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14
GRAANGIDS
2016
GRAIN GUIDE
THE FUTURE ROLE OF DATA SCIENCE IN THE
GRAIN INDUSTRY OF SOUTH AFRICA
Agriculture is receiving increasing attention globally because authorities realise that it is the key
to food security and increasing food production for a growing population. Grain production must
increase every year to meet this growing demand. In South Africa there are two ways of increas-
ing production, namely bringing more land into production (unutilised land), and improving the
effectiveness and productivity of the current grain production system. That is why we must focus on
the links between the land, people and technology.
Data science is a relatively new concept and refers to technology that manages large volumes of
data from various sources to develop a system with built-in intelligence. The role of data science in
agriculture includes three concepts:
• Facilitating effective decision-making and problem-solving through computerised data manage-
ment.
• Refining, analysing and visualising data to deduce profitable insights.
• Therefore data science creates value from data by converting information from farming activities
into decisions, which leads to increased profitability.
Producers gather data every day – consciously and unconsciously. Some of them use external
sources, while other data comes from internal sources. External sources include information from
other farmers, agricultural articles and institutions like Grain SA, while internal sources include the
producer’s own records system and farm information system. Data science can be applied to pro-
mote internal and external decision-making.
Figure 1
is an example of how data can be gathered
and applied on a farm.
Figure 1: Sources and application of data on a farm (Tom, 2014).