The year 2018 launched with two distinct but powerful demonstrations of how new Big Data platform technologies are changing the world and, along the way, transforming world food security.  The first event was, literally, a rocket launch, dependent upon the convergence of four distinct industrial sectors in order to shoot a shiny Tesla roadster toward Mars.  The second launch, less celebrated but no less significant, used related technologies to ship soybeans from a grain terminal on the east coast of the USA through the Panama Canal to a feed mills in China.

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