 I'm Mark Hall with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System here with Ohio State University bioengineering professor Dr. John Fulton. John, when you sent me this slide presentation, I had to Google telemetry to see what you were talking about. John explained gathering useful data from remote places to help our growing our crops. Well, you know, the world's becoming connected, Mark, right? Talk about smartphones and Wi-Fi and everything else that, you know, think of a portion of the day that you're not connected to the Internet. Telemetry is basically the connectivity that's being built by companies with their machines primarily that we're seeing. And now our common option that growers can take advantage of, and so it's become a key technology as we think about this evolving precision-ag, digital-ag piece that's going on in agriculture today. Data, data, data, data, data. So and telemetry can bring value, but it is a cost, so, you know, it's, you know, the premise here is that, and you know, you and I have talked about it, I mean we're already connected to the Internet, I mean we're carrying these smartphones or farms, and so we're connected to the Internet and we look at machinery, we look at the consumer world, I mean people, what they've got in their houses today and what Amazon, for example, is offering, I mean the Internet of Things is growing, this is just an example and you know the Internet of Things in agriculture is growing very quickly and so we're connected, I'll just make the comment that tractors and new sprayers and combine harvesters are coming out of the factories with embedded modems in them and so they're connected today. And so, you know, we just see this connectivity piece growing and so it's becoming something that growers need to consider, understand and potentially can utilize and I just think that with that and of course data, as you mentioned, is a big thing and this is just a recent survey that kind of outlines some of the uses of what growers are using or data for, having help with their data from others and so the point is data and the usage of it is growing and but the key thing is when we look at Precision Act technology, I would make the comment that 80% of the data that's collected at the field level on the machine is not even ever in an actionable place, it never gets downloaded or it gets stuck kind of in a folder someplace and it's never used but I think as we get connected, we can move and access that data, it's going to become a tool and an information piece for growers and so I just wanted again to highlight that telemetry is not in the mainstream, this just kind of reminds us where we're at, you know, we actually transfer data on thumb drives and other physical type devices today and that's almost 80% of the folks that are playing in the data business here in agriculture but we also use emails or FTP, Dropbox, such things like that and but the telemetry is still a very small but I expect if we sat down in another five years marked that the pie chart is going to look a whole lot different because of just advancement and the cost of technology. So that's kind of where we're at today, I mean this is where we're heading if in some cases maybe you're already there, where machines are connected and that data is kind of flowing through this piece that we call telemetry, it can be a real asset, I mean we were talking earlier, you know, the fact is that you used to carry thumb drives in meetings all the time, right? But now you can show up and have that presentation on Dropbox or your box account and you just pull it up, I mean there's an efficiency there, right? And so most of these companies that are providing telemetry have cloud storage and that's how they're managing that but think about that just having that, you know, I get done, it's accessible anywhere that I'm at in the world and so there's some value there and then the other thing is I can share that data with people much more readily now that it's in a place and I know where it is and so if I'm working with you Mark and we're working on a project we've got it out there, we can get it off the machine, I got access to it, hey I want great access to Mark and, you know, you don't have to come up and see me though, I'd like to see you, but you don't have to bring your thumb drive down for me to download all that data onto that, so. It's a real improvement. Yeah, so this is where we're headed. Again, I just want to highlight that there's a small fraction of the ag industry in North America and even Europe and down under and such that are using it but it's an ever-growing technology here. So just a definition, I mean, you said you had to do a little Google search to figure out and this is Ag Gateway, that's a non-profit organization working on e-commerce or standardization of data in Ag but they define it as a transmission and receiving data over a long distance and so that's what we're doing and what I would tell you is I can push data to you or I can pull data from that machine and so we're talking, we've talked about prescriptions for fertilizer and seeding in some of these sessions. Now I can make that at my laptop or desktop and through telemetry, I can push it out to the machine very simply today or once it's done and we've got the as applied or as planted data, I can pull that back through pretty quickly and again I don't have to make a trip to the farm or to that machine to do either one of those processes today. There's all kinds of telemetry out there. A majority of them I just highlighted using cellular type coverage. The irrigation things that our friend Dennis Bragg uses on all these systems that would be telemetry. That's right and so in that case you got an app that allows you to either see the pivots running, potentially turn them on and off for example or make adjustments to them. That would be telemetry as a good example. The other one is, and you see an example here that you can see where a machine is and how it's been moving during transport as an example but moving that data, having that at your palm in the case of an app makes it much more powerful because it's there, it's accessible, it's usable, it's a real piece and you can make decisions and so we highlight that keyword decision. Dennis can make a decision and he could be in Florida on vacation, right? Doing that type of work. This makes life better, John. So whether it's irrigation, it's machinery, it's your grain bins today, for example. All this, you see this vast, this growth of telemetry to be able to kind of sign in. Another key thing is not only can you sign in to see if it's working or not but in some cases on the machinery side is it can give you the code. So how many times have you driven your car and a little yellow light comes on and you just keep on driving, right? Yes. Now, with some of this telemetry, that actually gets communicated to your dealer and they can give you a call and they can schedule service and know exactly what they're coming to field to fix before they even come. And so that's just, like you said, real improvement and informed visit to your farm versus not knowing what I'm getting into. Rang the part, little trip. Yeah, we wanna, you know, I can put telemetry on my pivot, that's a fixed asset or an attractor or machine that's a mobile asset. So, soil sensors, for example, we think about the growth of that, especially in the south where irrigation just to be able to monitor that would be more of a fixed. Again, it's become a standard option on high horsepower tractors for combines, cotton harvesters and sprayers today that regardless of the color they are coming out, they probably haven't embedded. You do have to have a data plan. So you have to purchase a data plan but most of the companies are linked up to make that easy. And so there is a charge for that. In other cases, I can bring a MyFi or there's some opportunity to use satellite