Open-farming data

Farming is one of the oldest professions. Due to the extensive development of information technology, agriculture is facing yet another significant change after the industrial revolution. For farmers, there is a myriad of challenges to cope with, yet also as many opportunities. This premise was the point of reference for the first Swiss farming hackathon on September 4 and 5 2020, called Open Farming Hackdays.

Much hope lies in data-driven analyses. Data is valuable as everyone knows. As the wisdom goes, the more the data, the better. In many areas, however, there is no systematic data available. Thus, the main challenge is to collect data first before harvesting it for new insights. Unfortunately, much data is proprietary, meaning not free to use for everyone interested in it. Only open data enables innovation as any actors can make use of it by developing a multitude of solutions.

In farming, crowdsourced data about the spread of plant diseases or neophytes' prevalence could broadly foster new sustainable practices in the longer term. Against this backdrop, we developed an end-to-end prototype featuring the following:

a mobile web application to record geo-referenced data on the field
a cloud-based web service to aggregate the data at a central place
a Python script to access, combine, and plot this data with any other data source of interest

Code

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