In agriculture and food processing, we think a lot about infrastructure: transportation and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and delivery. It is a physical system of roads, railroads, and rivers; concrete and steel storage; processing plants, warehouses, and machinery; and, eventually, the complicated network that puts food on a supermarket shelf or, increasingly, at your front door. There is another infrastructure, the one of information, that is just as important as any of the above. The United States developed its agricultural information infrastructure over generations, much as it developed its physical infrastructure. It includes USDA market reporting and crop estimates, standardized grades, public cash bids, exchange-tr...