The traditional focuses of land grant universities—agriculture and science—need not only have traditional applications. Today, the rise of big data holds the capacity to transform agriculture the world over. The information encoded in this data carries the promise of a more productive, profitable future for both large-scale farmers in developed countries and smallholder farmers in developing countries. This information gives us the ability to see larger patterns, identify new problems, and create solutions in absolutely novel ways. In developed countries, these insights means more productive, less wasteful on-farm practices. In developing countries, the newfound penetration of information into isolated rural areas has allowed farmers to leapfrog directly into the digital age, bypassing decades-worth of lagging infrastructure development. Fittingly, to embrace this new frontier of science and agriculture, the University of Illinois—Illinois’s flagship land grant research university—recently hosted the Using Big Data to Improve International Food Security Symposium, addressing the capacities, innovations, and challenges that big data is bringing to global agriculture.

The crux of data integration within rural farming regions in developing countries is the explosive adaptation of mobile phones by smallholder farmers. Data penetration into areas that would otherwise be cut off from the flow of information has fundamentally transformed our ability to understand logistics and food security. Previously—only a decade ago—if we wanted to know the food security status of a region on a house-by-house basis, we’d have had to conduct a census-style study. Survey workers would go out into the field, door-to-door, and ask people: Have you planted your seeds yet?  Have you harvested yet? How many bags of grain do you still have in storage? This process took weeks and costs thousands of dollars to gather a single data point.

Today, the same data can be captured using text messages on mobile phones. In exchange for a transfer of mobile data minutes, farmers across the most remote regions can be surveyed in a single day at minimal cost: Have you planted yet—respond yes or no. Have you harvested yet—respond yes or no. Population surveys can be conducted start-to-finish in a single day and on a weekly basis. For the same amount a survey team would spend on a single census, data scientists can collect longitudinal, population-level data on the status of food security and harvest cycles at the household, village, and regional levels—all with a fraction of the manpower.

These data points create a dynamic model more representational of what’s happening on the ground than anything we’ve had before. With the proliferation of mobile technology, farmers are able to receive and interact with new information in ways impossible a decade ago. Advice on how farmers can adapt to changing conditions—be they weather or market—allows smallholder farmers to make better, more informed farming, selling, and purchasing decisions, while detailed updates on grain stocks allows the development community to allocate resources with unprecedented accuracy.

Data penetration into remote areas of the world allows for greater understanding beyond farming as well. Researchers at the World Food Program have used cellular tower data to map the migrations of peoples fleeing natural and unnatural disasters and have even used cellular and mobile banking data to combat financial corruption. Part of the World Food Program assistance programs includes the delivery of electronic vouchers for food via mobile phones; by analyzing spending habits, the organization can form a basic picture of normal buying behavior. By looking at the amounts, frequency, and location of purchases and by aggregating data of aberrations in those categories, hot spots of unusual activity can then be identified and possible fraud can be investigated and halted.

Thinking bigger, big data will soon allow us to understand the impact of development practices in a meaningful, near-real time way. Analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery is approaching the point where analysis of ground images taken from space will provide the data necessary to measure the impact of development and economic activity. The rising or falling economic well-being of a village or region could be measured based on changes in the small-scale environment that are visible from space. Such technology would allow the comparative analytics of aid and development strategies, and allow successful techniques to be tested, identified, and implemented across wide swaths of land.

Data on this scale ushers in new promise for agriculture. Farmers from Nebraska to Namibia benefit from the sharing of information, now made more plentiful and accurate with the help of this rapidly growing body of data. There will be challenges as data become further integrated into agriculture, but the positive impact these changes can make—many of them already measurable—demonstrate, as the University of Illinois’s Symposium showcased, that the future is, in many ways, already here.