Is Data the New Oil or the New Snake Oil?

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

We’ve heard it said before that “data is the new oil”, and supposedly that applies to ag data as well. So if that’s true, why aren’t farmers seeing money offered for their data? Cultura Tech’s senior vice president of global collaboration, Jeff Schreiner, believes there is still potential for consumers to pay for the information they want with their food, and for that money to make its way to farmers.

Schreiner... "There's both optimism and an agreement that technology can solve problems, but there's also a healthy degree of skepticism too, which is how many times are you going to ask me for data? And What does this mean and how does it help me produce and grow a better product and market it better and those kinds of things. And so we have to have a really clear, concise avenue for these entrepreneurial farmers that really want answers that way. And I think they want to make sure that if you're sharing data, it's going to be done in a very ethical, business-minded way. When we look at what data can do in our industry, the product that's produced that has data that surrounds it, that enhances that product, ultimately creates, you know, a way to grade that product and become, you know, become a variable pricing mechanism at some point in time. We're seeing the farmers start to recognize that if they do certain things and use certain treatments, at some point, there is a different pricing model for that type of pattern than something else."

Again that’s Jeff Schreiner, vice president of global collaboration at Cultura Tech.