Book Description
In this address I discuss the potential for the revolution in data infrastructure, data science and computation to support and accelerate the transformation towards a more productive, healthy and sustainable agricultural systems. A theme that emerges from both the agricultural systems science and economic-behavioral sciences is that improved acquisition and use of data is a critical constraint on agricultural research and its successful application, both for on-farm production system management and for technology and policy decision making. This in turn suggests potentially high returns to public investment in the data needed to enable computational agricultural science. I conclude with a prototype private-public scheme for investment in the data needed to support advanced computational methods and models, and discuss the economic, technical, legal and institutional challenges to its implementation.