Day 2: Desired scenarios for a future where data-driven agriculture is successfully adopted by smallholder farmers

The following principles are necessary for successful adoption of digital agriculure by smallholder farmers in the future:

• Digital technology must be developed by an open impartial and equitable process in which smallholder farmers fully participate
• Data, products and processes for digital agriculture must be context specific, designed to suit the conditions of farmers in poorer countries and improving local crops
• Ownership and rights related to digital agriculture must be balanced to protect the interests of smallholder farmers and create incentives to use and further develop such technologies
• It is necessary to formulate clear legal rules regarding the interaction of digital rights with other rights, especially human rights, and obligations under relevant multilateral, regional, and bilateral agreements. Clear thresholds need to be established stating where the rights to digital technologies start for smallholder farmers, and where they stop.

Thanks to all participants for the valuable contributions. I just have a few things to add.

1. With respect to desirable scenarios. Data-driven agriculture can take shape in many ways, and probably there's not one desirable scenario for all contexts, but we should imagine various scenarios. Depending on the needs and values that play a role in a specific contexts, it must be possible to prefer one or the other. (In Europe, for example, farmers may be reluctant to share data, because they are afraid that their competitors will use them; but maybe in other contexts it makes farmers stronger if they share data? I lack knowledge here, but would love to know. Maybe some of you can fill me in here...) 

2. Regarding the concept of 'success', which I find very interesting, I here list impacts ascribed to data-driven farming that I encountered in the literature on ethics of smart farming and that may be good candidates to think about success. Success can  be interpreted in a societal way: it can mean, for example, that farming imposes less of a burden on the environment, that animal welfare at farms is improved, that the production rate of farms goes up and farms will be able to feed more people, that the acceptance of farm products by consumers is improved, that consumers make better food choices (healthier, more environmentally friendly, better for animals), that the autonomy of consumers is fostered, that the chain leading from producer to consumer becomes shorter (for ex. localized in one region),  that food security is fostered, that the profession of farmers becomes attractive again to young people, that empty regions will have more farms and be populated again, that there will be more jobs. But success can also be interpreted from the perspective of individual farms: success can mean surviving as a business, remaining competitive, staying autonomous in the decisions taken at farms, continuing to have satisfying work, having less administrative proving that you live up to the  environmental rules, that there is equal access to technologies needed to realize data-driven agriculture, and maybe more....?  

So, it seems to me that if we want to talk about desirable future scenarios, maybe we should get clearer on the position from which we start to think about it (our background, culture and values, needs) as well as the goals we seek to realize, and the perspective from which we look at the goals (from a societal perspective or as individual farmers). It may be that from a societal perspective we are interested in different goals, than from the perspective of individual farms, although it is also possible that both overlap. Open access may be attractive, for example, to look at whether and to what extent farms contribute to the societal goals (less burden on the environment, more production for more mouths to feed), while individual farmers may not be so keen to share those data with everyone as it may kill their competitive position in the market.

So, what is success? There is, I think, a lot of conflict in our ideas of success, which may support differing conclusions as to how data need to be shared and with whom. It seems to me we need to get clearer on those differences, and maybe create various scenarios that suit them, in order to facilitate shaping innovation strategies in a more informed and reflected way....?

I should share my frame of reference that informs what I think is the future for data driven agriculture for smallholder farmers.  My frame of reference is that digitizing global, regional and local supply chains is a great and new frontier of business opportunity.  Further, that for any such opportunity to be successful it must be focused on serving the needs of the farmer and the farming family.  Without the scale of serving the high number of farmers the low profit margin nature of digital will significantly limit (if not eliminate) any digital agriculture business venture/initiative.  

In addition, the new cryptographic security technology that allows for validation, verification and consensus across global computers is as much a reality now as the law of gravity. Since we know blockchain will be the future it would seem appropriate for us to frame our important discussions about agriculture data in alignment with the three types of blockchains: public, consortia and private.  Briefly, public blockchains are fully decentralized, consortia blockchains are partially decentralized and private blockchains are centralized.   There is a discussion happening now about the merits of each and why one or the other should win and the others lose.  I think the future will include all three and that they will interoperate.    This aligns with CGIAR's promotion of open data (decentralized) when possible but closed data (centralized) as necessary which, to my mind, includes gradations of data (partially decentralized) in between.  Even if one believes blockchain is a fad, the rigor of thinking about authentication, validation, verification and consensus of data for each type of blockchain will add value when architecting any non-blockchain database.         

As we continue to harmonize our farm and farmer data in order to interoperate databases in the cloud for big data analytics, we should focus our thinking on how a database architect would approach creating such a database.  The architect will establish hierarchical data ecosystem parameters.  As such, should our hierarchical starting point be the farm and not the farmer? Is not the farmer simply an important (the most important) variable in the algorithmic equation that improves land productivity and crop quality? If so, how does this help frame the data ecosystem? In addition, while the farmer may be only a subset of data, that hierarchically rolls up into the farm data, our work with blockchains should have the guiding philosophy that farmers have the right to own, control and monetize their own data on any of the three types of blockchains.  This guiding philosophy is in exact alignment with, and written into the 'DNA' code of, blockchain as described by Satoshi Nakamoto who wrote the bitcoin white paper. 

