My experiences and thoughts about the digitalization of the agricultural sector now and in the future

I graduated as an agrologist in 2016. Since then and before that I have worked in agriculture. You can imagine that working on a farm is mainly working with animals, it is enough that you know how to take care of them. However, this is not the case, or at least not anymore. Animal husbandry and agricultural entrepreneurship involve a lot of accounting, which used to be done on paper, but today almost all information is in digital form. There is detailed information about the animals and fields in the farm company’s possession, and their lives and cultivation are monitored.

A big digital leap in the agricultural sector has been the use of robots in milking cows. I remember when I was little I thought that milking cows could never be automated. This idea seems quite strange now, because it is commonplace in many farms these days. Other things in agriculture where digitization has been used to help include self-driving tractors, manure cleaning and pars drying robots.

In addition to working on the farm, I do agricultural consulting related to feeding cows. During the last five years, team meetings and video calls with clients have become more common in counseling work. Before, the consulting work was almost always done at the customer’s place in the barn. Now we can also do a lot of ”remote work” using various digital aids. We have also greatly reduced the use of paper reports and switched to electronic reports.

Although there have already been several great digital leaps in agriculture, I believe that even more can be made. I believe that in the future, digital technology can be used even more in the observation of animal health, for example. It would be a big help if, for example, the fullness of a cow’s rumen could be detected with the help of a device or an application. It would also be good to get help from digitalization to monitor dry matter intake per cow. Drones can certainly be used as an aid to agricultural planning in many ways.
Many digital programs needed by an agricultural entrepreneur can be used on a phone, but the view is the same as on a computer. So this could also be improved by making more functional and easy-to-use phone applications.

Risks of digital society

In addition to its strengths, digitalization also has its own weaknesses and risks. Today, even traditional crime is different. Many crimes also take place in the digital environment. Fortunately, GDPR has been created to create digital security for every person, creating rules and securing our data security. People give their information in many places without knowing it, for example when downloading a new application on their phone. I agree with this myself and admit that too few data protection forms and terms are read. Those of us who don’t deal with the negative consequences of digitization easily forget they exist. Therefore, this course is also a good reminder of these dangerous aspects of digitization.

Self-assessment

This part of the course was a good reminder of how much digitization there is in today’s everyday life and professions. Already in my own lifetime, I have seen a big development in terms of digitalization. It was also really interesting to read other students’ blog posts on the topic. It was sad when I couldn’t find articles in my field. I still had to learn a lot about the development history of digitization, because it is difficult for me to internalize a lot of new things in a short time. It would also be good to familiarize yourself with the GDPR even better.

I commented on the blog posts of Paula Kivekäs and Laura Vattulainen.