Special Report
The issues surrounding ‘Big Data’
As expected, “Big Data” was a big topic of conversation at Commodity Classic in San Antonio.
Iowa Soybean Association president-elect Tom Oswald of Cleghorn told Brownfield it’s important that farm organizations be proactive on the issues surrounding the generation, collection and storage of farm data.
“One of the things is that data now, as opposed to Grandpa’s notebook or memories of how the farm performed, this stuff now has value—and it can have value out into the future,” Oswald says. “I think as organizations we need to look at it and say, ‘what elements are there that need to be protected—what elements need to thought about—so that the value of that data in the future is not degraded by decisions now’.
“How do we manage our data such that someday down the road we don’t regret how we managed it now?”
One thing that would help preserve the value of collected data would be collecting it in a standardized format. It doesn’t do much good to collect data with your John Deere equipment if you can’t hand that off to your seed saleman, fertilzer dealer, herbicide vendor or your tenant or the next person that owns your farm. That works both ways. All of those people need to be able to hand data back to you. Right now we don’t have that. The sooner there is an industry standard, the better.