News

Helping farmers manage on-farm data

Several agricultural entities have come together to form a coalition to build a central site where farmers can house and manage their farm’s production data.

Bruce Erickson, with Purdue University, one of the founding members of the Agricultural Data Coalition says farmers want and need a safe place to store their information.

He says farmers are collecting more data from their farms than ever and need to be able to utilize it.  “There’s been an explosion of people that are working on this information,” he says.  “We think the potential is enormous.  We’ve been using some of this information on the farm, yield monitor information to create management zones to potentially farm better.  We think this will only increase in the future.”

He tells Brownfield in some cases farmers have yield information from the past 20 years on stored on multiple devices.

Erickson says that isn’t efficient or effective.  “And getting it all in this kind of a repository is a way that we can have all that data more closely at hand,” he says.  “And let someone else worry about that than a farmer having to pull all the information together and make sure it’s available for their service provider.”

Other ADC founding members include AGCO, the American Farm Bureau Federation, Auburn University, CNH, Crop IMS, Mississippi State University, The Ohio State University, Raven Industries, Topcon Positioning Group, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

AUDIO: Bruce Erickson, Purdue University