Special Report
The importance of sharing data
It’s the power of knowledge. Shared. As Matt Bechdol, president of GeoSilos closed out the IDEAg Interconnectivity Conference last Thursday he challenged attendees to not just collect data about their farming operations – but share it in one way or another. “You think about how we share data today, Google Maps and traffic, Twitter feeds to see what is going on with the markets,” he says. “We complain about USDA reports, planting intentions, etc. if we are sharing a data anonymously about what we are doing we can know in real-time who is planting, what they are planting, what they harvested, and what their yields look like. It enables us to compare what we’re doing with others.”
Bechdol tells Brownfield there’s tremendous value in sharing data but agriculture has to translate the ability to share with its actual value. “It’s going to take time to really build up data to the scale that we can really make sense of it,” he says. “We have to start sharing now and have some faith. Sharing is going to be key to our industry’s success in the next five to ten years.”
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