NAPDC: Focus on Data Issues in Agriculture

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NAPDC: Focus on Data Issues in Agriculture

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

A relatively new addition to the AgGateway fold is the National Agricultural Producers Data Cooperative (NAPDC). This group is run out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is funded through a USDA-NIFA grant.

The aim is to help sort out some of the issues with data exchange – especially as it pertains to working with academia and government agencies – with a view toward creating a blueprint for a US national framework for agricultural data.

One of the many things the group works on is monthly webinars that feature a different project or organization to help spread awareness of what is happening in the industry. As anyone in the ag tech space knows, there are new companies, consortiums, research projects, and various initiatives popping up all the time. The goal of these webinars is to help spread awareness so different projects can find synergies and help each other out by sharing what they have learned or what resources exist for other efforts to leverage. Past presentations have been led by other friends of AgGateway like the Ag Data Coalition, Purdue OATS center, and EMILI project in Canada.

The NAPDC also administers convening awards where different organizations have applied for funding to help make progress in different areas of data exchange to help inform the overall goal of the blueprint. These different sub-awards have worked on data exchange for beef genetics, understanding data use better with smaller specialty crop growers, as well as the perceptions and requirements around an independent grower managed data repository.

The NAPDC also hosted a conference in June that featured several workshops on key data topics, including permissions, access, security, and legal issues to help inform a broader whitepaper. Several AgGateway members we present to help the team gather information in the workshop to document the state of the industry and identify some actions to help move the whole industry forward.

If you are interested in learning a little more about the group and what they are up to check out the past webinar archive, you will find one there (Webinar 14: Industry Defined Standards Solving Digital Interoperability) covering some of the various AgGateway projects of relevance to the audience that was done in late October. Also, you can talk with the Principal Investigator, Dr. Jennifer Clarke, at the Annual Conference in Nashville to learn more.