Participants in the Develop with Deere Conference in Chicago had the opportunity to hear a keynote address from Brandon West, Evangelism Leader, Americas, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
West shared that John Deere is a partner of AWS, and the groups have similar philosophies. While West said John Deere is working to build a platform for collecting agronomic data and make it useful for software developers, AWS is trying to provide the primitive building blocks of the internet operating system. He said the volume of data being collected is massively growing because of better connectivity, cheaper processors, and numerous other reasons.
“I think, in this particular instance, machine learning and how you turn that data into useful knowledge is one of the most important things that can be done,” said West. “If you’ve got a bunch of satellite imagery of your fields, you can start to train automated systems to be able to identify anomalies for you and just really increase the level of software automation involved in agriculture so we can really address the scaling problem that we have in this industry right now.”
While the algorithms for machine learning have been around for years, West said those complex ideas can now be built into tools that can be readily applied to industries like agriculture. AWS has a variety of teams ready to help equipment dealers and others to do this, along with a training program and relevant webinars.
“The more things you try, the more you learn,” said West. “If you want to be innovative, you have to be willing to fail.”
Listen to Chuck’s interview with Brandon here: Interview with Brandon West, Amazon Web Services (AWS)