Farm Data Privacy Law
From the Western Ag Network, I’m Bob Larson. Precision agriculture is driven by data, lots and lots of data, but questions have arisen as to who owns that data.
A new Nebraska law takes effect January 1st, declaring that the farmer owns and controls the data generated on his or her farm.
Reed Freeman, a data privacy attorney with the law firm ArentFox Schiff, explains …
FREEMAN … “The farmer, the producer, has a right -an exclusive right- to sell his or her raw farm data. Nobody else has an uninhibited right to sell that data. The producer can sign away that right, but otherwise, the collector of the data, the vendor for the farm, cannot sell the raw data.”
While that is an important first step, Freeman says much work in the area of ag data privacy, like creating some kind of template, remains to be done …
FREEMAN … “It's going to be a while before we have versions of templates that are sort of market standard, and in the meantime, a lot of what Nebraska is saying, except for the right to sell, you need to negotiate the various rights that you need and want, and that's going to depend on your relative leverage with the other parties in the ecosystem.”
Freeman says other states, including Missouri and Colorado, are also considering ag data privacy legislation and he expects many others to follow.
