Live From the Combine Streaming Farm Machine Data Without the Gaps

This application covers a way of getting data off farm machinery and onto a screen while the machine is still working, and of stitching that live feed together with the data the same machine produced earlier in the day. The claimed method uses two kinds of server side channel, a shared room that broadcasts live readings to everyone watching a given machine and a personal room that backfills the earlier data for one requesting user, plus a specific routine for the moments when the mobile signal drops. It was filed by AGI SureTrack LLC, the precision agriculture data arm of Ag Growth International.

The Problem

Modern farm machinery generates a great deal of useful information. The specification lists what comes out of it: insights into farmland, machine efficiencies, harvest yields and farming methodologies, drawn from data the machines and attached sensors produce as they work. Farmers, it notes, benefit from getting at that data as quickly as possible in order to make informed decisions.

Getting at it has historically been the obstacle. The specification describes the conventional route as a manual one: the operator connects a USB drive to a terminal in the machine and exports the data to it. Because the data is typically stored in a proprietary format, the operator then has to upload the file to a proprietary or third party system so it can be translated into something readable, a step the specification says can take several hours or days.

The consequence is not that the information is unavailable but that it arrives late. The specification puts it plainly: the process is time consuming and may provide valuable information only after the period in which a decision could have been made has passed. During a harvest window, a yield anomaly is worth knowing about while the machine is still in the field, not the following week.

A second problem sits underneath the first, and it is the one claim 1 spends most of its length on. Farm machinery works in places with poor mobile coverage, and a live feed that stops when the signal drops and resumes with an unexplained hole in the middle is worse than useless.

What This Invention Does

Claim 1 is a computer implemented method, and it runs as a sequence. The system obtains historical farming data associated with a farming data collection device, the device itself being tied to a user account. It then receives, at a particular time and from a computing device on that account, a request to receive real time farming data.

In response it instantiates a personal data room, which communicates to that device the portion of the historical data associated with the time of the request. Separately, it communicates through a shared room and over a communications signal one or more pieces of farming data arriving as a real time stream from the collection device. The user therefore sees the earlier part of the day’s work and the live feed together, the history through a private channel and the live portion through a channel other users watching the same machine are also connected to.

The remainder of claim 1 handles the dropout. The system determines that a data gap associated with unavailability of the communications signal exists in the stream. When it does, farming data is cached at the collection device rather than lost, and the last observed piece of farming data is carried forward, which the claim states eliminates the gap, so the display continues from the most recent known value instead of breaking. When the signal returns, the cached data goes to the computing device through the personal data room.

That final routing is the differentiator against the sibling claims in the same specification. Claim 1 sends the recovered cache back through the personal data room; the corresponding storage medium and system claims send it through the shared room instead. The body of the specification has the collection device geo tagging and storing readings in its own memory whenever a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or cellular signal is unavailable, then uploading once one returns.

Key Features

• Two room architecture. A shared room broadcasts one machine’s live feed to every connected user at once, while a personal room delivers the historical backfill to a single requesting account.
• Timestamp bounded history. Dependent claim 7 retrieves the historical data using a pair of timestamps, the first marking when the device began collecting on the current date and the second the moment the live request was made, which is what makes the two views join cleanly.
• On device caching during dropouts. When the communications signal is unavailable, the collection device holds the readings in its own memory and geo tags them, so nothing is lost while the machine is out of coverage.
• Carry forward of the last observed value. Rather than leaving a hole, the stream continues from the most recently received reading, which keeps a live chart or gauge readable through a signal outage.
• Recovery through the personal room. Once the signal returns, the cached backlog is delivered privately to the requesting device rather than replayed to everyone in the shared room.
• Server side data cleaning. Dependent claim 3 covers cleaning the historical data against user defined adjustment values, correcting for things like where the antenna sits on the machine.

Who Is Behind It

The applicant is AGI SureTrack LLC, the software and farm data business inside Ag Growth International, a Canadian listed manufacturer of grain handling and storage equipment. The AGI SureTrack platform combines machine telemetry, agronomy records, bin monitoring and grain marketing in a single account, and AGI is a signatory to the Ag Data Transparent certification scheme covering how growers’ data is used.

Four inventors are named: Sean Zicari, Adam Mertz, Rick Talken and Jason Tatge. Tatge co-founded Farmobile, the Kansas company behind the PUC data collection device that the specification names as an example of the farming data collection device in the claims. AGI took a minority stake in Farmobile in 2019 and acquired the remaining shares in 2021, after which Tatge was named senior vice president of AGI SureTrack with responsibility for merging the two organisations.

The chain is short by the standards of this batch. AU 2026202133 is a divisional of Australian application 2022389989, and the Australian specification says nothing further about priority. The wider family record shows 2022389989 entered Australia from PCT/US2022/020375, filed 15 March 2022, which claims priority from US application 17/527,944 filed 16 November 2021 and granted the following June as US 11,360,984. That US application was filed in the name of Farmobile LLC and later assigned to AGI SureTrack, which makes the United States the priority country.

Why It Matters

The gap between machine and screen has been the practical bottleneck in farm data for two decades. Machines have carried CAN bus networks and the agricultural ISO 11783 extension of them for years, so the data exists in a structured form the moment it is generated. What has been missing is a route off the machine that does not involve a memory stick and a proprietary conversion step, which is why aftermarket telematics devices like the one this specification names became a category in their own right.

The claim’s preoccupation with signal dropouts is the part that reflects real conditions rather than a demonstration. Farms are among the least well covered places in developed countries for mobile data, and any connected device architecture that assumes continuous connectivity will fail there. Caching at the edge and carrying the last value forward are not novel in isolation, but writing them into the independent claim alongside the room structure is what makes this a specific system rather than a description of streaming in general. The transport described is a WebSocket connection with rooms in the Socket.IO sense, a room being a named group of connections a server can broadcast to.

The shared room has a commercial logic too. Farming increasingly involves more than one party watching the same machine at once: the operator, an agronomist, a farm manager, sometimes a grain buyer. Broadcasting one live feed to all of them while keeping each person’s historical backfill in their own channel assumes the audience for a machine’s output is plural, which is a fair description of where the industry has moved.

Related Concepts

• Ag Data Transparent – the industry scheme governing who owns and may use data collected off farm machinery.
• ISO 11783 – the agricultural extension of the in vehicle network standard that structures the data at source.
• Edge computing – the general form of the caching step that keeps readings on the machine during a dropout.
• Internet of things – the connected device category the collection device belongs to.
• Combine harvester – the machine class whose live yield and efficiency output this system is built to move.

---

AU 2026202133 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.