Advancing Digital Agriculture and Conservation: A Virtual, Multi-Day Policy Workshop

You are invited to join the upcoming Digital Agriculture and Conservation Policy Workshop hosted by the Cornell Initiative for Digital Agriculture, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Farm Foundation. This is a four-part online event, May 20, 27, 29 and June 3. All sessions begin at 10:00 am EDT/9:00 am CDT and run for 60-90 minutes. Session 1-3 are open to the public. Session 4 is focused on research planning, and we will regulate registration appropriately. Please join us.

The workshop aims to advance policy discussions to realize the promise of data applied to conservation in agriculture. Workshop discussions will encompass policies that support development and deployment of new digital agricultural capabilities (e.g., privacy rules, standards, public investments, workforce training, infrastructure), as well as new digital capabilities that support policy innovations (e.g., more cost-effective conservation investments, more effective targeting of conservation practices, reducing transaction costs of administering incentive schemes).

By bringing the policy and research community together, this workshop series aims to move policy discussions forward and identify a set of policy-relevant research questions to support future work and intersections in these areas. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with panelists and each other to advance discussion and collaboration opportunities.

Sessions include:

Risks and Opportunities of Digital Agriculture for Environmental Conservation

Session one will feature Charles Baron, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder of Farmers Business Network, and Jason Weller, Senior Director, Land O’Lakes SUSTAIN, as keynote speakers to open the workshop series. The session focus will cover the changing landscape of technology and agriculture, with a particular focus on both the risks and opportunities of technology for conservation. This broad focus will set the stage for our additional sessions and anticipate potential policy implications and discussions. 

Conservation Implementation and Policy Perspectives​

​Session two will bring together leaders across the agricultural technology and conservation sectors with those working in the policy arena to discuss agri-environmental policies, barriers or constraints to making them work, and how so-called big data or digital agriculture can potentially serve to overcome those barriers. Issues of data privacy, data-use limitations, and safe harbor considerations will also be considered.

Mobilizing Data for Conservation: On- and Off-Farm Perspectives​

​The session will address interplay between on-farm and off-farm elements of platforms to practice digital agriculture. A diverse set of panelists include Christina Slay, Director, Technical Alignment with the Sustainability Consortium, and Andrew Nelson, Farmer and Software Engineer, Nelson Farms, Inc., and Silver Creek Farms, Inc., who, among others, will provide the perspectives of a producer, an upstream input supply perspective, and a downstream food industry processor/retailer perspective on questions and topics such as how farmers and agribusiness can be supported by the public sector, and vice versa; the risks of public and private complementarity; the infrastructure necessary to scale and scope, including the digital infrastructure and enabling conditions. This session, as the others, will continue to look at these issues with a lens focused on policy opportunities.

Research Opportunities​

​This session will open with a wrap up discussion, building upon the momentum of the prior workshop sessions, and will lead into breakout sessions focused on topics of interest so that collaborators can discuss opportunities for further action and research. 

This session is intended to be a working, collaborative opportunity for researchers and policy experts to network and plan opportunities for further action and research. Session 4 requires a separate registration and is open only to researchers, industry leaders, policy experts, and others actively engaged in research and policy planning who wish to contribute to addressing research and policy questions ignited by the workshop.