For thousands of years, farmers have looked to the clouds for the next sign of rain to irrigate their crops. Now farmers are also looking to another cloud—the digital cloud—for insights that can make a critical difference for their operations. Through this network of servers, satellites, and mobile devices, the cloud is helping farmers share and access massive volumes of data.

The CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture is helping to facilitate this new relationship between farmers and the digital world. Using the emerging tools of Big Data, the CGIAR Platform is developing approaches for solving complex problems in agriculture, especially smallholder farming in the developing world. CGIAR, which is the largest network for agricultural research in the world, is working to bring these analytical breakthroughs to farmers and to transform how farming research is conducted and potentially transform farming itself.