Put Junk Data in the Silo. Get Junk Data Out of the Silo.

Farmers had a great saying growing up, which goes like this:  “If you put rotten feed in a silo, you get rotten feed out of a silo.”  The same is applicable to farm data.  Seems like every week a new product emerges that is designed to collect, analyze, and benchmark farmers’ data in hopes of improving productivity.  In the race to collect farm data, I think the data collectors are often forgetting this old farm expression.  There is no point in collecting and aggregating “junk” data.

Is Your Farm Data a Trade Secret?

Every agricultural technology provider likes to say that “the farmer owns the data,” but is that really true?  This statement hinges on the answer to a central question: is farm data a form of intellectual property that the law protects?  Farm data doesn’t neatly fit into the legal box designed to hold patents, copyrights, or trademarks.  That leaves the law of trade secrets.  If farm data is a protected form of intellectual property, it must be a form of trade secret.