The Agriculture Department should be a leader in facilitating data collection, utilization, sharing and research, said the AGree farm policy initiative and the Data Foundation on Tuesday. “The time has come for USDA and the policy community to consider how to accomplish the joint objective of protecting critical data while also allowing its use to answer critical questions,” said the organizations in a white paper that encouraged interagency sharing of information.
The USDA gathers enormous amounts of information through its statistical agencies and its farm support programs. However, the data “are generally siloed within the implementing agency and lacks interoperability with other datasets within USDA,” said the report. As a result, it may be difficult to assess how well programs mesh with each other and if they can be improved or made more efficient.
As an example, the authors said, USDA’s crop insurance and land stewardship agencies “largely implement their programs in isolation from each other” without considering how they could pool their knowledge to mutual benefit.
The white paper suggested four approaches, ranging from a USDA data clearinghouse to privately run data center, and listed “farmer trust” as the first consideration for any of them. “Efforts that integrate data need to clearly explain what activities are being undertaken, the benefits of those activities and the standards employed to maintain farmer privacy,” said the white paper. Legislation may be needed to assure confidentiality of data and to acquire data from other agencies.
Farmer reluctance to share information with USDA derailed a proposal for a traceback system to find the home herd of cattle suffering “mad cow” disease in the 1990s. When precision farming was in its early days, farm groups were also wary about sharing crop data with technology companies.