Digital Opportunities for Better Agricultural Policies

Recent digital innovations provide opportunities to deliver better policies for the agriculture sector by helping to overcome information gaps and asymmetries, lower policy-related transaction costs, and enable people with different preferences and incentives to work better together. Drawing on ten illustrative case studies and unique new data gathered via an OECD questionnaire on agri-environmental policy organisations' experiences with digital tools, this report explores opportunities to improve current agricultural and agri-environmental policies, and to deliver new, digitally enabled and information-rich policy approaches. It also considers challenges that organisations may face to make greater use of digital tools for policy, as well as new risks which increased use of digital tools may bring. The report provides practical advice on how policy makers can address challenges and mitigate risks to ensure digital opportunities for policy are realised in practice. Finally, the report briefly considers the broader regulatory and policy environment underpinning digitalisation of the agriculture sector, with the view to ensuring that use of digital tools for agricultural and agri-environmental policy remains coherent with the digitalisation of agriculture more generally.
Case Study 9: Connecting the dots to create a data infrastructure: The US National Soil Moisture Network
The objective of this case study is to provide the example of the National Soil Moisture Network (NSMN) initiative in the United-States, which intends to address the fragmentation and heterogeneity of data coverage for the tracking of soil moisture. Its intent is to combine data from satellites with the data captured from state level in situ networks, to build a national inventory that can inform policy management and decisions.