Government-backed Ag-tech Centre and Microsoft Partner, Agrimetrics, have released a whitepaper exploring barriers to data sharing in agriculture and what can be done to overcome them.
Data has the potential to revolutionise the food and farming sector, but that revolution hasn’t happened. This report argues that poor data sharing is behind the slow pace of innovation. It explores the political, cultural, structural and technological barriers to data sharing, and delivers recommendations for overcoming them. Two of these barriers are:
Low trust prevents data from being shared
Poor corporate behaviour and a mistrust of Government’s motivations for gathering data have created an understandable cynicism amongst farmers. This has not been helped by the sector’s slowness to adopt independent data governance accreditations – such as ISO270001 – that are commonplace in other data-rich sectors; of 35 leading ag-tech firms surveyed by firm Supply Intelligence, just 2 had attained ISO27001 and several were not aware it existed…
There is a misconception about the value of farm data
A number of organisations, influencers and media outlets have fueled an unrealistic expectation regarding the value of an individual farmer’s data. This has encouraged the belief that organisations should pay to access on-farm information. However, this does not fit with realistic reward structures; ironically, it may end up limiting choice and raising prices. Though this is not to say that farmers should simply give away their data…
You can read the full report here:
https://agrimetrics.co.uk/blog/whitepaper/barriers-to-agricultural-data-sharing
