World of agriculture as an industry is a new world to me who has spent most of my life dealing with finance and energy sectors.
The fact that we still have not and probably will never be able to defeat insects and even keep them from eating our food is blowing my mind. We think we've conquered the nature by industrialization, but at the end of the day we seem hopeless against the weather, insects, bacteria and fungus.
While humans dying of hunger in Africa, we can't keep them from claiming our grain even using best technology we have and thousands of different poisons we have in market.
Fighting them makes grain transportation a costly challenging operation. Price of grain inside Australia can vary a lot simply depending on where you buy it.
MES systems can assist efficiency of pest control and reduce cost of pest control operations. They can also help make cheaper logistic plans and prevent human mistakes in planning by providing correct data.
An MES system if implemented completely can definitely reduce grain loss in 'Farm to Fork' process and reduce cost of food for humans.
While we reach limits of our industrialization and it becomes harder for us to make more efficient trucks, trains and ships or more effective chemicals that insects won't get resistant to it, role of IT becomes more important.
Enterprise systems currently in grain production and handling industries tend to only focus on sales, accounting and inventory management. Equipment are usually operated independently using either PLCs or even more basic control panels with push buttons. There is a long gap to be filled between these two layers to enable a smart handling of grain that can lead to less costs.
I'll try to elaborate more on this as I go through the project I'm doing at work.
The idea that my work may help reduce hunger in world is very exciting
