Another big part of the food supply comes from ranches and farms that raise and slaughter various livestock. While ranching is sometimes bundled with agriculture, I discussed farming in Big Data in Agriculture, so we’ll focus on ranching this time around. Somewhat surprising is that big data usage in ranching appears more limited than in farming. That said, there are a number of novel uses of technology and data in animal husbandry.
Credit: Emilio A. Laca
Land Use Optimization
At a high level, the goals of ranching and farming are the same as any business: increase yields and lower costs. Production maximization has long played a role in large operations. A twist to the optimization problem is land use optimization and how that can affect yields. According to NASA, “Australia’s rangelands provide an opportunity to sustainably produce meat without contributing to deforestation” if properly managed. This sort of optimization is made possible by big data coming from satellites. The same article cites how some West African nations use satellite data “to identify areas with agricultural potential and to estimate the amount of food available.” Growing up in rural Colorado, the most advanced tech I saw at ranches were solar powered fences and artificial insemination. Clearly a lot has changed. From a supply chain perspective, these trends also demonstrate how just-in-time manufacturing can be extended to resource allocation.
From a technical perspective, crop and livestock rotation will become outputs of a multi-objective optimization problem. I imagine that the challenge will be less about the optimization and more about the inelasticity of “bioprocesses”. Aside from slaughter or transfer to somewhere else, there aren’t too many options for reducing “inventory”. Presumably these issues already exist, so any solution is bound to be an improvement. Ultimately, there is a race to avoid the outcome that the U.N. foresees: …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com