Read The On-Farm Data Fine Print Expert Warns

Data on the farm is valuable to the farmer and other business entities off the farm. Who owns and controls that on-farm data coming in through smart devices?  Bill Oemichen, a University of Wisconsin law professor said in 2025, farms can provide a lot of data.

“We've moved from analog agriculture, which means not very sophisticated electronic agriculture, to digitized agriculture, which means now when the planter is going down that field, it is figuring out exactly the right place to put that seed," Oemichen said.  "It's getting data on where that seed was put. It's being sent through smart devices, up into the cloud, and that information is being aggregated with all sorts of other information, like how much rain has fallen? What is the nutritional nature of that soil, so how much fertilizer is there? Those types of things. And all that's being combined to figure out, is that seed going to do well, and if it does well, what's the value of that underlying land then?”

It's Not Just Producers That Want This Data

While that kind of data is very valuable to the farmer, Oemichen said there are others who may find that data valuable as well.

“Well, it's extremely valuable data. It's very valuable data, because a farmer can decide, I don't need to put as much pesticide in this area and therefore helping to protect the groundwater and surface water, and so it has lots of benefits from that, but the greater value in that is the companies that provided this, whether it's the seed, the fertilizer, the feed, whatever they provided, they're gathering that data through the smart devices," Oemichen noted.  "They're aggregating with a bunch of farms, and the good purpose is they're trying to provide you with better products and services as a farmer. The part that's not quite so fair is they're creating all this data that they can then sell to third parties, and they're making a lot of money off of it, and in some cases, it's being sold to hedge funds that are then competing with farmers for the purchase of land.”

But is it ethical for companies to sell that data?

"It's really hard to negotiate these agreements from a consumer protection standpoint. I was head of consumer protection for the state of Wisconsin," Oemichen said.  "These are boilerplate agreements. You agree to it, or you don't. It comes in on your iPhone and your iPad, it's multiple pages long, has complicated language that even an experienced attorney like me doesn't always understand, and most everybody's just going to hit the consent. You hit the consent. In the agreement, it does say the farmer owns their own data and has access to their own data, and almost every agreement - not everyone, but most agreements - what you don't realize is that it also says that we control that data, and once we've anonymized it so we can't have individual characteristics about you, but we can about your farm once we've anonymized that we can aggregate it with other farms and develop what's known as predictive analytics, which says we can almost be assured that we know exactly what that 40 acres are going to produce over the next ten years, based on precipitation, based on soil quality, and all of that. That is tremendously valuable information.”

Groups Competing Against Farmers May Purchase Data and Information

Who are the companies that are most prone to selling a farmer’s data?

“If you're buying your Ag inputs from a co-op, the co-ops generally will not sell your data to a third party," Oemichen said.  "Like Farm Credit, they said, ‘We will not do this. Farmers own us. We're not going to ever use this information against farmers.’ It's the for-profit companies that you have to be more concerned about. There is a group of for-profit ag input providers that have agreed to certain principles. It's called ag data transparent, which gives their producers more information and more control over their data, so what we're saying is to be aware of those companies. You can Google it - ag data transparent. If you've got a choice between using a company for ag input that complies with those standards and one that doesn't, you're far better off going to that company that uses the Ag data transparent principles.”

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