The development of farming machinery and digital technology that is able to generate objective information about the status of the soil, water, crops, pasture and animals is quickly changing the way in which farming businesses can be managed in Australia. The emergence of digital agriculture, and the potential this creates for the application of big data analytics in agriculture, signals the initial stage of a fundamental change away from skill based farm management systems that have prevailed until present times towards a more industrialised model of agriculture where decisions are based to a greater degree on objective data. The introduction of the global Positioning System (GPS) in the 1990's was a notable stage of change. The GPS was then augmented with auto steer technology and grain harvester yield monitors. Subsequent developments include seeder and fertiliser applicators with the capacity to vary application rates within a field. More recently again, software applications and cloud data storage facilities have enabled the resulting data to be captured, stored and manipulated, and then used in decision-support tools to guide farm management decisions. Digital agriculture applications have also emerged in the livestock and horticulture sectors and further with telemetric irrigation and water management systems, remote sensing technologies, and instruments for the automated collection of weather and climatic conditions.

Generally speaking, digital information generated by machinery and technology used on farms is owned by the "farmer", although the 'Conditions of Use' agreements that routinely signed by computer software users when they first register, use a particular application typically curtail the users data ownership rights and create exceptions which enable the software provider to use the data in different ways, and often to make that data available to third parties.

concerns about the misuse of digital agriculture data by service providers has led to the development of a "Code of Practise" in the US and New Zealand. There is a range of initiatives that can be adopted by the Australian agricultural sector, to facilitate the more rapid development of digital agriculture systems. The following nine recommendations outline these:

1. Establish an Australian Digital Agricultural Forum

2. Adopt a key principle that farmers own their data

3. Make agricultural data open access

4. Appoint a Farm Data Ombudsman

5. Publicly fund soil and climate data

6. Publicly fund rural mobile and data networks

7. Publish publicly funded agricultural data open access

8. Publicly fund knowledge and not commercial platforms

9. Digital extension pathways are the future