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.
