You just spent six figures on a new piece of farm equipment. Now you read the fine print and realize that you must also sign-up with the equipment manufacturer's cloud based data platform. You want the equipment, but not the proprietary data platform that comes with it. What do you do?

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.

Dicamba drift issues are a big concern this summer, making me wonder how willing farmers will be to trust the recommendations from their ag data platforms on when it is OK to spray. An even better question is: what happens if the platform's recommendation gets it wrong, resulting in Dicamba drift and nearby crop damage?

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?

What will Elon Musk's impact be on agriculture? This is what I kept thinking after reading his biography by Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future) and, although the only part about agriculture was a brief period in Musk’s life working on a family farm in Canada, I think there is a lot agriculture can learn from entrepreneurs like Musk.

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.

The clouds that house America’s agricultural data are going to see a lot shifting in 2017. The ag data platform space has been on a constant growth trend for the last few years. But all good things must come to an end, and I think 2017 will be the year when farmers demand results to part with their ag data.

One of my favorite end of the year activities is to reflect on the past 12 months and ask: What were the big stories of 2016?

Janzen Ag Law is celebrating our first year. What better way to celebrate than write a blog post about the highs and lows of what it meant to start a business in late 2015. Here are my highs and lows from the past year.