Love Data 2024: How Data Can Save Family Farms with Jamie Sonneville

Love Data is an international celebration and awareness campaign designed to build community and understanding around research data. This year's theme is “My Kind of Data”, which focuses on data equity, inclusion, and creating a kinder world through data. RIT Libraries is excited to be celebrating Love Data 2024! Please join us for the event below. 

Our food supply is one of our most precious resources. Many people have heard the statistic that only 2% of our population feeds the rest. Most businesses use some form of electronic tool to capture and save data regarding their business practices. Surprisingly, however, only 16% of farms capture this data with any tool other than pen and paper! The other 84% of farms are challenged with making critical decisions without the benefit of usable, reliable data. Decisions are therefore often reactionary, too late, and hunch-based, which can result in major problems. Critical decisions that lack critical data leads to critical errors. For family farms to survive, they must adopt technologies to capture data that helps them better understand their business, and empowers them to make data-based decisions.

Speaker: Jamie Sonneville, Founder and CEO, Agri-Trak

As a Cornell grad with a background in IT and being a 5th generation apple grower and entrepreneur, Jamie’s experience is ideally suited for leading Agri-Trak. Prior to founding Agri-Trak, Jamie was the Director of Technology for Williamson Central School District, Newark Central Schools, and Owner/CEO of itClix, a web design and social media training and consulting firm. In addition to driving Agri-Trak’s vision and mission, Jamie understands farming. She knows the challenges farmers face and how increasingly difficult it’s becoming to turn profits, especially without accurate data to inform decisions. That’s why she created Agri-Trak. Jamie is leading the charge in Agri-Trak’s commitment to building tools that help farms – every farm – in practical, powerful ways. When she’s not wearing her fearless leader shoes, she loves spending time with her husband and two boys, enjoying life with her extensive family (most of them also farmers and growers), and serving as President of her local school board.

To request interpreting services, go to: http://myAccess.rit.edu/

This event is part of Love Data programming at RIT Libraries. Other events include:

• February 6, 11:30am: The Intersection of Data and Photojournalism with Jenn Poggi and Josh Meltzer (Wallace 2410)
• February 13, 11:00am: Learning to program by transforming data into information visualization with W. Michelle Harris (Wallace 2410)
• February 14, 1:00pm: Bee My Valentine: Data Visualization in Tableau Workshop with Rebekah Walker (Wallace 2410)
• February 15, 5:00pm: Citizen Archivists: Empowering Student-Run Organizations to Preserve Their History with RIT Archives (RIT Archives Research Center, Wallace 3650)