  Information and communications technology (ICT) within the agricultural
sector is characterized by a widespread use of proprietary data formats, a
strong lack of interoperability standards, and a tight connection to specific
hardware implementations resulting from vendor lock-in. This partly explains
why ICT has not yet had its full impact within the domain. By utilizing the
vast amount of publicly available open data, ranging from topographic maps to
multispectral satellite images, the economically and environmentally optimal
farming practices can be advanced beyond state of the art. This paper addresses
the potential of applying publicly available information sources to improve
crop production, with emphasis on yield optimization. This potential is
evaluated based on free public data for the growth season 2016 by examining
winter wheat production for a selected region in Denmark. Data aggregation is
performed by promoting opensource software tools as a foundation for decision
support. That allows the farmer, or another domain expert, to query a certain
crop type, merge this information with other data sets, and perform analysis on
data ranging from sub-field analysis to statistics on national/regional scale.
The registration of field polygons and sowed crop types for fields in Denmark,
alongside with detailed geographic data and free satellite images, enable us to
exploit publicly available data of high quality, which can be applied to
perform further analysis.
