Cloud Computing Presents Great Opportunities, New Challenges, for Precision Agriculture.

Software tools that have recently entered the precision agriculture space are making heavy use of data, massive computing power, and the rapid pace of development and deployment that cloud computing platforms enable.  Adapt-N is a precision nitrogen management software tool that has demonstrated the value of cloud computing by taking a deep amount of crop, soil, and climatic research and quickly transitioning it to the precision agriculture market in a scalable and secure fashion.  Adapt-N is architected in a way that protects users’ data even when it resides “in the cloud,” it allows for the seamless scaling of computing capacity even under large and unexpected spikes in demand, and new advances in the underlying science, as well as new user experience features, can be easily deployed to consumers without the need for software updates or downloads.  With the fast adoption of cloud computing principles by software providers in agriculture, however, comes a number of new challenges for consumers.  As companies can develop and release new products and services faster than ever before, consumers will be faced with an increasing challenge of sorting through a multitude of options, with a decreasing ability to discern fully vetted solutions from those which may have been introduced before being truly validated.  Some of these new products will challenge concepts which have been commonly accepted for decades, introducing confusion into the user selection process as well.  Lastly, the fact that data will no longer reside with and be physically controlled by the user presents a number of new concerns which go far beyond the privacy policy, and should cause users to take a holistic view of where their data goes, how it might be used now and in the future, and seek to understand the fundamental intent of companies who collect and store it.