Data-Driven Agriculture: Today's Possibilities, Tomorrow's Potential

Here at Consumer Corner, we value the cross-pollination of ideas, open-access materials freely available for public consumption and (of course) data-driven decisions. Recently, I was thrilled to be invited to participate in the Data-Driven Agriculture: Today’s Possibilities, Tomorrow’s Potential Digital Ag Webinar Series. I delivered a webinar titled Public Data for the Public Good that pulled from a variety of our ongoing and recently published pieces about online and social media data in the public policy arena or marketplace.

According to the Purdue Digital Ag Resources website, “In this series, researchers from across the College of Agriculture and beyond showcased how they are using data to improve crop, livestock and forest management decisions, increase produce safety, quickly identify disease outbreaks in livestock, and much more.”

This past spring, hosts Dr. Dennis Buckmaster, Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Dean’s Fellow for Digital Agriculture, and Dr. Bruce Erickson, Agronomy Education Distance and Outreach Director, led viewers through weekly topics ranging from digital forestry to precision soil mapping to deep-learning for weed identification.

“We like the webinar format for a broad audience, as it can take a complicated topic and make it more relatable for those who don’t work in it every day,” said Erickson. “That’s why Dennis and I facilitate these discussions and sometimes interrupt to chime in about something important in the moment, moderate participant questions and always have a few questions of our own up our sleeves.”

Freely available, full-length webinars from experts on cutting-edge and impactful topics could be valuable for producers and educators, as class materials, or for interested citizens who want to know more about how agriculture uses data today. Given the interest in data analytics and data-driven decision making in agriculture, this rich series deserves a review.

To view the entire series, check out the Data-Driven Agriculture playlist on Purdue Agriculture’s YouTube channel or click the links below for more information about individual webinars.

The entire fall 2020 webinar series is also available here or by clicking the individual webinar links below.

  • Put Your Smartphone to Work by Dennis Buckmaster, Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Dean’s Fellow for Digital Agriculture, Purdue University
  • Make Sense of Your Sensors by Andrew Balmos, Data/Software Engineer, Purdue University, and John Scott, Digital Agriculture Extension Coordinator, Purdue University
  • Meet LoRa, Your New Best Friend by Andrew Balmos, Data/Software Engineer, Purdue University, and Jack Stucky, Vice President of Engineering, Wabash Heartland Innovation Network

“We certainly had a themes for these series, but we also believe most of these webinars are useful as stand-alone sessions,” said Buckmaster.  “We hope these presentations and discussions have lasting value for educators and students at high school and college levels and, of course, the general public.” 

ConsumerCorner.2021.Article.07