DuPont Pioneer's $300 million acquisition of Silicon Valley based Granular might have you wondering what happens to all that data a provider collects after it is sold? This post answers that question.

You would have to live under a rock to not have heard about farmers’ issues with dicamba this growing season. Arkansas banned the pesticide, Missouri temporarily banned and then changed the label, and complaints are skyrocketing in Indiana and Illinois.

In the race to the cloud, we must also be cautious so that the American farmer is not left behind. Today I will address the issues facing farmers as digitalization occurs and how the industry has begun to address these issues.

Over two years has passed since American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) led an industry coalition to address issues of surrounding ag data ownership, privacy, and security. When AFBF published the "Privacy and Security Principles for Farm Data"--or as I call them, the ag data's "Core Principles," I expected the industry uptake to be swift.

If you haven't heard from now, Monsanto has terminated its agreement to sell its Precision Planting division to John Deere.  Only those inside these companies really know what led to the end of this agreement, but the press releases help us piece together what happened.

Federal law prohibits price fixing or collusion among competitors. As more ag data moves from farmers' tractors and computers into the cloud, the temptation to price fix by ag technology providers grows. Is it inevitable that sooner or later, ag data platform providers will conspire to fix prices?

A number of poultry growers have filed suit against Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, and other poultry integrators alleging that growers’ production data was shared among integrators to depress grower payments. This is the first case where farmers’ ag data is the center of the lawsuit.

A number of ag tech companies have developed ag data use policies. This is a good trend and will benefit farmers. "Data Use Policies" (some companies have other names for these) attempt to answer farmers’ questions about "what happens to my data" in one single document.