New Guidelines for Handling Farm Data

American Farm Bureau Federation and 12 Other Industry Players to Come Together to Create New Guidelines for Handling Farm Data

Sometimes new technologies can get ahead of basic rules for their management. That was the concern that led theAmerican Farm Bureau Federationand 12 other industry players to come together to create new guidelines for handling farm data. The standards were released late in 2014, and major industry players are already signed on.

Concerns over data ownership were the start of the conversation, and farmers are still concerned about how data might be marketed to third parties in a relationship. But these new guidelines aim to take the guesswork out of that going forward. The first principle outlined is ownership:

"The group believes that farmers own information generated on their farming operations. However, farming is complex and dynamic, and it is the responsibility of the farmer to agree upon data use and sharing with the other stakeholders with an economic interest such as the tenant, landowner, cooperative, owner of the precision agriculture system software and/or agallricultural technology provider [ATP]. The farmer contracting with the ATP is responsible for ensuring that only the data they own or have permission to use is included in the account with the ATP."

Sounds complicated, but basically it says "read the agreement." Mary Kay Thatcher, who headed up the Farm Bureau's effort on this, talks about the next steps now that the guidelines are available: "We've sent out a request for a proposal to create an evaluation tool to rate data agreements based on their transparency," she says. "We hope to have an independent third party assure that agreements are clear and understood by the grower."

She acknowledges that farmers should be responsible for reading those contracts, but at the end of the day, they can be pretty difficult to read. The aim here is to potentially rate those agreements to provide a sense of the transparency a company offers. "We're just getting started in that process, so we don't know exactly what it's going to look like in the future," Thatcher says.

Source: Farm Industry News

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• Agriculture
• Data Management