Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This is a concern among farmers locally, as well as nationally, and the Indiana Farm Bureau is one of the groups leading the charge in ensuring farmers’ data is protected — however a farmer defines protection.

“Farmers watch the news and they see that data is being misused in other industries, and it causes concern and apprehension,” said John Shoup, industry relation coordinator for the Indiana Farm Bureau.

The agricultural machinery of today is equipped with the latest technology that allows a farmer to gather precise data on yields throughout a season. While an individual farm’s data may be useful only to that farm for field maintenance and productivity, if that farm’s data is combined with yield data from across a region, state or nation, it becomes big data.

National and international yield projections for a specific product can often swing market prices. For example, soybean futures have been on the rise due to the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimating that global inventories will fall 8.1 percent by the end of September next year, according to Bloomberg News.

“I don’t think it’s (big data) a big issue right now, but it’s going to be an issue in the future,” said Whitley County farmer Dane Drew. “Agriculture is still the base of our economy.”

Every tractor on the market now has GPS, and most planting and harvesting machinery have built-in technology to track a number of data points, including seed moisture, moment-by-moment yield and soil quality.

But once the data is sent to the chemical company for analysis, who owns it?

This isn’t an issue Drew is too concerned about yet, since, as a small farmer of 1,100 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat, he isn’t uploading any data to the cloud.

But for larger farms, say those with 10,000 acres or more, who are uploading and sending information on a regular basis, controlling the data is important, Mary Kay Thatcher said at a recent industry conference in Indianapolis. She is a lobbyist with the American Farm Bureau Federation.

“It’s a paradigm shift for farmers and ranchers right now,” Thatcher said.

While farmers value the data, they question why they must pay for services provided by companies who collect the data and then use the data to make “a ton of money,” she said.

Farmers are also asking with whom companies are sharing data, Shoup said. They don’t want their information to be used against them by a competitor, or to be used to sell a new product back to them.

To combat this, farmers need transparency, Thatcher said.

This begins with transparency of contracts for services, which spell out who owns the data being shared and who has control over it, she said. The Indiana Farm Bureau has established an “ag transparency evaluator,” Shoup said.

“The bureau doesn’t say if the contract is good or bad, but it’s there to let farmers know how the data is used,” said Mark Thornburg, director of legal affairs for the Indiana Farm Bureau.

A contract evaluation is free to farmers and provides seals of approval for transparency.

The ultimate goal for farmers is having portable data, Thatcher said. The ability for a farmer to move data from one company to another depends on what working relationships suit a farm best — similar to the way cellphone customers now can retain a phone number when switching carriers, she said.

To assist with this, the Indiana Farm Bureau is in the process of developing a data cooperative for farmers, Shoup said.

“The bureau is being proactive,” Shoup said, adding that the bureau is unaware of any data misuses at this point in time.

The dialogue has begun so that privacy and security can be protected — whether that be through transparent contracts or regulations on how big data can be used, Thornburg said.

Big data has been around for a while, but the policy discussions are fairly recent — beginning within the past couple years, he said. Groups such as the Indiana Farm Bureau hope to establish best practices for the handling and control of big data as soon as possible.

This article was originally published on www.kpcnews.com and can be viewed in full

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