Facilitating Digital Agriculture with Simple Databases

TL;DR

This paper introduces open-source, user-friendly database templates designed for farmers with limited technical skills to improve data management and analysis in digital agriculture.

Contribution

It provides simple, private database templates with validation and user-friendly interfaces to help agriculturalists adopt digital data practices.

Findings

Templates enable easy data entry and export for analysis.

Workshops support adoption and understanding.

Resources promote digital agriculture principles.

Abstract

As an on-ramp to databases, we offer several well-structured private database templates as open source resources for agriculturalists, particularly those with modest spreadsheet skills. These farmer-oriented Air table databases use simple data-validated forms, with the look and feel of a customized app, to yield operational data that is tidy, machine- and human-readable, editable, and exportable for analysis in other software. Such data can facilitate logistics, provide contextual metadata, and improve enterprise analysis. A recorded workshop explaining how to build a database for activity records is presented. These resources may facilitate infusion of digital agriculture principles through Extension and structured educational programming.