Precision Farming System(Farm Management Information System, FMIS)

There has been a global decline in the number of people employed in agriculture in recent years. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the number of agricultural workers was about 1 billion in 2000, but it fell to about 900 million in 2019. And in Japan, where the population is aging rapidly, the number of commercial farms fell from 2.3 million in 2000 to 1.3 million in 2015 and then to 1.02 million in 2020, and this trend is expected to continue.

Given the decline in the agricultural workforce, one solution for enabling high-quality crop production regardless of experience is data-driven precision farming. Kubota is providing the precision farming system (Farm Management Information System, FMIS) in order to achieve a shift from traditional farming, which was based on expert intuition and experience, to evidence-driven farming that is based on data.

Kubota’s FMIS is a support system that visualizes farm management. It stores and analyzes farming information such as work records and crops cultivated for each field, helping to formulate work plans and make field management more efficient. And when linked with a water management system, it can efficiently manage water use, which is essential for rice farming.

Another advantage of the system is that it enables data-driven agriculture. Remote sensing is performed using GPS, sensor-equipped agricultural machinery, and drones, and then FMIS collects and analyzes taste, yield, and growth data. This gives farmers an understanding of taste and yield variations for each field, and they can use this information for fertilizer planning, variable fertilization, soil improvement, and ultimately crop quality and yield improvement.

In this way, FMIS uses AI to analyze the accumulated farm records, taste and yield data, and even external data and other data collected outside the cultivation process to build a system that generates optimized farm management plans. And by using past data to determine cultivation for the next season (the following year), it enables PDCA-model agriculture to derive a desired taste and yield.

To further advance data-driven agriculture, Kubota is aiming to make FMIS an open platform. As part of this effort, it has provided an open API^*1 for FMIS. This will allow users to link with other manufacturers’ agricultural machinery and farming-related services and systems, contributing to faster solutions to issues faced by farmers.

In addition to linking with other manufacturers’ agricultural machinery and services, the system can also connect with WAGRI^*2, an agricultural data platform for linking various services, along with external data from markets and distribution networks, and it can analyze each field’s sensor data and big data to develop optimized farm management plans and recommend business plans. With these and other solutions, Kubota is striving to provide a more sophisticated agricultural support system.

1. *1.An abbreviation for Application Programming Interface. This is an interface used when applications exchange information. By connecting applications, functions and data can be mutually shared.
2. *2.A public cloud service provided by the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization. It provides agricultural data and functions such as weather, farmland information, and growth and yield forecasts in the form of an API.