Last September, when David Yee was in the United Kingdom for a conference, he took a side trip to Harper Adams University.

The vice president of the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute wanted to see a project called “Hands-Free Hectare” - three men taking an entire crop from seeding to harvest using only autonomous technology.

“While watching that particular project, I realized the real brilliance of it wasn’t that it was autonomous, but that they utilized an off the shelf technology and an open source software that brought value back to older and legacy machinery. And that really, really hit and turned on a light bulb for me,” Yee told Bolt FM.

The agriculture world is witnessing the meeting of Big Iron and Big Data, as equipment manufacturers develop new technology such as GPS, sensors and telemetry and bill them as a way for producers to improve their business, Yee said.

For example, telemetry and GPS are the backbone of auto-steer technology, which is probably the most successful precision agriculture tool, he said.

The problem is, manufacturers are walking away from legacy machinery that farmers still use, Yee said. And the cost to access manufacturers' proprietary data technology can be hard to swallow.

“So for producers in our neck of the woods, they’re not buying new equipment every single year and updating it. Part of their business proposition of making their farm viable includes legacy equipment and older equipment,” Yee said.

“And how do we bring this new value, this new functionality, to legacy equipment to keep their operations viable? That's where I think it becomes really important.”

PAMI aims to help small companies - or even producers themselves - develop open source software as a cheaper alternative to brand name products, he said.

“Just supporting the overall marketplace to really advance itself.”