By Elisabeth Fischer, Head, Good Growth Plan Customer Marketing, Syngenta

Every day, farmers around the world use data to make decisions about their farms. Weather forecasts help them decide when to make important planting decisions. GPS coordinates can help steer their machinery in the most efficient way around their land. More recently, growers began documenting the sustainability of their field operations to address a growing desire for increased accountability, trust, and transparency within supply chains.

When aggregated on a massive scale, these types of data can be highly valuable. Handled well, this data creates new opportunities for greater resource efficiency and knowledge transfer along with better market access. Handled poorly, it creates additional burdens for farmers entering and managing data-intensive evaluation frameworks with no guarantee that the view will be worth the climb. Turning tremendous amounts of data into insight and services takes time and expertise.

At Syngenta, a multinational company that develops technology for our farmer customers, we have experienced this challenge directly. Since 2014, we have collected and published a broad range of data on the six commitments of our Good Growth Plan, which aims to make agriculture more sustainable. Our productivity commitment progress is tracked and information on agricultural efficiency collected on 3,600 farms in 42 countries around the globe. This means growers in our reference farm network track how much water, land, pesticide, fuel and labor goes into producing their harvest.

It quickly became apparent that we were generating buckets of data from farms all over the world. One of the first questions we faced was “How can we maximize the impact of all this data?” We knew it had the potential to help farmers make their operations more efficient. The key question was how to make that happen in an easy and open format.

We turned to the Open Data Institute (ODI) to apply best practice standards to the data to make it searchable, usable by all, and shareable without compromising confidentiality. In time, this means everything we release as open data has an ODI Open Data Certificate for best practices. Their guidance has opened our eyes to just how much can be done. It’s the first time crop level information, including resource efficiency, has been made public in this way by a commercial organization.

For individual farmers, we have worked to format publicly available agriculture data in a way that can help them make better, more sustainable decisions about their farms. To reduce the burden of managing all that information, we have found it works best to incorporate this data into the farmer’s own Farm Management Information System (FMIS). Using a metrics-based approach within these existing information management systems, we have been able to help farmers draw conclusions with far greater impact than simply maximizing yields. Local benchmarks help to identify improvement areas with the greatest potential. Data can be used to optimize crop production, food transport and market access. In summary, information can revolutionize the industry in new and unexpected ways.

It’s estimated that there will be more than 20.8 billion Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices by 2020. As the quantity of data collected by these devices in the agricultural sector increases, so does the potential for this data to help feed and nourish the planet while maintaining vibrant rural communities.

In today’s information age, there’s no denying that data plays an increasingly significant role in understanding and addressing the world’s challenges. Sharing our crop data is Syngenta’s contribution to developing a collaborative and unbiased approach – one that can empower farmers to make better decisions on what works best for them and their land in order to feed a growing population.