Guest written by Anne Bruinsma, Mobilisation Officer, Hackwerk-Advies
On April 1st and 2nd, the 2016 Thought For Food Global Summit took place in Zurich, Switzerland. GODAN and its partner Syngenta worked together to organize an Open Data workshop for the next generation of inventors, doers and dreamers.
The question on the table was: how can open data be used to challenge conventional rules and boundaries in food and agriculture?
To help participants better understand how open data can help design future food and agricultural systems, Syngenta and co-host GODAN gave a presentation discussing how open data is already making real improvements in the day to day lives of farmers by improving efficiency and sustainability. The presentation was followed by an interactive exercise on the importance of an open data ecosystem to help farmers make informed decisions on crop protection.
Presenting open data and agriculture
Agriculture is generating an abundance of relevant data, mainly through the proliferation of affordable technologies. But if we want to use this data to feed 9 billion people sustainably in 2050, we need to make sure that key data is available and accessible. Too often agricultural data is kept in silos, closed, undiscoverable, not licensed and not well described or of low quality. This leads to prohibitive efforts to clean it and make it useful.
Syngenta, a chemical company that develops and deploys innovation in seeds and crop protection, presented The Good Growth Plan, which comprises six ambitious commitments around crop efficiency, protecting biodiversity and soil, and building rural prosperity by reaching and training smallholders in developing countries. In order to help farmers make better-informed decisions, Syngenta created individualized farm reports that benchmark each farmer’s efficiency performance with the comparable farmers in the same region.
Now in the second year of the project, Syngenta has made all audited GGP data on biodiversity and soil preservation initiatives available in open data format. The initiative was well received, and as a result, according to Syngenta’s Elisabeth Fischer, “we feel challenged to go beyond transparency to empower sustainable innovation through data. We realise that in order for our data to be impactful, we need to link it to the data ecosystem in agriculture, to other data sets to generate more insights about what works in agriculture”.
Taking a farmer-centric approach
GODAN’s work was highlighted to focus on the organization's support of proactive sharing of open data in agriculture and nutrition. The importance of taking a farmer-centric approach when it comes to data driven change in agriculture was especially emphasized. It will help data driven concepts move that much faster if farmers are actively articulating their interest and ideas and are investing in and cocreating proof of concepts.
According to Anthony Osborne, Climate Corporation, “farmers are the ultimate ‘must see it to believe it’ group. Until they can see the impact technology can have on their farm, they are not willing to make an investment.”
An interesting example of a farmer-centric initiative from the Netherlands is Boer&Bunder, a web application that has brought together open data for the last six years for specific geopositioned land parcels, crop rotation, soil types, average NDVI values for the fields, and nature conservation measures. Another example is a new initiative called FarmHack.NL, which will soon facilitate hackathons built up around challenges and ideas of individual farmers.
The benefits of open data
During the second part of the workshop participants were given a hands-on perspective on open data. A complex process is required to unlock the benefits of open data — one that spans not only the release of data, and translating that into actionable insights, but also the willingness of multiple data partners to unlock and share their data, and become more connected, contingent and collaborative. The exercise, which was cocreated with XPLANE (a design consultancy that incorporates visual-thinking, people-centred design and co-creation to help clarify and navigate complexity) was targeted at the question how open data can help improve access to information for farmers to crop protection information.
In the Netherlands, the lack of real time access to relevant information for farmers has been topic of debate for decades. In 2013 the problem was addressed during a hackathon, which led to a hack called ‘Pestileaks.'
In a follow up project, the design company STBY developed the customer journey to determine the needs of a farmer: what does he need and when, during the crop season.
For this exercise, participants were given some background on different stakeholders involved in crop protection. The main character was an average farmer who wants to produce good quality food at a volume that generates income for his family. He wants to ensure the food is safe, and meets national safety standards. And he wants to safeguard stewardship of the land, to ensure continuity for his farm. To make decisions he looks for labels for applying fertilizers and chemicals and the interaction with farm for determining planting strategy, and diagnostics for interventions. He needs to comply with current legislation, but also anticipate unforeseen circumstances (such as weather conditions). He is also under increasing pressure to be transparent regarding his farming operations.
During the exercise participants elaborated on possible partnerships with other stakeholders, such as governments, supermarkets, and water sanitation companies. The need for collaboration and cooperation with these stakeholders is paramount. It is open data than can help farmers, consumers, government and agribusinesses to close ranks and contribute in creating a data infrastructure and data ecosystem that makes data available, as open as possible, and useful to generate insights, create services, and improve decision-making.
Concluding thoughts
As one way or another many of the future big ideas on how to feed the world will depend on the use of open data, our call to action to all participants was that everyone has a role to play, either in articulating demand for open data, in donating data or in becoming an ‘open data broker’: an intermediary who facilitates the use of open data that may otherwise not have been the case
Resources:
GODAN Presentation at 2016 Thought for Food Summit - PPT
The Good Growth Plan & Open Data Innovation - PPT
