Dear all,

Data and, more important, information are crucial for every endeavor to succeed. Agriculture is no exception. Information is a capital good, as are land and seed. However, acquiring it and using are usually difficult in their own, but ICT or Digital Technologies are particularly useful for the task.

That said, in this post I would like to stress the point of data acquisition, and later in another one, the transformation of data into useful-actionable information and its dissemination.

Data acquisition in agriculture is expensive, and because of this is mainly undertaken by governments, universities, NGO's, etc. and mostly with different purposes in mind. So most data gathered by this actors is not very useful at the farm level. 

We argue that data must be acquired at the point of origin, the individual farm. Then it can be aggregated and processed to get a better view of market and production.

As said above, Digital Technologies are very powerful for this task. We need to bring farmers to the digital space through useful applications, so their common production-commercial activities generate point of origin data, that can then be processed into useful actionable information at the farm level.

Any thoughts?