6th Grain has launched the Data Sharing Platform, a publicly available browser-based platform where private sector companies can share their agricultural data with researchers and the wider public, at https://dsp.6grain.com/.

Private companies collect data to better position their products and to better understand the needs of individual farmers. These data are often used for specific business needs and then “shelved” by the company with no further use. Not only does this limit data transparency, but governments, research institutions and other companies with demand for additional ground truth data could utilize this already collected data to help inform decisions across the agriculture sector.

With the long-term goal to increase yields and income for smallholder farmers in Africa, 6th Grain is working to expand the agronomy advice and input availability information for growers. 6th Grain, in partnership with Tetra Tech as part of the Enabling Crop Analytics at Scale (ECAAS) initiative, is proud to pilot the new Data Sharing Platform focused on providing historical farm level data in East and Southern Africa to researchers. This publicly available free browser-based platform provides a space where researchers and the public can access agronomic data shared by private sector companies. Located at https://dsp.6grain.com/, this Data Sharing Platform aims to provide a wealth of field data for diverse research needs.

The Data Sharing Platform provides researchers and the general public a user-friendly, free to use platform, where users can access datasets of historical data on field boundaries and/or field locations, field area, crop type, planting date, and yield. This data is collected for private sector companies by agronomists on the ground using Field Focus and Field Focus light technology, and then made available via a discoverable geographic catalog of all geo-referenced datasets.  Researchers and the public can also contribute data to the platform through a multistep process needed to maintain clean and valid data.

Thanks to Data Sharing Platform’s streamlined interface, users can easily filter the desired fields in the central Map view, along with creating custom reports based on the Platform’s existing datasets. Researchers and other public users can quickly see where data is available and data completeness, as well as filter by year and crop type. Custom reports are automatically emailed to the user-submitted email address, which allows researchers to rapidly share the custom datasets.

6th Grain’s long-term goal is to provide data and monitoring tools that can increase yields and income for all farmers in Africa. To achieve this, we need to greatly expand the agronomy advice and input availability information for growers, governments, input providers and others across Africa. We also need to increase these growers’ ability to determine if seeds purchased and other inputs used have resulted in increased productivity. To do this, we seek to share information at the field-level, which include field boundaries, crops in cultivation, year in cultivation, and productivity in the field, that can be combined with geospatial data to improve information on effectiveness of agricultural technology through the Data Sharing Platform.

6th Grain and ECAAS are excited to provide this valuable resource to researchers and organizations. Come see how the power of data sharing can help your research efforts and those of the world at large!

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