Prescriptive agriculture is growing in the United States, and several companies and retailers are providing these data tools as a means to improve input efficiency at the farm level. At the same time, “big data” in agriculture production continues to be a topic of attention both positive and negatively. For prescriptive agriculture, a farmer will be required to submit farm data to receive back information and recommendations. This presentation will help producers, consultants, county agents, data service providers and others within agriculture to understand the three primary precision ag data layers (agronomic, machine and production data) and how they are converging today. Examples of these different data layers are provided along with comments on imagery. A production example is provided on how merging agronomic and machine data can provide more information to making farm decisions related to inputs. By the end of the presentation, practitioners should understand the opportunity these data layers provide plus the importance of data quality to receiving proper recommendations based on data.
