CIAT 9 June, 2015 by Adriana Varón (comments)

From yesterday until next Friday, 12 June, a workshop on the analysis of big data from Uruguay’s commercial rice production is being held in the Uruguayan city of Treinta y Tres.

The purpose of the event, which brings together rice producers, millers, and researchers from Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, is to share and promote the use of new methods for analyzing agricultural information.

“We’ll use the big data approach that CIAT is developing to organize and analyze the information on commercial rice production that the participations have collected, and we’ll combine this with information on climate and soils,” said Sylvain Delerce, a researcher with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), who is part of the team that organized the event.

During the week, participants will learn, with assistance from the experts, how to use the new analytical tools and apply them directly to their own data. “The event is based on learning by doing,” Delerce added.

The data required for the analysis cover yields of different rice varieties, planting and harvest dates, fertilizer type, agronomic practices, and weather data.

Daniel Jiménez, a CIAT agronomist and big data expert taking part in the workshop, emphasizes the potential value of the new approach Latin America’s agricultural development.

“By using analytical techniques based on machine learning, we can explore the nonlinear functional relationships between various factors that affect crop productivity, such as temperature, solar radiation, and rainfall,“ Jiménez said.

The workshop is taking place at the headquarters of Uruguay’s National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA) and was organized with World Bank support by CIAT, the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice (FLAR), INIA, Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology, and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).

See more at: http://www.ciatnews.cgiar.org/2015/06/09/rice-at-center-stage-in-uruguay-big-data-workshop/#sthash.JvPcIyyB.dpuf