One nit to pick: the term "big data" needs to be better defined. Most of what was discussed during the conference, as interesting as it was, derived from simple filtering or basic statistics -- not from Map Reduce jobs or machine learning algorithms. In fairness, more than one speaker stressed the need to get "little data" right before moving on.

The conversation was professional and genteel...but I think more than one attendee must have noticed the elephant in the room. For all the talk about privacy and security and ownership, little was said of the current grab for farmers' data by a handful of industry giants and what can or should be done about it.

Also, almost all of the data mentioned was agronomic in nature. Big data includes financial data, and one of our biggest challenges will be to associate financial and agronomic data and merge that in a GIS. What happens if all of our agronomic data are wirelessly, quietly streaming to somebody's cloud somewhere and we want to close the gap between agronomic and financial? Will we be as comfortable including costs and revenues as were are yield and fertility? It was instructive that of the four panelists in the final discussion, all were comfortable with storing their data in the cloud of their choosing -- but none had shared their data with one of the commercial service providers.

I would like to keep this conversation going, as I view it as one of the most important topics facing farmers today. We can do that here, if you like, or perhaps in an e-mail group. I have some ideas about this and I am sure many of you do, too.