Howdy Jackson - I too have an opinion or two. I will guess you are a graduate student looking to render a thesis or dissertation on precision ag? I think the following summarizes how I feel - Precision Ag is high on precision and rhetoric but low on accuracy and skilled insight. It is also a genie out of the bottle and very likely a foundation technology for the next millennium as we struggle to feed, clothe, and house the billions without destroying our planet. Most notable is a trend in PA towards the use of the internet to somehow jump start the large majority of producers out there that just don't get the map - they are too in awe of the pretty pictures, do not have time or skill to GIS/VRT their farm, and would prefer to off-load the whole precision thing to someone else just like their end of year tax reporting. Agribusiness has decided that their contribution to the whole precision ag movement is to offer a remote web site where the producer can upload and download "his" site specific files. They like this for many reasons but mostly my guess is they feel that once you have them by their data you have them by their ____s. They may also be threatened that the growers may soon have more information than they do. And since there are only some 400,000 US producers doing most of the work on the large majority of the acres you don't want them to jump around too much or test the technologies they are expected to blindly adopt. Back in the 1930s the Land Grant Institutions began offering their assistance in area of farm management. The reason was the Federal Government created a national income tax. Many farmers needed help to meet this new requirement. As a result many states via their Land Grant schools and their Extension Services helped to form Farm Management Associations. Even today there remains a number of these associations in Iowa, Kansas, Illinois, and others. Many of these records associations maintain close alliance to their universities for access to the agricultural economics and related departments. These associations have huge assets in historic farm financial data and need new graduates to crunch the numbers. In example, K-MAR in Kansas has some 3500 top producers, many with 30 or more years of data who gain access to a well organized, mostly university staffed office network with necessary resources, interest, and longevity to maintain these legacy data archives. As a graduate student at Kansas State I was able to access and research in this data base. Its likely hundreds of graduate students like myself have written important papers due to the cooperative nature of the association, this Land Grant, and the quality of the data files. The whole science of cropping systems is in the process of a revolution due to the emergence of information intensive site specific farming systems. No longer can Land Grant research only take place on the Research Stations and speculate on how well the technologies adopt to their surrounding landscapes. The research agenda is now frimly on-farm with the producers involved. Just as the Ag Economists and growers saw real benefits in an association for financial records so must the cropping sciences push to organize similar Site Specific Farming Records Associations. The growers are desperate for unbiased leadership. This is the mandated charter of all Land Grant colleges, their Experiment Stations, and Extension Services. Its very likely that you may contribute important insights. Consider the opportunity of having access to potentially thousands of acres spanning many years with a highly consistent data content? More than likely you will face fragmented data sets from a farm or two. Conclusion: The Land Grants and their Experiment Stations need to get on the WEB in full duplex mode just as agribusiness have. They are a natural center for the necessary learning, discovery, and archiving of these complex data sets. And certainly it will be young minds like yours which will discover the new truths of the information age farm and its systems. Soil Carbon Credits Anyone??????? FWIW MidNight Mapper aka Neil 2/3/99 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
