Down on the Farm with Watson Analytics
Data helps Danish farmers be more competitive
Famous for its beer, bacon, and butter, Denmark’s agricultural sector accounts for three-percent of their national GDP and 12 percent of exports, and employs 8.5 percent of the country’s total labor force. Agriculture is Denmark’s largest industry, but to remain competitive in an increasingly globalized market, Danish farming processes look to become more efficient and more profitable.
This is where SEGES comes in. As Denmark’s leading agricultural advisor, SEGES is committed to driving innovation in and boosting the competitiveness of the Danish farming and food industry. Headquartered in Aarhus, the second-largest city in Denmark, SEGES operates laboratories and research farms across the country, and employs around 650 people.
“Our primary objective is to safeguard the future of the Danish agricultural and food industry, and give Danish farmers a global competitive advantage. To do this, we provide farmers with the information needed to run their businesses more profitably,” said Peter Enevoldsen, Head of IT at SEGES.
SEGES collects huge volumes of data from farmers across the country, covering everything from crop and livestock production, environment and climate, to accounting and financial expenditures.
With different departments handling different data sets, SEGES struggled to gain a unified overview of its data. Enevoldsen expressed that, “We were unable to provide farmers with ‘360-degree’ advice, as we simply did not understand the relationships between different sets of data from different parts of the organization. We wanted to know how weather conditions might affect the quality of cow’s milk, for example. All of the data was there, but we didn’t have a good way to bring it together.”
SEGES teamed up with IBM Business Partner Mjølner Informatics to unlock the true value of its data using Watson Analytics. SEGES quickly realized that this was a completely new way of working with and understanding data.
Enevoldsen had this to say, “With an easy-to-use natural language interface, we can ask questions of the system in the same words that we would use if we were asking a colleague — there’s no need to understand SQL queries or do any complex programming. We can also quickly create engaging, detailed visualizations with just a few clicks, which helps us to gain deeper insight into our data and — crucially — present the information in a way that is easy for non-statisticians to understand.”
Enevoldsen also noted that farmers today are much more tech-savvy than people realize, but it’s still very helpful to be able to present findings to them in a way that’s intuitive.
After uploading a data sample into the cloud and typing questions to test hypotheses, SEGE was delighted to find that Watson Analytics automatically searched for correlations and highlighted potentially interesting areas of research. It showed SEGE patterns that might have gone unnoticed in the past, and also relationships they had never thought to look for.
For example, when they uploaded datasets from their cattle database into Watson Analytics and integrated it with climate data, the system quickly picked up a pattern: the higher the temperature, the higher the somatic cell count in cow’s milk — meaning a poorer quality of the milk. This insight means they can better advise dairy farmers on how to optimize milk production and increase profits. These insights for dairy farmers are immensely valuable for the national economy as a whole, because butter and cheese are such important export products.
What’s up for the future?
“Seeing what is possible with IBM Watson Analytics has given us a whole host of new ideas.”
Peter Enevoldsen, Head of IT, SEGES
SEGES is excited to explore new opportunities for research. What’s more, being able to produce visualizations so quickly serves as a solid foundation for team discussions of the analyses, enabling them to ensure that the latest knowledge is quickly put into practice on farms.
Enevoldsen concludes, “Seeing what is possible with IBM Analytics technology and the Mjølner Informatics team, has inspired us and given us a whole host of new ideas. We are highly confident that with Watson Analytics, we are on track to uncovering new insights that will help Danish farmers sharpen their competitive edge.”
If you want to learn more about Watson Analytics or try it for free visit www.watsonanalytics.com.
