Note: John authors a regular column in Farm Journal magazine, the most widely-circulated farm publication in the United States.
Agriculture is officially entering the era of big data. Prescriptive planting relies on historical weather trends and satellite mapping coupled with soil sampling, yield monitoring and soon whatever a drone can glean from flying over a field. Using these tools, data flows from a farmer’s equipment to a central database, along with terabytes of information from farms all across the country. While this data transfer is necessary to feed the algorithms that will compute an individual farmer’s planting prescription, it also has value that extends well beyond its use for prescriptive planting.
One of the primary concerns many producers have about prescriptive planting programs is the ownership of the data. Most farmers view the information about their farm as personal. Although you might brag or complain about yields in the truck line at the grain elevator, you do not necessarily feel comfortable with a computer jockey who is five states away sharing your yield data. If this data can be sold, many farmers want to know how it will be used.
