I coordinate field operations for a farm with more than 5000 acres of blueberries and cranberries, divided into a number of fields ranging from 10 - 125 acres each. I was hoping to bring in a new system of data management for better grip on money and money out of each field.
By data, I mean chemical input, equipment usage, labour charges, and yields to have a better grip over every part of farm. This will help us plan variable applications and management.
As of now, I am looking for a GIS solution/software for data management, visualisation, analysis (to support third party statistical software), and decision-making.
At first you must see if a relational DB can handle the data.
If so, for data management you can select PostgreSQL which is an open source object relational database (ORDBMS). There is a special extension available called PostGIS that integrates several geofunctions and supports geographic objects. PostGIS implementation is based on "light-weight" geometries and the indexes are optimized to reduce disk and memory usage. The interface language of the PostgreSQL database is the standard SQL. PostGIS has the most comprehensive geofunctionalities with more than one thousand spatial functions. Also, there are several spatial operators for geospatial measurements like area, distance, length and perimeter and supports several types of indexes. For general
balanced tree structures and high-speed spatial querying, PostgreSQL uses GiST indexes that can be used to index geometric data types, as well as full-text search.
In case that you have to handle big data you can go with one of the NoSQL solutions for data management. There are plenty open source like MongoDB, Redis, Hadoop-GIS, Neo4j, SpatialSpark, GeoSpark etc. In case of data management and decision-making I suggest SpatialSpark. If you want only data management I suggest MongoDB because is simple and efficient.
For visualisation you can go with QGIS. This tool is useful but according to my experience if you have a lot of data (for example one million ids) the visualisation is not so clear. But you can test it as a start and see if it works in your case.
I strongly recommend QGIS software. It has the option to plugin third-party statistical software and decision-making capabilities.
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