UK farmers are being asked for their views to help shape a code of practice to promote the safe sharing of data across the industry.
Once developed, the code will provide a framework of trust and transparency, so farmers will know what will happen with their information.
AHDB chief strategy officer Tom Hind said: “The use of data is transforming every industry, including agriculture, and we need to have the systems in place to embrace this.
The lack of a coherent set of principles that the agri-food sector can sign up to is, we believe, a significant gap which means data is not being shared in the volumes we’d like to see.
“There are potentially huge productivity gains to be made from better data sharing throughout the supply chain. But these will not be realised unless farmers are confident that their data will be used responsibly and its use supports their business.”
Situation internationally
Data sharing codes in agriculture have started to emerge in the past few years in New Zealand, the US and Europe.
The main driver for these has been to protect farmers’ rights in relation to data that’s come from their farming operations.
“It is crucial farmers have confidence that they control their data and where they release or share that control it’s clear under what terms and conditions this is done,” said Rezare Systems UK’s managing director Julian Gairdner, who is leading the project for AHDB.
“The code we developed in New Zealand was strongly focused on this and has subsequently lead to other initiatives to standardise data and provide flexible technologies to transmit and share it.”
Survey
Over the summer, Rezare conducted a series of industry stakeholder workshops to understand the key issues around data sharing and to help develop a draft code of practice.
“Over 60 organisations and farmers took part,” Gairdner confirmed. “But now we need more farmers to have their say through the online survey.
“It’s a relatively short questionnaire that should take around five minutes. It will allow us to gauge farmer views on the importance of sharing data, the relevance of a code, and how it should operate and be governed.”
The survey will run until Friday, November 30 and can be found on the AHDB website. The code of practice and recommendations are expected to roll out in the new year.
