Farmers get their own ‘Google’

It has often been argued that farming has its own unique language, with those unused to the terminologies used by the industry left puzzled.

But computers, laptops, mobile phones and other forms of digitalisation have changed the way farmers record, curate and receive data – and with much business-critical information now online, apparently normal search engines have often struggled to return meaningful results.

A recently set up software company, Simsage, has, however, produced a plug-in product for agri-businesses and organisations to better connect farmers with the information they need – effectively creating a ‘farmers’ Google’.

“A farmer typing ‘artificial insemination’ into the Google search bar will provide a colourful list of results, but unlikely it will be the shade they were looking for ”, said co-founder of the app, Sean Wilson.

He said that acronyms were often another sticking point.

“Type AI into any popular search engine and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ will dominate the search results - even when combined with ‘agriculture’ – but standard search functions aren’t configured to the broad range of agricultural language.”

And he said that while such examples might seem trivial, they reflected the incompatibilities which createdbarriers for an industry trying to keep digital pace.

Wilson said that with global market research indicating that25-30% of the working day could be spent trying to find information, a significant proportion of farmers’ time online was therefore wasted - even when technology was supposed to increase efficiency and free up time for farm work.