Speaking at the Open Government Partnership summit in London on 31 October, the secretary of state for international development, Justine Greening announced the launch of a Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (Godan) initiative, explaining that it would "improve the data we have on agriculture and nutrition and do it on a global scale."
The launch of Godan is the latest sign of momentum in the idea of open data in agriculture. Last year, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition agreed upon at the G8 summit included a commitment to share agricultural data with African partners, and to hold an international conference on Open Data for Agriculture, which happened in April this year. The policy support is there, but how might open data actually help achieve food security?
The idea of providing agricultural information freely is not entirely new. Data has been made available in the past by various agencies and research organisations, but the amount of data being generated now is increasing, as is our ability to share it effectively. This is leading to a growing interest in making good use of it.
There's a global refocusing on agriculture, which is positive and necessary," says Johannes Keizer, the information systems officer at FAO. "And we are producing enormous amounts of data. But what are we doing with it? How can it be used to produce useful services? These streams are coming together. Open access to data in agriculture is one of the key issues that we consider important if you want to combat hunger and poverty."
One example of this increased data generation is the emergence of genomic selection, which uses statistical modeling to predict how a plant will perform before field testing. Cornell University's $25.2m (£15.8m) Nextgen Cassava Project, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and DfID, is using genomic selection to improve cassava varieties, and in May this year it released Cassavabase, an open access database.
Cassavabase features all the phenotypic and genotypic data generated by cassava breeding programmes involved in the project, such as Nigeria's National Root Crops Research Institute and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.
"The breeding is done at different centres, where they extract the DNA and do the phenotyping," says Lukas Mueller, assistant professor at Cornell's Boyce Thompson Plant Institute. "But with this paradigm you need a really strong database component to track all the genotypes and phenotypes, and Cassavabase is the place where all the data flows to."
Data on cassava research has never before been shared to this extent, according to Chiedozie Egesi, assistant director and head of cassava breeding at the NRCRI.
We all tended to do our own work in our own countries and keep our data to ourselves," he says.
"That has limited us in what we can achieve as a community. Cassavabase significantly changes the way we store data. It's open to anyone, and it's getting cassava breeders all over the world to work together."
Another recent example of an open data initiative is Cabi's Plantwise Knowledge Bank. Plantwise is a programme of community-based plant clinics providing advice to farmers, and its associated Knowledge Bank, which launched in 2012, is a repository of information on treating crop pests and diseases.
The Knowledge Bank has collated open access information from all over the world, and also includes in-house data that Cabi has made freely available for the first time.
"The Knowledge Bank is a big step forward," says Shaun Hobbs, global director of Plantwise Knowledge Bank.
"Previously, the information on how to treat pests and diseases was scattered, and we've tried to bring that together and make it safe as well. Many people will make recommendations or suggest pesticides that are not safe, so we trawl through the information in the knowledge bank to make sure that has been weeded out."
But how exactly do farmers in developing countries benefit? Few will access something like Cassavabase themselves, but the resource is already cutting the time it takes to get improved varieties out in the field, which happens through intermediaries such as extension workers. A database such as Plantwise's Knowledge Bank can also be used by extension workers and NGOs working directly with farmers.
"A key challenge there is to get information from the Knowledge Bank offline," says Hobbs.
"This may be in print, or through SMS. I was in India recently and they had our fact sheets for farmers hung on a line where a plant clinic was being run, and farmers were reading them and discussing them amongst themselves."
Farmers increasingly access agricultural data through commercial services too, and better sources of open data may encourage more of these, says Keizer.
"Farmers may benefit through a plethora of new entrepreneurship, from people who access this data and set up new derived services. And this is where NGOs could fit in very well too, by setting up derived services themselves."
Simply making data available is one dimension of open access; the other is interoperability. This essentially means making data readable by other machines, so that datasets can be aggregated and compared. Not all open access data is at this stage yet, though FAO is working on it for FAOStat, and Cabi is also trying to make some of its data open in that sense.
The potential insights from merging data like this are significant: a classic example is Dr John Snow's combining of data on cholera deaths and the location of wells in 19th century London. As different types of agricultural information become interoperable, insights may follow which could improve yields, climate change resistance, nutritional quality and more.
Within the development sector, involvement in open data may mean different things to different organisations. Some may use it as a resource, contribute to it, or both. There's also a need for advocacy to keep the momentum up and create more sources of open data.
"The launch of Godan has put a bit of high-level pressure to make data free and available," says Keizer. "NGOs, too, can play a role here, and put the pressure on for data that is not yet open – but should be."
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