The Agriculture sector is seeing its biggest challenge ever in feeding a growing global population, coupled with the task of reducing adverse impacts on the environment and protecting natural resources for future generations. To address these challenges farmers need access to best practices and techniques, insight into how they can most effectively use their land and resources, and help in addressing unforeseen problems and issues related to natural or man-made causes.

Data can play a key role in addressing these challenges and there are many public and private entities that can use data to create innovative data-driven services for farmers and the agricultural ecosystem. However, there are many barriers in putting the data to work. These barriers include lack of standards in representing the data, data quality issues, data security and consent issues, the ability to find pertinent data, etc.

The concept of a publicly-owned non-profit data exchange software platform that allows sharing of public and private data, while enforcing security, consent, and commercial policies, has been successfully deployed in several other sectors.