Reap What You Sow? Precision Agriculture and The Privacy of Farm Data

George Kantor will lead a discussion of Karen Levy, Solon Barocas, & Alexandra Mateescu‘s
Reap What You Sow? Precision Agriculture and The Privacy of Farm Data on Friday, April 12 at 11:30 a.m. at #werobot 2019.

Across rural America, the day-to-day lives of farmers are changing. Traditional forms of land management are rapidly shifting into data management, as global agriculture firms such as Monsanto and John Deere have begun to furnish farm equipment with a variety of sensors that detect and transmit fine-grained information about nearly every aspect of farm conditions and operations, including soil and weather conditions, seeding and fertilizer applications, and crop yield. While monitoring and mechanization have a long history in farming, recent developments in so-called “precision agriculture” aim to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to customizable, plot-specific strategies.

Precision agriculture arose from the fact that productivity in a field can vary widely as a result of differences in terrain, soil, irrigation, and other conditions within and across fields. To mitigate against the unevenness of these starting conditions, precision agriculture aims to measure the exact needs of square units of land, and this information is used to develop farming strategies (called “prescriptions”) tailored to these conditions on a unit-by-unit basis. Precision agriculture refers to a wide range of tools and practices, but generally comprises a combination of equipment-mounted sensors, farm data management software, and analytics services that often combine farm-level data with country-wide agronomic and weather information. Sensor-derived data is used to more closely measure agricultural productivity, to facilitate operational decision-making on the farm, and to meet the data collection standards for compliance with environmental and other regulation that requires reporting to government.

While adoption of such tools has been uneven, precision agriculture techniques are becoming the norm. In 2014, the American Farm Bureau Federation surveyed farmers on the issue of big data in farming, and found that more than half of respondents were planning to invest within the following year or two in additional data-driven technologies. For many farmers, precision agriculture has become necessary for keeping up production and minimizing costs. In particular, farmers have embraced precision agriculture as a way to improve environmental sustainability, while also increasing profits. The more precise application of fertilizer and pesticide, for example, ensures that farms do not apply more than necessary, limiting environmental impact and reducing costs.

More broadly, the industry has begun to look to precision agriculture as a means to build “resilience” into food systems as climate change destabilizes centuries-old food production patterns and practices. Many of these innovations have introduced new forms of data collection and information flow, transforming the information ecology of farming and raising concerns with the privacy of agricultural data in the process.