First Field Trip

As I like to establish a working relationship with my respondents before the actual interviews, I took a very informal field trip in order to get to know one of my potential respondents a little bit better.

I met Heikki Huhtanen, a chair of local MTK group at Metsämaa, at the North Food event/seminar and after a short email correspondence he invited me to attend a village festival he was arranging. It’s called Pyramidipiknik, Pyramid Picnic, which has a rather weird sound to it. Well, I’m game. Turned out it was the most up-to-date, quirky, enjoyable and accessible village fest I’ve ever been to or heard about. Even if I had to walk 15 km to the site (no buses on summer weekends). See Pyramidipiknik 4’s fb event here and event at MTK’s website here.

At an after-party sauna & hang-around I met some of the local farmers and got an oppurtunity to listen how they talked about their businesses. I also got to tell them what I was doing there in the first place. While AIoT as a concept was a new thing for most of those present, they had good grasp on concept of precision farming, which to me apperars to be the most potential case for AIoT in field crop production. Whether precision farming qualifies as an AIoT technology has to be defined case-by-case, but at this point I’ve chosen to not to ignore any technologies and cases of their uses that I come across at the field that have the potential to become as such.

As Heikki Huhtanen is currently only “traditional” farmer growing field crops in my list of potential respondents, I will ask him if he would like to introduce me to some of the farmers he knows so I could get a bit wider representation for their experiences and thoughts in my work.

As a note to self, I need to adjust some of the interview questions to accomodate the fact that the respondents have been unaware of IoT as a concept. Although I suspected as much, now that I’ve got it verified I need to make damn sure before the interviews that I can present the concept in clear, accessible and precise manner.