communication. And again, I put that down at the bottom. You brought that up with the connectivity, the growth of the apps where I can be on my smartphone or iPad enables me to watch what's going on or manage or make a decision about that from my fingertips today. Pretty amazing. These are just a kind of a laundry list that a friend of mine provided. I've kind of added but there's a lot of things that you can do with this and we were talking about it. One of the neat things you think about capital investment you can geofench your machines. And if the machine leaves outside that geofence you get an automatic alert. Man, that's neat. And so when I've got a quarter million or a half million dollar machine and I've got it parked down at the field and we're done for the night. Some of these kind of safety features that's these are some of the things but you guys think about grain storage. I get a text of the humidity in a grain bin. So I know I got to go down and turn a fan on or maybe in some case I can do it right from my phone. These are just value added things but again, being able to transmit data to and from the machine and remain at your desk or not have to deal with that thumb drive as you know, really improves your ability to make use and brings value to that data as well. So these are just some examples. Types of data, we're just kind of throwing this out that we see being offered. And this is just electronic but agronomic data. The yield data we've talked about as a planted data we talked about in a precision seeding portion. The machine data, show that again real quick but now I can put my production data in an app or I can have my hired hands dealing, putting that information in remote sense imagery again, coming through the apps or just some data that we talk a lot about today. This would be a real asset in the prescriptive that you talk about a lot. Prescriptive planning or prescriptive spraying. It makes much higher efficiency. That's why you see a lot of retailers that are running doing custom applications will use a lot of the telemetry to push and pull data plus they're managing their assets. They wanna know where they are and make sure they're in the right field. So these are just a handful of the solutions common to the United States and Canada but just to kind of say that there's quite a few different ones. You see some of the large companies, of course the machine companies all have theirs but there's third parties as well that enable some of this and that list could go on and so some of those are listed at the bottom just as just examples here today as we talk about this Mark but it's again very growing part of the farm operation and availability. Just thought, hey, while we're at this let's just talk about some examples and let's talk about maybe where you might see it. This is an example from John Deere. This is my John Deere. They're operation centers they call it but you see data pulled right in right off in the machine. I can go and log right in when I get home at night and rather than me having to move data around or such it's right there for me and I can look at it Mark and better yet in those cases again there's other companies that do the same thing. I can access that on an app but I can also share that too. So if I'm working with you and I could call you and give you access and say Mark, hey, we got field A done. Go take a look at it when you got an opportunity and it just again efficiencies. This is an example. Actually this company is purchased by climate but 640 labs going back to that machine data. This is just a summary of the field and you get all that summary right done as soon as you pull out of the field you get fuel usage, total fuel use, how much loading, et cetera all that again is being available to growers today if they want to take advantage and look at some of that. You know and again the same example here we've used this in some of the other ones but I just think this is going to be a growing. If I can take the machine data Mark and put it with my yield data and my as-planned data and build that layer of all these different layers think about the analysis and learning that could take place as we see issues or some questionable things in trying to make sure I either don't know what's happening or I do know trying to figure that out and just it's information that can be really valuable to the growers today. Here's just an example, taking that machine data. This is from Iowa State just quick. I got two sprayers here and you look at the fuel consumption essentially doing the same operation on the same field but you can see a distinct difference in terms of just fuel consumption and so having that this is a comparison but I would have never known that potentially if I wouldn't have been able to collect the data and see this and even map it out and understand what's going on. So can be very valuable if I'm thinking about purchasing a machine or something I can use some of this as a value added to my decision-making. Here's an example, this really gets me how much does a combine cost today, Mark? 500, 600,000. Quite an investment, right? It's a key machine necessary. We talk about the size of these being class nine, class eights today in any state and to keep that machine running. We wanna talk about the efficiency of that machine and this is just one example of a combine again using telemetry. We can watch it up there on the top left as an example but after the day, I can look at this is just summarized over the week and basically you see on that bar chart transportation in the green. So there's a portion, we get done with fields, we got transported and then the downtime essentially is red and then actually productive time is in blue but look at the productive time of that particular combine over the four week period of harvest and you're looking down into 50 to 60 percentile other than week three where it really shot up you just start to wonder with that investment do I really wanna be down in that 50 to 60 percentile? You know, I would probably comment you wanna be up in that 70 to 80 percent. But again, having this data, having this being able to look at things because they're at your fingertips and we know this particular producer once they saw that they noticed that the lunch times and their breaks probably needed to go in order to keep that machine which costs a lot of money and so there was a change in the operation but until you get this information it's kind of hard to do it. We showed this in our precision planning again just having that at your fingertips I could see that today, I can see it tomorrow but the value that just in this case row unit, right quality, indicating where compaction occurred was just the real value. So in my view, you know, I think you gotta weigh the cost out and the value I'm not saying it's cheap necessarily but if you're someone starting to use data and you wanna collect this data and be able to utilize it, telemetry begins to make sense and it can do a lot more than data. Like I said, servicing, working with your dealership, having them be informed when they come out or knowing what's going, you know, they could come out and service your tractor every 500 hours and they know that information rather than having someone reporting that back. So, and I also think is one of our last examples efficiency of these machines. Until you measure it, you really don't know what the efficiency is and so there's maybe some things that you might learn either about operators or yourself that I might need to improve in order to reduce costs. So, so telemetry kind of covered full suite there real quick, Mark. Thank you, John. That really informed me and hopefully it did our viewers. Thank you for watching our precision ag videos and please look at all of them. We've got quite a few with Dr. John Fulton who's our friend and just the best precision ag guy I know. Thank you, John. Thank you.