Giving Compass' Take:

• By calculating factors such as equipment, labor, seeds, irrigation, etc., the CGIAR Platform provides farmers with a better understanding on how to produce sustainable agriculture, Food Tank reports. 

• How can donors help support data tools that will benefit our agriculture ecosystem?

• Here's how small farms are incorporating sustainable practices. 

Farming, like any business, has a bottom line. At the end of the season, a farmer has to be able to account for the farm’s costs, subtract from the revenue, and determine whether or not the farm is profitable. Due to the number of variables involved in farming, however, calculating the bottom line for a farm is harder than for most businesses. The emerging field of Big Data is creating new approaches to help farmers analyze their farm operations and ultimately make agriculture more efficient, profitable, and sustainable.

In the simplest terms, sustainable intensification means to have more with less.

The CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture is helping lead the digital revolution for farming. This initiative centers around incorporating Big Data tools into the work of more than 8,000 agricultural researchers across a global network of CGIAR Research Centers. The Platform for Big Data is accelerating discoveries in agriculture that translate directly into valuable guidance for farmers. In particular, the CGIAR Platform has the potential to make significant strides in sustainable intensification, a field of research that deals directly with assessing farming systems to improve efficiency.

Read the full article on sustainable intensification by Elliott Brennan at Food Tank.