ASABE Harvest Data Standard Addresses Some Common Conundrums in Yield Analysis

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ASABE Harvest Data Standard Addresses Some Common Conundrums in Yield Analysis

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

The ASABE Precision Agriculture Technical Committee (MS-54) recently announced that has developed and released a new National Standard relevant to several different projects within AgGateway. The official title of the standard is ANSI/ASABE S611 JUN2023 Collecting, Processing, and Visualizing Geographic Harvest Data, and it addresses some of the common headaches the industry encounters with yield data files, both from the OEM manufacturer perspective of generating yield files as well as for FMIS or software companies that receive and analyze yield data.

Another key topic discussed is recording any modifications to the data, commonly referred to as cleaning or correcting the data. Most systems in the market today, whether the machine logging the data, or the software tool ingesting the data, have mechanisms to remove erroneous data and also attempt to fill in gaps in the data. The standard provides some guidance on how to document the type of and how much filtering was done. Ultimately, the party receiving the data ends up knowing a little more about the data quality and provenance.

Finally, the standard also includes some guidelines for displaying yield data in a map as far as the statical methods used to group points into zones as well as what colors to use. This is a common point of confusion in the industry – there is no real consistent use of colors. Some users create maps with red areas as low yield, while others might choose a completely different color. The standard provides some guidance on what colors to use, how many different colors should be in one map, and considerations for making maps that are not difficult to read for people that are color blind.

This standard covers topics that are relevant to the work of AgGateway data linking working groups and supports some of the changes to how data is exchanged in the current ADAPT Standard discussions. While it is focused on yield data and maps, many of the concepts would be good best practices to apply to any as-applied maps.

An abstract is available on the ASABE website here: https://elibrary.asabe.org/abstract.asp?aid=54348&redir=[confid=s2000]&redirType=standards.asp&dabs=Y

You can also buy a copy from ANSI: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/asabe/ansiasabes611jun2023