The State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology is building a cloud-based clearinghouse that it hopes will help farmers and others in the food industry “make sense” of the growing mountain of data and “put it to good use,” reports The Enterprisers Project.
As farmers increasingly employ the tools and strategies of precision agriculture—basically using advanced technology, such as drones and satellite sensors, to increase the efficiency of their operations—they are producing huge data sets. The idea behind the Broadband Rural Agriculture Cloud, or BRAG Cloud, as it’s called, is to create “a common directory or clearing house” for all that data and for agriculture and farm-food information generally.
The first phase gets underway this fall with “a wireless broadband mesh network that will connect the SUNY Cobleskill campus with the 150-acre farm it recently acquired, which will function as an experimental test bed.” It will enable “the movement of large data sets from the farm back to campus for storage and analysis.”
In phase two SUNY Cobleskill will partner with Cornell University’s Cooperative Extension to ensure students get “the skills needed to perform the kind of big data analysis that will drive success in precision agriculture and other disciplines.”
“Ultimately, the plan is to make BRAG Cloud available to any research organization in the state and, eventually, nationally,” says The Enterprisers Project. “If a university is conducting research on how to best grow a particular type of apple, for example, it could use BRAG Cloud to see what information already exists on the topic, to help identify historical trends or validate their research and add that research to the collection. Or perhaps a grower having an issue with a particular type of apple can input data and use the database to find whether anyone else has experience with the issue and get some advice on how to handle the problem.”