The Business of Farming Will Be All About Analytics, Thanks to FSMA

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is here, and I think it’s fair to say that IoT technology is going to be one of the best ways to ease the burden of compliance for farmers and supply chain companies. But once FSMA compliance is a commonplace part of doing business, the data collection and smart analytics will continue providing tasty meals for those companies, if they know how to use it.

When you think of farming, you might not immediately think about technology, but workers of the land, and those that are immediately above them in the food supply chain have been at the forefront of data analysis innovation since the beginning. You can’t improve a farm or market supply plan without understanding the history of your growing cycle and using that knowledge to attempt to predict future occurrences.

Now, thanks to the data coming from the IoT, that kind of predictive analytics can make farmers’ lives even easier, and being able to use that same process for food supply can make us all safer.

IBM has a system available that will allow folks to use big data to track and predict food outbreaks. With it, almost any individual bit of food can be tracked from farm to fork, literally (for once). Knowing food origins and supply chain path will allow FDA and CDC officials to more quickly find and contain contamination outbreaks.

IBM’s system automatically identifies, contextualizes and displays data from multiple sources to reduce the time to identify the mostly likely contaminated sources by a factor of days or weeks. It integrates pre-computed retail data with geo-coded public health data to allow investigators to see the distribution of suspect foods and, selecting an area of the map, view public health case reports and lab reports from clinical encounters. The algorithm effectively learns from every new report and re-calculates the probability of each food that might be causing the illness.