Module 3: Working with Your Data


On its own, data doesn’t produce value for your farm business. Creating value using agriculture data requires planning, oversight and strategy. As the farmer, and business owner, you have a central role to play. Your planning and data management decisions go a long way to determining how your farm data improves the profitability and efficiency of your farm business. 

In this module, we will provide an introduction to data management that will help you integrate solid data practices into your existing farm business planning. In particular, we will focus on the pivotal role of data collection in ensuring you are working with high quality agriculture data. We will also explore the role of the farmer in data management relative to other key players in the agriculture data ecosystem, such as trusted advisors and agtech vendors. To round out the module, we will look at how the data lifecycle concept can be applied to strengthen your on-farm data collection practices.  

The goal of this module is to develop your capacity to think through the challenges and opportunities connected with farm data management. This is a big topic so we won’t be able to cover all the relevant issues - for instance, we won’t be doing a deep dive into how specific software tools work, or make recommendations on specific technologies or agtech companies.  

After completion of this module you will be able to:

1. Discuss the importance of high-quality, accurate, and precise data collection for data-informed decision making.

2. Describe the opportunity for engaging trusted advisors and vendors to support data-driven practices on-farm. 

3. Examine how the data lifecycle applies to agriculture data and the importance of integrating the data lifecycle concept into your farm business planning activities. 


In later modules of this program, we will go deeper into elements of data management and ultimately data governance, through modules on privacy, ownership,  cybersecurity , and more.



Click  NotebookWhy Data Management Matters?  to continue.