Putting Agricultural Data to Use

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

There’s no shortage of data in agriculture, but dispersing that data for the industry’s benefit is another story. DeLoach professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis, Aaron Smith, says agriculture must figure out how to make private data, public, starting with the large industry players.

Smith… “The next, I think, revolution in agriculture is through various types of precision technologies, and so we’ve had a period, I’d say over the last decade or so, where a lot of farm equipment is collecting and producing massive amounts of data in the sense that you know, if you’ve got a GPS guided tractor or a combine is a better example, that combine is going to record for every square foot of your field, how much production, how much yield you got off that land. And so that data is getting produced and I think the transition that we’re in right now is being able to take that data and actually use it and so those data tend to be private and I think there’s a lot of challenges around that data privacy there but maybe the large combine companies like xX will have access to that or particular researchers or others may not have access to an individual farmer’s yield data that comes off the combine but taking those data, being able to access them, and turn that into something and then help improve productivity I think is the phase that we’re in now.

That’s UC Davis DeLoach professor, Aaron Smith.