Researcher Interview

1. What is your job like? What do you do?
   As a Farm Research Scientist from a Research Council, I carry out fieldworks to gain insights to current farm processes. My goal is to optimize the process to increase crop yield for food sustainability. My research focuses on soil.
2. How do you collect the data? Do you have to travel directly to the farm to collect the data yourself?
   Yes, I manually collect data, which is inconvenient since travelling from office to farm takes an hour every day. I place down the meters in the soil and take readings whilst I am at the farm to log data.
3. What kind of data will you be interested in having access to remotely?
   I would love to have an improved infrastructure on data collection methods for factors such as soil pH, temperature and rainfall. I intend to use this to investigate the pollution level of the soil in order to help reduce its negative impact on plant growth.
4. In what form would you want data to be presented to help with your job?
   A range of visualizations to choose from would be useful, for example pie charts and line graphs. I want to see how rainfall varies throughout the year and visualize relationships between factors that may affect the state of the soil over time.
5. What other features would you like to have in such a remote system?
   Some pre-analysis of the data by trained models would help to predict costs, weather patterns, etc. A model that can predict characteristics of soils such as nutrient and water level based off data already collected would be very useful.