Posted March 13, 2014
On Tuesday, Purdue University researchers and a group of agriculture companies announced an open source project to standardize farm data and set standards on data privacy and security, according to a Reuters article available here.
The Open Agriculture Data Alliance (OADA) includes Purdue’s Open Ag Technology Group, The Climate Corporation, Valley Irrigation, farm cooperative GROWMARK, equipment maker CNH Industrial and seed company AgReliant Genetics. Others participating include farm product suppliers Wilbur-Ellis Company and WinField.
Agriculture companies including John Deere, DuPont Pioneer and Climate Corp (recently acquired by Monsanto) have invested heavily in precision agriculture and data analytics tools.
The OADA will seek to address some of the data privacy and security concerns farmers have voiced about their data being misused or sold to third parties. OADA will also create a “reference implementation” of a “cloud storage and data analytics service to set an example for the industry on how an OADA- compliant system should function.”
“OADA will work to ensure farmers can move their data seamlessly and securely between their equipment, software and services by speeding the development of technical standards for data formatting and interoperability that will be openly developed, and shared,” said David Friedberg, CEO of The Climate Corporation, as reported by AgWired here.
Aaron Ault, senior research engineer for the Open Ag Technology Group at Purdue and a farmer himself, will serve as project lead for OADA. “The open standards of OADA will give farmers the flexibility and control they need to choose data science products and services that will work on their farms to help manage their data and make more data-driven decisions, enabling the next wave of agricultural production.”
For more information on biotechnology, please visit the National Agricultural Law Center’s website here.
Share: