By Phillip Powell
Nebraska leads the way on ensuring farmers own the data produced by their operations after the state’s governor signed the Agricultural Data Privacy Act into law.
This is important because agronomic data produced by the farmer might be used by a company that developed the technology in a farmer’s equipment, such as drones and GPS-guided tractors, without the farmer’s knowledge.
“Typically, when farmers buy new technology, like a drone from a manufacturer, they may not realize they are also signing a user agreement giving the company ownership of data produced by that technology,” said Will Scobey, a staff attorney with the National Agricultural Law Center. “With the passage of the Agricultural Data Privacy Act, each farmer producing the data in Nebraska will own that data, with some notable exceptions like aggregated and public data produced on the operation.”
With Gov. Jim Pillen’s signature in April, Nebraska became the first to establish ownership rights and safeguards for a wide array of data generated by farmers, Scobey wrote in his recently published analysis.
Source : uada.edu