Some solutions require data transparency
Tim Hamelich
News Reporter
Tim Hamelich of the Agriculture Information Network brings you the Future Farm Report.
There’s no shortage of data in agriculture, but how much of that data is transparent enough to solve industry-wide problems? Jeff Schreiner, senior vice president of global collaboration at Cultura Tech, says one of the biggest issues he hears from his clients in the agri-food system is a lack of data sharing, which ultimately prevents problems from being solved.
Schreiner: “If we can share the data, we can report it for compliance or other purposes, or decide that a board initiative wants to hear answers on a certain topic. If we get the data from our partners or myself, we have a much better means of doing that. And when someone says optimization, I mean, there are a lot of examples of optimization out there. We produce products that aren’t used and get thrown away. We have two or three ways to move them, and they might not be the most efficient way to get them to the right consumer. We might have an instinctive decision about where is the market, where is the flow of goods, and so on. And I think optimization — looking at it as a holistic picture and seeing if we can optimize, can we reduce a step in the process, can we get the right outcome using the data that people are willing to share — is a really great premise.”
Schreiner believes there are plenty of opportunities to use approaches from other industries as models for agriculture.
