Scalable Knowledge Management to Meet Global 21st Century Challenges in Agriculture

Achieving global food security requires better use of natural, genetic, and importantly, human resources—knowledge. Technology must be created, and existing and new technology and knowledge deployed, and adopted by farmers and others engaged in agriculture. This requires collaboration amongst many professional communities world-wide including farmers, agribusinesses, policymakers, and multi-disciplinary scientific groups. Each community having its own knowledge-associated terminology, techniques, and types of data, collectively forms a barrier to collaboration. Knowledge management (KM) approaches are being implemented to capture knowledge from all communities and make it interoperable and accessible as a “group memory” to create a multi-professional, multidisciplinary knowledge economy. As an example, we present KM efforts at the US Department of Agriculture. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is being developed to capture tacit and explicit knowledge assets including Big Data and transform it into curated knowledge products available, with permissions, to the agricultural community. Communities of Practice (CoP) of scientists, farmers, and others are being developed at USDA and elsewhere to foster knowledge exchange. Marrying CoPs to ICT-leveraged aspects of KM will speed development and adoption of needed agricultural solutions. Ultimately needed is a network of KM networks so that knowledge stored anywhere can be used globally in real time.