Harvesting Big Data

            Agriculture in the United States is a massive industry that produces food for not only America, but may other countries around the world. The last census of agriculture in 2007 states that there are 2.2 million farms that cover approximately 3.73 million kilometers squared with an average size of around 1.69 kilometers squared . This is an eminence amount of land that is ripe for the picking and I mean picking though the mountains of data that it creates.

            Farmers could really benefit from being able to analyze this data and have open access to the results. My thoughts would be to create an avenue for them to share this data openly for the mutual benefit of all. If all farmers joined a cooperation that gathered all the data that each participating member produced and had a team of analysts search using data mining techniques, imagine how that could benefit the agricultural industry. They could better predict weather, the likely hood of droughts, freezes, or disease.

            How could this data be collected you ask? Well, if you wanted to be a participating member of the co-op you would pay a membership and that would cover the costs of installing small weather stations around your farm. These stations could gather all sorts of data, from the amount of moisture in the soil to the wind speed. The data could then be streamed back to the co-op main office for analyzing.

            I think that some sort of data gathering co-op between farmers is the best way to gather massive amounts of data that could help predict many devastating events. Being able to be proactive to these events will cause a much smaller impact then if they are reactive to the situation.      

Resource:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_States