Big Data in Agriculture: Property Rights, Privacy and Competition in Ag Data Services

Abstract

The transition from precision agriculture to big data opens a variety of concerns among both farmers and ag data service providers about the privacy, ownership and use of farm data. This paper discusses the nature of those concerns as well as an attempt to establish industry guidelines concerning data privacy and security. I argue that the proposed guidelines likely do little to protect any real privacy concerns and run the risk of negative consequences for competition in ag data services and of reducing valuable information flows in commodity markets.