The data revolution in agriculture is enabled by advances in sensing, communication, and computation technologies and spurred by demand for improved sustainability and transparency in areas such as natural resources use and food safety. Cheaper and more portable sensors generate measurements at previously unimagined spatial and temporal resolutions. As these new data products are becoming available, other data such as publicly available soil, topography, and weather information is also flowing more readily via improved connections. Agricultural professionals will be increasingly using these data in both research and in production, processing, and marketing. With increased intensity, volume, and applications, industry is expecting programming and data skills. The Purdue Data Driven Agriculture minor builds these proficiencies and efficiently packages content related to the data pipeline and data science analytics with a culmination in data-driven decision making. The minor includes courses that map to these skill sets:
- A foundation in mathematics and statistics
- Data acquisition and sensors
- Data literacy, ethics, management, and analytics
- Knowledge of how data is used in agricultural disciplines
- Data architecture and usage, including geographic information systems (GIS)
- Data-driven decision making
