Resource Magazine by Aaron Ault, et al.

There are some common laments in agricultural data that seem to remain despite repeated attempts to address them: lack of interoperability, varying data privacy, varying data quality, and difficulty in attracting talent from a population increasingly disconnected from agriculture. At first glance, these issues seem unrelated to each other: how could solving interoperability issues relate to attracting talent? How can issues of data privacy affect data quality? Why is agriculture finding it difficult to attract talent when it offers some of the most interesting, challenging, fun, and relevant problems in the world? The common thread of all these problems is that their solution can be found in open source culture.

It is important to address one misconception up front: “open source culture” does not mean “make all private agricultural data publicly available.” Open source refers instead to a method of software development in which the source code is made available publicly without requiring a licensing fee. The data, which the software handles, remains as private as the owner wishes it to be. Only the code is open, not necessarily the data. Of course, once open source code makes people masters of their own data, they are empowered to make their data available as they see fit, be they researchers, industry, and even farmers. The hassle and time sink of wrangling data should not be the limiting factor in getting value from the data.

What happened in subsequent decades has been miraculous. The fledgling community of open source volunteers has grown into a movement that eclipses all others as the basis for nearly every piece of software written anywhere in the world. Technology companies that ignored or fought against open source for years have either disappeared or transformed themselves into ardent open source supporters. How this happened is beyond the scope of this article, but why open source turned out to be a huge success is worth mentioning here due to its relevance to agriculture.

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