In an effort to ensure farmers have full agronomic data access along with security and privacy, 360 Yield Center has announced it is joining the Open Ag Data Alliance (OADA) to help make data more open in agriculture.

With the application of data science in modern production agriculture, farmers are able to improve crop yields and use natural resources more efficiently. Farmers’ analysis of data generated in the field allows them to evaluate the past, current and future farm management decisions. However, a significant barrier to the adoption of these new technologies is the incompatibility of data formats between platforms and inconsistent approaches to data security and privacy.

The OADA’s mission is to ensure that farmers can move their data seamlessly between their equipment, software and services and provide the technology capabilities to support security and privacy rules to guarantee that data is protected by all farmer software and organizations.

“As a farmer, I need the freedom to select the right hardware, software and services for my operation,” said Aaron Ault, OADA project lead and senior research engineer for the Open Ag Technology Group at Purdue University. “The open standards of the OADA, will give farmers the flexibility and control they need to choose data science products and services that will work on their farms to help manage their data and make more data-driven decisions, enabling the next wave of agricultural production.”

360 COMMANDER, sold by 360 Yield Center, is an advanced agronomic software tool on the market with a multiple year proven history of success. Helping farmers build variable rate Seed, Nitrogen and Irrigation plans in a single click, the system can be used in any monitor and allows farmers to continue to work even closer with their advisors to make decisions from the data on their farm.

“We’ve developed an API that connects 360 COMMANDER to other software systems, which will allow farmers to easily send data they want it to use while creating prescriptions,” said Daryl Starr, Commander Development Lead, 360 Yield Center. “We see a lot of interest from other companies in our industry to connect with us.”

Along with OADA, 360 Yield Center believes that each farmer owns their own data generated by the farmer, their employees or by machines performing activities on the farm.

“We’re a group of farmers at 360, and it influences everything we do,” said Jim Hedges, Director of Sales, 360 Yield Center. “We know how we want our farm’s data handled and that is how we care for our customers’ data, too. Farmers own their data and we want to help them make better decisions with it.”

“I’m excited that 360 Yield Center is joining a group of leading Ag companies to focus on making data sharing easier,” said Tim Sauder, Director of Product Development, 360 Yield Center. “We look forward to making new connections between 360 COMMANDER and the other members’ systems.”

To learn more about OADA, visit www.openag.io.