Last week the World Bank hosted a conference on Open Data for Agriculture. The goal was to “brainstorm about how Open Data can be harnessed to help meet the challenge of sustainably feeding nine billion people by 2050.” It seems like that might be of interest to farmers and food advocates in Minnesota for a couple of reasons. First, Minnesota may have a role to play as food producer. Second, a range of tools have been developed that could be as useful in Minnesota as they are in Kenya. Third, this is an example of an industry that’s going digital – farmers without access to broadband and technology will be falling behind their international counterparts!

Here are some of the programs that were highlighted…

• MFarm has built a mobile application that allows farmers to receive accurate, real-time crop-price information from five major markets in Kenya, via daily text message, six days per week. The service helps farmers to make informed decisions on what to plant when, how to price produce, and where to sell to the largest profit.  MFarm is currently refining their service and will soon begin integrating USAID data into their product to help deliver more accurate price information to users.

• INSEAD has introduced Toto Agriculture, a smartphone interface fueled by USAID data that provides village-specific agricultural data. Users can use this free application to access localized information on soil, pests, climate, and planting tips in over 100 languages.

• iPlant: A community driven collaborative of researchers, educators, and students working to enrich all plant sciences through the development of the cyberinfrastructure essential for modern biology. The collaborative can sequence the genome of an individual cow in 3 hours, taking the time of sequencing from months down to hours.

There was also a huge push and unveiling of open datasets…

At last week’s conference, USDA, USAID, and a number of other entities—both domestic and international—unleashed a host of new datasets, tools, and platforms—with more to come in the weeks and months ahead. For our part, the U.S. Government:

• Launched The Food, Agriculture, and Rural “data community” on Data.gov, which offers more than 300 datasets (and growing!) that relate to the social, economic, and environmental aspects of agriculture. For example, the new community offers Quick Stats—a comprehensive tool for accessing agricultural data profiles by subject area or commodity, such as crops and plants, or livestock. Over the next few months, USDA will make these data available in a robust Application Programming Interface (API) to enable easier sharing of data by third party applications and services.

• The Millennium Challenge Corporation released an open evaluation data catalog that contains household survey metadata from food security programs in Armenia, El Salvador, Ghana, and the Philippines, and more data is coming soon.

• Launched USAID.gov/Developer, a page that curates APIs and datasets specifically for developers looking to scrub in and work with open global development data. APIs include the U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants, or Greenbook, which encompasses all international aid funding allocations.  This data will help developers and researchers more dynamically parse these data, that goes all the way back to the Marshall Plan.