Once again it appears that the movement to have agriculture wired up to a fully digital future has been challenged, this time by the state of Nebraska.
It has proposed a law severely curtailing the use of data generated not just on farms in day-to-day operations, but by the farm itself.
On January 22, Senator Mike Jacobson of Nebraska introduced the ‘Agricultural Data Privacy Act’ (LB525) at the request of Governor Jim Pillen.
The legislation aims to address critical issues surrounding agricultural data privacy and its impact on farmers and stakeholders, and it goes far beyond the normal stipulations associated with such contracts as telemetry services.
Thorough list
The list of what is construed as farm data is long and comprehensive. It includes such information as all farm and machinery records, from the service interval of tractors to the historical yield and application data for the fields.
Basically anything that has been recorded about the farm, its purchase, its equipment and its operation, is subject to the legislation and it makes no distinction as to how it is recorded, digital or written.
The Nebraska bill also divides the users of the data into two distinct groups, the owners and the controllers.
The owners are those who generate the data which in this case is the farmer; the controllers are those that are not the farmers but may use the farm information – crop advisors, machinery dealerships, manufacturers and so on.
To use any data, the controller has to be granted written permission by the data owner and they cannot pass on any of that data to a third party without further written permission.
Nebraska extends scope
So far this may sound par for the course, however, it goes further in insisting that the data owner can rescind the permission at any time and the controller is obliged to delete or destroy all records within 30 days.
From the the machinery point of view this could well entail manufacturers and dealers not being able to pass on service records of used tractors.
The owner might in fact refuse to allow manufacturers and dealers to keep all such records in the first place.
Owners may also choose to rescind the permission at any time, obliging manufacturers, to remove the information they might hold on a machine’s performance, and the yield records of farms etc., that they have accumulated through telemetric systems.
