"Digital infrastructure to power the secure exchange of data across the food and agriculture system."

Farmers receive a staggering amount of information each day from government extension agents, private agribusinesses, and NGOs. With little coordination between these actors, farmers often receive information and services that they did not demand and which are not relevant to their needs. Farmers and the organizations that serve them do not have an easy and secure way to exchange data, which leads to fragmentation and silos. No single organization can alone solve this problem, so we need an industry standard for sharing agricultural data globally.

Digital Green has pioneered the use of agri-tech to boost the incomes of small-scale farmers. Building on more than ten years of experience with 2 million farmers across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, Digital Green is now leading the development of FarmStack, an agricultural data-sharing platform to enable organizations and individuals to transfer data through peer-to-peer connectors governed by usage policies that codify data sovereignty and control.

There will be two parts of the session; in the first part Rikin Gandhi, co-founder of Digital Green, will present the motivation & architecture of FarmStack with practical use cases. The second part will be a conversation with Lin Nease from Hewlett Packard Enterprises & Ranveer Chandra from Microsoft, on ways that can co-create public infrastructure to automate the discovery, transfer, and transformation of agricultural data.