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OPINION | CES 2021 REVIEW
such as vineyard grapes. Pellenc, in southern
France, developed such robotic gear, which
Data Drives transformed farmers into data scientists.
Indeed, once automation was in place
Agriculture 4.0 for this new generation of farmers, they
had the opportunity to go the extra step,
not just looking passively at their yield but
acting proactively to improve the quality
Farmers are harvesting sensor data to shift and quantity of their agricultural produce.
Whereas the small-scale farming operations
from preventive to predictive agriculture. of the past could rely on the farmer’s eyes
and intuition to monitor everyday activities,
By Pierre Cambou and Dimitrios Damianos today’s gigantic farming operations can no
longer rely on human senses. Data technology
has become central to steering the farm in the
ince its inception, the Industrial Revolution has centered on automat- right direction. Whether it is for herding, crop
ing production processes. Now that we have entered the era of Industry production, or high-end production such as
wine, data is the focus of Agriculture 4.0.
4.0, most industrial processes have become data-centric, generally
Sinvolving five steps of data manipulation: collection, transmission, With versatile data-centric
storage, analysis, and, finally, display. This last step is to keep humans in the technologies, agriculture is
loop, but data can also be fed back to some actuating device, bringing the pro-
cess into the realm of robotics. becoming an industry that is
piloted in the same manner as
Agriculture has not been immune to industrialization over the past two centuries, and in
recent years, Agriculture 4.0 has gained momentum. Just as industrial production made the automotive or aerospace. The
transition toward data management, agriculture is now following that path. Companies that
traditionally have served industrial segments now offer similar data-centric approaches to farmer has become an engineer.
the agriculture sector, and we are even seeing agricultural-equipment manufacturers expand
into industrial-equipment manufacture. Although agriculture is often characterized by an
unstructured environment with respect to traditional industrial manufacturing industries, the CAMERA UTILIZATION IN AGRICULTURE
versatility of new data-centric technologies is helping agriculture to become an industry that One of the best examples of agricultural data
is piloted in the same manner as automotive or aerospace. The farmer has become an engineer management is the monitoring of fields using
like any other engineer. drones. Paris-based Parrot is a key player in
It all started in the 1990swith the first automation equipment for the high-value dairy that domain, largely thanks to its U.S. subsidi-
industry — primarily milking machines from the likes of Swedish manufacturer DeLaval and ary, MicaSense. However, the French company
Netherlands-based Lely. At the same time, optical sorters for grains, particularly rice, were devel- announced in January that it had agreed to sell
oped by companies such as Satake, headquartered in Japan, and Bühler, based in Switzerland. MicaSense to AgEagle Aerial, a U.S.-based data
Some of these sorting techniques ended up in the field again for high-end agricultural products, collection, analytics, aerial imaging services,

IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK

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