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Precision farming enables agricultural management decisions to be tailored spatially and temporally. Site-specific sensing, sampling, and managing allow farmers to treat a field as a heterogeneous entity. Through targeted use of inputs, precision farming reduces waste, thereby cutting both private variable costs and the environmental costs such as those of agrichemical residuals. At present, large farms in developed countries are the main adopters of precision farming. But its potential environmental benefits can justify greater public and private sector incentives to encourage adoption, including in small-scale farming systems in developing countries. Technological developments and big data advances continue to make precision farming tools more connected, accurate, efficient, and widely applicable. Improvements in the technical infrastructure and the legal framework can expand access to precision farming and thereby its overall societal benefits.
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Providing Public Value through Data Sharing: Understanding Critical Factors of Food Traceability for Local Farms and Institutional Buyers
Many of the datasets that could contribute to solutions for current public problems are proprietary and reside outside of government agencies. Accelerating data sharing and collaboration between those who hold valuable data and those able to deliver solutions is key to generating public value from private data. There is still a limited body of literature, however, that addresses data sharing and collaboration between private and public organizations. Using a case study of food traceability from local farms to institutions, this paper contributes to this emerging field by identifying challenges and incentives in data sharing among different types of organizations. In particular, our goal is to study how small farms and institutional buyers can be incentivized to share their data in a way that contributes to food safety, public health, and other societal goals. Our findings demonstrate that initiatives which can show the benefits of having a whole-chain food traceability system, have clear policies and regulations, and opportunities for participation in training activities are key incentives.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1649820
- PAR ID:
- 10073412
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2018
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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