Agriculture’s Big Data Keeps Getting Bigger; Needs Home to Make Greater Impacts
Massive amounts of agricultural data are being collected around the world by scientists utilizing drones for remote sensing, agronomic yield measurements, or plant breeding variety trials, writes Kay Ledbetter at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension. Seth Murray, Ph.D., Texas A&M AgriLife Research corn breeder, College Station, called upon the agricultural scientific community to address the lack of plans or infrastructure to catalogue and make this data accessible for future research and synthesis during the recent Crop Science Society of America conference in San Antonio.
“We have this huge emerging problem centered on big data,” he said. Murray said big data permeates all facets of agricultural research and agricultural production. When properly curated, this data can be used beyond initial experiments, providing inexpensive but valuable opportunities to improve breeding and management knowledge from experiments that were never planned.
“Not a lot of people are thinking about this, but it will be a real pain to try to go back and find data later, so we need to address it now,” he said. “Right now, people generate data, keep it on their local computer, write a paper, and then are supposed to put the data somewhere.”
Continue reading at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension.
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