So my "desired scenario for the future" is actually the reality of what has been significant private sector investment and rapidly increasing future investments to deploy blockchain in agriculture.  Given what we know about the exponential scale of technological adoption, in the near(er) term future we can imagine farmers equipped with better decision making tools derived from artificial intelligence that cranks through sensor, UAV, satellite, GIS and other rich data sources.    Finally, my desired scenario also includes civil society providing a healthy and robust counterbalance to the private sector's focus on bottom line profitability.  

In thinking about the scenarios, I am concious that making sense of and extracting value from data on a large screen with powerful tools and a good internet connection is very different to querying and analysing data on a phone screen (a feature phone?). Also, when I am analysing data, I often ask colleagues with specialist skills in statistics or just with the particular tools to help me. So, while we can paint scenarios with various data services, we should also think about the role that intermediaries might play in enabling smallholder farmers to structure, organise and make use of any data that might be available. I imagine local farmer co-operatives or other data intermediaries sharing and offering resources such as large screens and data science skills.

I personally look at a scenerio where every farmer is able to collect on farm data, upload it on a shared platform for aggregation where after is given an appropriate lincense published on the web where the smallholder farmer accesses it when needed. A scenerio when our government will have repositories for farmers data and data related services available all the time. When weather data will be broadcast in a language understood by farmers. When market data will be readily available to the farmer via messaging updates and through tradition media mostly used by farmers. A scenerio where access to external data and sharing among farmers is common place but this is dependent upon all actors from data collectors, aggregators, processors, stewards through data policy makers.

From the discussions so far, in my opinion, we are percolating to a viewpoint that smallhoder farmers will need to cooperate/collaborate to practice and benefit from data driven agriculture. I would go a step further and state that the smallholders need to aggregate in all their functions related to farming. We are all aware that Soviet style collectivisation failed. But there were many aspects of it, for example pooling of all farm resources and division of labour, that were useful and would have been successful if they then had access to the new technologies we now have for data driven agriculture. 

If we use available technologies, we can "virtually" aggregate smallholder farmers into larger producing units without disturbing ownership of land as was done in the Soviet collectives. Virtual aggregation would mean larger scale planning of farmland and cropping cycles, using technologies such as predictive planting for both the most suitable crop and the most suitable crop variety for a particular plot and field. With large scale planning, access and use of farm inputs would be more economical and efficient and outputs, and because of more precise forecast for quantum and schedule and assurance of quality of the farm product, it could be better marketed. In cultivation, the crops can be better monitored and human drudgery eliminated through use of automatic and autonomous farm machinery. These are all the issues smallholder farmers want solved.

What would such a scenario require? At the policy level, advocacy and incentives for farmers to virtually aggregate,  subsidies for virtually aggregate farmer/producer companies for start up and use new technologies etc. We would not have to worry about the current frame of land ownership being parallel to data ownership as virtually aggregation would also mean data and information aggregation. Virtual aggregation will contribute to reinforce most societal ethics of equity, fairness and justice and as also the right of smallholder farmers to live with dignity. Even many of our civil laws would remain unchanged.

Dear participants, this is really a fantastic discussion and in my mind, just for starters, shows how dispersed and different we are in thinking about "data driven agriculture" -  this dispersion is not a negative thing, I must add, but rather a very useful way of extracting constructive suggestions.  A couple of issues caught my attention:

1. Organizational aspects also seem to be recurrent in the chain of comments.  Thinking about very poor, small holder farmers in many parts of the developing world, their organizational capacities are very, very limited (in many regions at least). And incentives for grouping seem often weak and do not last very long. I wonder if associations/cooperatives/whatever-grouping-scheme are in some way a pre requisite for better integration into data flows and community management of data. My guess is: it depends on very specific contexts, including types of crop and destination of production.  

2. Mr. Uschena summarizes it well:  "Data, products and processes for digital [data driven]agriculture must be context specific, designed to suit the [very specific] conditions of farmers in poorer countries and improving local crops." I would personally focus on improving not only production but contributing to overall welfare and and improved livelihoods, including womens situation in the farmng family and educational, health and nutritional wellbeing of youngsters.  Better production and productivity may not always lead to improved livelihoods. 

3. Mrs. van den Burg comment on how to look at "success" from our own vintage point, pressess us to some re thinking. This is not simply a conceptual issue but one which has some very practical effects in terms of design and implementation of policies, tools, management schemes, etc. under which better innovation can be deployed and uptaken by small holder farmers.  

4. Mr. Babcock´s comment is highly informative and provocative. I have to admit I am not a blockchain expert and have always been intrigued about its concrete application in certain fields. I wonder how and IF it would be possible to deploy these technologies in certain small holder farmers contexts where extreme conditions (poverty, literacy, capacities, etc.) may be limited.  I have to say I CAN envision a positive scenario, maybe with more basic data/technology tools at hand. Very stimulating reflection ...

5. Mr. Maru´s "virtual aggregation" suggestions also seems very interesting to me. The notion seems flexible, and at the same time would seem (if I understand correctly) to enable the maintenance of certain local, cultural, technological values and assets already in play with farmers.

This is of course not an exhaustive comment ... and all comments could be part of detailed exchanges.  

I truly appreciate engagement and interactions.

Manuel