According to a recent Reuters news release, the Open Agriculture Data Alliance has officially launched an industry-wide project to standardize farm data formats and better improve communication between farm equipment and farm management tools.
The alliance will also seek to set standards on data privacy and security, which lead the list of data-sharing related concerns for many of today’s farmers. Companies such as John Deere have been heavily investing in, and improving precision agriculture and data analytics tools to help crop producers boost yields or increase efficiency. The OADA will seek to standardize the manner in which this data is shared through a series of privacy and security guidelines industry wide.
Aaron Ault, a senior research engineer at Purdue's Open Ag Technology Group and project lead for the OADA, said in the release, "We will solve as many problems with technological solutions as we possibly can. The ones that we cannot solve with technological solutions we will solve with common language that lets the farmer know, up front, what it is they are getting into when they enter into agreements with these different companies."
The Open Agriculture Data Alliance is comprised of a group of Purdue University researchers and a group of agricultural companies including The Climate Corporation, Valley Irrigation, GROWMARK, CNH Industrial, AgReliant Genetics, and more.
As data becomes a critical component of successful farming, and precision agriculture technologies are commonplace among farms and farming equipment, the OADA is seeking to implement an industry-wide set of standards and guidelines to protect sensitive data.