Data Sharing in the Ag Community - What Are Current Challenges, Benefits, and Opportunities.

The model for building agronomic science today and into the future to meet global food demands with limited resources will be through public-private data acquisition, sharing, and collaborative analysis. The public perspective focuses on preserving natural resources. The private perspective focuses on income generation and livelihood. Solutions require data pooling in a way that harmonizes both these perspectives. This presentation will discuss and present examples of the primary challenges of data stewardship that require attention to create a more conducive environment for data aggregation. These challenges include standards for data management plans, including appropriate metadescriptors, data ownership, confidentiality, credit for shared data, fear of data misuse, lack of knowledge for analyzing aggregate data, and data sharing costs. As we move in an era of “big data” accumulation in food production systems, adequate data stewardship will allow data mining strategies to capture their full benefits. The advantage of pooling data from many farmers, including organized networks, is that agronomists, economists, and other researchers will have sufficient data to calculate reliable probabilities describing the chances for success of new and existing crop production practices. This will then lead to reliable, adaptive (soil, season, etc.), and contemporary guidelines for “personalized” crop management systems to improve the efficiency of crop production, and result in greater profits for farmers and less pollution from unneeded inputs. The presentation will give examples of collaborations that show promise for developing robust and personalized crop management solutions.