By MATTHEW D. ERNST

Missouri Correspondent

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Digital farm data quality, use and access continue to be a growth market across agriculture, spurring new product offerings from ag software companies – and leaving producers to sort out the best data management options for their operation.

New and updated data management options were on display at InfoAg, the annual precision agriculture trade show July 17-19 in St. Louis. Exhibitors said industry standards make it clear that data belong to producers and landowners.

“The data belong to the producers,” said Robin Starkenburg, North America marketing manager for Topcon Agriculture Group, as she described Topcon’s new software platform for corn and soybeans. “They will have the opportunity to share the data with who they want to share it with.”

Farmer ownership and control of data fits the American Farm Bureau Federation-led Privacy and Security Principles for Farm Data, a standard agreed to by major crop industry players and producer groups. According to those principles, when it comes to data-sharing, “farmers should be able to choose some, all, or none of the options offered” by agriculture technology providers.

That makes managing farm data a major responsibility for today’s row crop producers, said John Fulton, associate professor of agricultural engineering at The Ohio State University, who chaired an InfoAg forum on robotics. While autonomous tractors may be in agriculture’s near future, data management is in its present.

“With the ever-growing integration of digital agriculture into current technology, data sharing and prescriptive agriculture likely will be necessary to stay competitive,” stated Fulton, in an OSU publication providing guidance on data ownership.

Data management is also more important as farmers navigate various compliance issues, said Jeff Dearborn, chief agronomist at Agrian, a California-based software company.

“Row crop growers are going to see a lot more of the convergence of compliance with precision ag,” he predicted.

Producers are also looking at data as a potential revenue stream for their farms. Farmobile, a precision ag software company, touted its DataStore service at this year’s InfoAg. Launched in 2016, DataStore lets Farmobile subscribers receive and accept offers from buyers for their farm data.

Collecting good-quality data that are useful continues to present challenges for producers, ag retailers and software companies. “Every field operation, input and transaction needs to be properly digitally documented to make data useful for farmers and their trusted advisors,” said Steve Cubbage, former president of Prime Meridian, who now leads Farmobile’s DataServices product.

Farmobile this month announced the purchase of Prime Meridian, a Nevada, Mo.-based precision agriculture data company.

A farmer-owned data cooperative has even formed to provide growers an option for their own data analysis. The Grower Information Services Cooperative, headquartered in Lubbock, Texas, was demonstrating its new Validator software at InfoAg.

The software, offered through a partnership with IBM and Kansas City-based Main Street Data, lets co-op members analyze and compare their field performance with that on similar soil and weather conditions.

Bryant Boyer, the co-op’s vice president of member services, said the software lets producers identify the field zones that are most obviously underperforming, by benchmarking that field against those under similar conditions.

“The biggest thing is to understand how I can put more money in these fields to attain a better benchmark,” he explained. There is a $500 membership fee in the co-op, allowing basic software usage, with additional options available this season from 85 cents to $2.50 per acre.

The co-op’s members and “advocates” are spread across the country, said Billy Tiller, co-op CEO. “We had a group of early farmer advocates from Ohio, we have users in Indiana and surrounding states,” he said. “Right now, corn and soybean acres benefit most from our analysis.

“I think there could be benefits for cotton, too, as we build the high-quality data we need to create benchmark analysis,” said Tiller, who grows cotton and sorghum in West Texas.

Producer ownership and control is important to the co-op members. “We want to have a grower-centric ecosystem where growers can get independent insights,” he added.

Data quality and management are among “at least 10” specialized knowledge areas crop farmers have to maintain, said Scott Shearer, chair of OSU’s Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering. “Agriculture is transitioning right now, and the question is, when we come out on the other side, what’s it going to look like?”