Today's agribusiness benefits increasingly from the «big data» collected at farm level. The information collected can cover anything from the weather to past crop yields and soil content. All of it can be used to help farmers cut costs and increase productivity.
But such data are not valuable only to farmers. At the end of April, the FBI’s Cyber Division put out a «Private Industry Notification» warning that «the farming industry’s growing adoption of precision agriculture technology may increase cyber targeting activity …with the intent to steal farm-level data in bulk».
Theft, however, is not the only threat to farm-level data, they may also be vulnerable to both ransomware and data destruction.
As if farmers didn't have enough to contend with in current market conditions.
Farming and Big Data
VR = Variable Rate
Source: Cornhusker Economics, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. 27 May 2015
About the Author:
Samuel R. Halpert is an analyst at VanEck specializing in the agriculture, coal, steel, forest products, and tanker sectors. Prior to joining VanEck, Mr. Halpert was employed by Goldman Sachs as an analyst/trader for a global macro hedge fund. He was previously Vice President of Institutional Futures Sales at Salomon Smith Barney where he covered Steinhardt, Omega, Kingdon Capital, Soros Fund Management, and Tudor.
The article above is an opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of MV Index Solutions or its affiliates.