision agriculture actions like fertilization or soil treatments. Weather stations with internet connectivity can also give a much more detailed view to each field’s growing conditions. They have as well become quite affordable and according to Jussi, units can be purchased for about 100 € each. To me it feels like a small investment for the information they can provide, but I would like to interview a farmer who has implemented this kind of solution on their experiences.
One scenario of precision agriculture (or smart farming?) that Jussi described was that a farmer could take an EC map of his field as a base and making a drone image run in the morning. After getting an up-to-date intelligence on plant conditions on a map, using the combined maps to create a work instruction file for precision sprayer it can be used to spray the exact amount of fertilizers needed in the afternoon. While this sounds awesome, I’m not sure if it will be feasible for a couple of years —see a previous post on drone imagery where I wrote ”everything is hard and nothing is easy”. I hope I could get more info on this and perhaps I could have a chat with Jussi on this.
I’m sorry to write this, but writing this post has taken me longer than I expected and in order to publish this post in a reasonably timely manner, I have left Liisa’s commentary presentation “Mitä olemme oppineet? - Täsmäviljelyä 22 vuotta” and Jussi Pylväs’ presentation “AgriSmart-toiminnanhallinta koneyrittäjän tehotyökaluna sekä Säilörehun korjuun satokartoitus ja rehun reaaliaikainen seuranta”out of the scope of this post. Both presentations would merit a write-up and I hope I can get back on their work in both my thesis and this blog.
It was well past two in the afternoon at this point and after a break I thought I should see if I would be extraordinarily lucky and meet Katja Alhonoja at Yara’s stand. Longest of the long shots, but worth taking. I looked around but could not see her and after a while asked if anyone around would know her and whether she would be around today. Turned out that Katja had done a morning shift that day and had already left but Anne Kerminen knew her and agreed to take my note and send it to Katja. Many thanks, Anne. I’ll be writing to Katja and we’ll see what comes of this. Also, I think that I’ve used the word “hope” way too many times in this post already.
As I was winding down of the day’s operation and just strolling around, I noticed Viljelijän Berner’s stand that had Soil Scout on display. The same Soil Scout that I had read on and was first developed in Johannes Tiusanen’s dissertation, then called Peltotiedustelija. As I had somehow lost the track what happened to Peltotiedustelija I was very exited to find it on the market. I met with Teemu Helkala from Viljelijän Berner who gave me a short intro to Soil Scout’s application and hardware. I noted that the data generated by this system is downloadable, likely in a common spreadsheet format so users can really take ownership of their data. I immediately assigned extra points to Soil Scout for that feature. Teemu described that the use cases that could benefit most from Soil Scout’s capabilities were golf courses and speciality plant production where the precise control of irrigation systems could bring greatest benefits to users. He also encouraged to just call Tiusanen if I needed any more information. That will definitely make my to-do list.
T
Edit 18.10.2017 12:00: “tool” refactored to “implement”; minor styling; refactored Toivon tila’s description to match correction from L. Pesonen; added link to Toivon tila’s website.
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