An international agricultural research group has created a set of guidelines for organizations using agricultural data in research projects. CGIAR is the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research. CGIAR and is a consortium of 15 international research centers. CGIAR has developed a Platform for Big Data in Agriculture that advocates for open data use for agricultural research.

Electric vehicles are coming. Audi’s 2019 Super Bowl ad promises that one-third of its cars will be electric by 2025. Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Nissan, Porsche, Kia, and Volvo are all launching new electric cars this year. Ford announced it will even build an all-electric F150. As battery prices come down and all-electric drive becomes more mainstream, will we see farm equipment similarly embrace this technology?

In 2014, American Farm Bureau did extensive surveying of farmers to understand their attitudes towards ag data privacy and security. The results were pretty alarming. 78% of farmers said they were concerned or “extremely concerned” about which entities can access their ag data and whether that data could be used for regulatory purposes.

For the Janzen Ag Law Blog, I also spend some time looking back at the past year’s agtech developments and start to think about 2019. Here’s my list for the Ag Tech Year in Reverse: 2018.

This year blockchain moved from little-known buzzword to an early-adopter technology. If you missed it, blockchain is a distributed ledger accounting tool that promises better record-keeping and reduced transaction costs.

Many in the tech industry are reluctant to embrace privacy regulation because of the potential to stifle innovation.

One entrepreneur told me that the steel and aluminum tariffs were making it difficult, if not impossible, to commercialize his agtech invention.

We have been talking about the potential of aerial imagery from UAVs over the past few years, but what struck me recently at the InfoAg conference was the excitement surrounding satellite and aerial imagery from aircraft.

Tech companies often think user agreements are not that important—no one reads them anyway. This mentality instructs their lawyers to draft lengthy, lopsided, overly complex agreements that no one understands

The last five years have witnessed an explosion of online cloud-based platforms that promise to revolutionize farming. These platforms collect agriculture data, such as yield data, soil type, rainfall, fertility and dozens of other data points across entire fields.