Farmers Press Agribusiness Giants for Data Security

Don Villwock, a corn, wheat, and soybean grower in Indiana, stores farm records going back three decades on a computer that has no Internet connection. He’s not a Luddite: Villwock worries that his sales and crop yield data might fall into the wrong hands and compromise his business. In this age of Big Data and massive customer information security breaches, that’s not a casual concern.

At coffee shops and tractor dealerships across the Corn Belt, the debate about the collection and security of proprietary data has flared up in the last year as national and state farm bureaus push for the establishment of data use guidelines by companies. For years, farmers have shared crop yield and soil data with some of the world’s largest agribusinesses to help develop technologies that make American farmers among the most productive on the planet. DuPont, Monsanto, and Deere have developed powerful software that can determine optimal seed spacing or more accurately predict local weather patterns. The flip side: Big ag companies could now control a data trove that presents privacy and business risks to farmers who don’t want to share the secrets of their trade with rivals or the government.