Better Farming – September 2016

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28 Farm News First >
The sharing of information is
becoming a hot topic in precision
agriculture. In June, the G-8
announced the formation of an
International Conference on Open
Data in Agriculture. This group
quickly merged with six African
nations to form the New Alliance
for Food Security and Nutrition.
“We’re at a crossroads,” says
Leo Bose, advanced farming
systems marketing manager at
Case IH. “How does a producer
know who is seeing their data?
The data has to be accessed by a
third party specialist to optimize
its use. We need a security struc-
ture. Up to now, it’s been, ‘here’s
my USB stick,’ no terms of
service agreement, no privacy
protection.”
There is also the issue of
proprietary platforms. Can data
collected on a planter from one
manufacturer be used in the
system of a combine from another
manufacturer? In order for the
data to be useful, some kind of
data management software has to
be used, and right now there are
dozens of farm management
information system packages on
the market, many developed by
seed companies or farm imple-
ment companies.
“The companies may believe
they are using their platform as a
tie-in for future sales, but farmers
have to be cautious about that.
You want to continue to have the
flexibility of having a mixed fleet
of vehicles, for example,” says
Steve Redmond, Hensall District
Co-op precision ag specialist.
To try to overcome data sharing
problems between different farm
equipment’s software, over 200
companies set up a non-profit
consortium called AgGateway.
Andres Ferreya, manager of
special projects for Ag Connec-
tions LLC, a farm management
software developer and member of
the AgGateway consortium, has
Sharing data and issues of ownership
worked on a number of AgGate-
way projects.
“There is a huge inter-opera-
tional problem in agriculture,” he
says. “The rapid growth in
technology hasn’t been matched
by growth in our ability to get the
data to do useful things. When
growers have mixed fleets,
usually the machines can’t talk
to each other or, worse, they
can’t talk to the farm manage-
ment information system.”
AgGateway has introduced
something called ADAPT (Agricul-
tural Data Application Program-
ming Toolkit), an add-on software
package that allows data to be
transferred among machines of
different manufacture and be-
tween management software
packages. “The intent is to get the
manufacturers to create a plug-in.
But because ADAPT is open
source (programming), anyone can
create that plug-in and make it
available,” says Ferreya.
Steve Redmond, Hensall
District Co-op precision ag
specialist, believes time will pick
two or three standardized soft-
ware management platforms, but
in the meantime, farmers should
store their raw data.
“Use the cloud,” he says. “I
know you think that makes your
information vulnerable but, well,
get over it. It’s secure there. But
use a system that’s going to be
around for a while, like Dropbox.”
The cloud refers to a comput-
erized network that is accessed
over the Internet from any com-
puter device to store or process
information. Dropbox is one such
network that specializes in
allowing its users to store large
amounts of information.
The shared, on-demand nature
of the cloud makes sharing
information between an agrono-
mist and a farmer easy, but it
continued on page 30
PRECISIONAG