To find out anything these days, you Google it. It’s got to a stage where we now think of Google as a daily action more than a relatively new technology company.

Google Inc became this indispensable part of lives by offering us the right answers to our questions. Its complex algorithms seemed to just know what we were looking for.

Asked about this magic software, a Google executive once said: “The data is the secret sauce.”

It’s a simple idea and Google has become a multi-billion euro company based on it.

Without the data, you can have all the fancy algorithms in the world, but they won’t give you the right answers.

The same principle applies more and more in farming. We see it in ICBF and SheepIreland: the more data and the better its accuracy, the better the results.

Horizon2020

I’m writing this dispatch from an information and communication technology (ICT) conference in Budapest, where I’m representing my off-farm job.

Organised by the European Commission, the event is a platform for people to network ahead of the next big Horizon2020 funding deadline in April 2018.

Several sectors who can benefit from ICT are here, including the smart-agri domain. There are lots of men and women in suits talking about agri-data and how it will improve decision-making on farms. However, I have yet to see another farmer among the 1,000-plus attendees.

In most discussions here, the farmer has two simple roles: (1) A data gatherer, who sends away his/her data for others to analyse; (2) A consumer of services, telling external companies what answers he wants from his data.

As you can guess, there is still a large gap between these data analysts and the reality of everyday farming, where the weather, tight margins and managing part-time jobs are more immediate concerns.

Farmers are the data suppliers

Having said all that, the data analysts and other external entities — be they processors, advisers, government or whoever — cannot become players in the farming world without farmers supplying them with data; no more than they can come out to the fields and milk the cows or feed the cattle/sheep themselves.

In the same way farmers are primary producers of food, we are also primary producers of data.

It seems like it at times, but we don’t give milk, meat or corn away for free, so why should we give our data for free?

The exact way in which we’ll be paid for our data is not yet fully worked out. Some systems are in place, but it will take time for sector-wide models to come into being.

For now, it’s worth writing down or typing up facts and figures related to your enterprise.

And remember that your data is the secret sauce when the experts here in Budapest, and their Irish counterparts, come calling.

Kieran Sullivan and his brother farm part-time in Co Waterford. You can follow him on Twitter: @kieran_sullivan

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