Farm Data

Nuffield has been a great opportunity for me in terms of personal development and learning new things outside my daily job. Most interesting for me was to do research on a topic for which I usually do not have the time for because of my responsibilities on the farm.

My Nuffield 2018 topic is about Farm Data. Even after two years of research and traveling, I still have the feeling I just started! However, Nuffield is an ongoing process and - besides writing a nice report - the most important goal is to build something, which contributes to the development and growth of our farmers and their farms.

This summary explains my journey of Nuffield and how the farmers can benefit from it. This is just an overview of the journey so far, I will give my final presentation on the annual Nuffield Netherlands congress on November 29th, 2019.

I am also organizing a seminar with the ultimate goal to offer the opportunity to farmers being part of a farmer’s database which they can control. The seminar will be held on February 7th, 2020. This seminar is particularly meant for farmers. In case you are interested, please sign up via www.farmersnet.org.

This journey has just started and I am hoping it will have a snowball effect where many farmers join forces by working together. If we collectively gather the data from multiple farmers and work together in developing new skills and opportunities, this can result in more income and growth for the individual farmers.

My hope is that during this process, more and more people in organizations like universities and governments (both regional and national), become enthusiastic. This will help us being competitive in the data ‘battle’. With farmers being in control, we have a better position in the meat chain and it helps farmers deciding who are the best business partners for them and also with whom they want to share their data with.

In this summary, I will explain my topic Farm Data. I will start with a few problems that came up during this journey and I will write about how my traveling contributed to the project. You can also read about the project itself as well as the current status. At the end of this summary, I will explain the next steps.