Technological innovation over the last few decades has made it possible for agriculturalists to collect and use real-time climatic, soil, water, equipment, plant, and animal health data to inform decision-making processes.

Currently, however, nearly all technology solutions are provided by large manufacturers or private companies. These systems are proprietary and closed, with limited opportunities for integration across platforms. Farmers with a diverse range of data needs have therefore been forced to buy, manage, and maintain multiple data platforms. This has created a barrier for the adoption of such innovations, particularly for small farming operations who do not have the resources to participate fully in this space. It has also acted to discourage the sharing of data, even though farmers are very willing to share their data with other farmers and research institutions (Zhang et al., 2017).

Open-source IoT offers an alternative and more accessible solution to the collection, aggregation, and sharing of data across the agricultural sector. But open source is not open data (Sargent, 2020). Open source refers instead to a method of software development in which the source code is made available publicly without requiring a licensing fee. Only the code is open, not necessarily the data (Ault et al., 2018). Farmers are therefore empowered to be masters of their own data (Ault et al., 2018) and to make it available when and to whom they see fit.

Visit the https://opensensing.com/open-source-agtech-iot-ecosystem/ for more information.