Ag News
Agricultural Data: More legal questions than answers
Posted on Aug 19, 2026 at 14:52 PM
Prof. Ross Pifer of the Penn State Dickinson Law School Center for Agricultural and Shale Law discussed key components of agricultural data law, which he termed a “developing legal area.”
“I would call it a developing legal area because we really don't have a lot of established law in terms of statutes, regulations, or other legal authorities that kind of provide some frameworks,” Pifer said.
Pifer said there are some voluntary programs but he encouraged farmers to think about how their approach to agricultural data will impact them and what policies should put in place.
There are currently a lot more questions than answers, though Pifer said there are significant practical concerns over privacy and security. He noted that the key questions are what data is being collected, who is collecting it, how it is being used, who has access to it and how it can be used against farmers’ interests.
“From a legal standpoint, it’s hard to wrap your arms around this topic,” Pifer said. “I think it’s one where there are a lot more questions than there are answers. And I think it’s important to think about how does this affect you as a producer?”
Farmers’ concerns about their ag data center on two key areas: privacy and security.
Regarding privacy, Pifer said, the goal is to ensure that access to agricultural data is kept away from people whom farmers don’t want to have it.
Those people might include regulators, environmental or animal welfare activists, business competitors, vendors, commodity traders and neighbors.
For example, a farmer might not want vendors selling to farms having access to the farm’s proprietary information that would let the vendor know how valuable their product is to the farmer. Or, the producer might not want commodities traders to know real-time data on all aspects of the farm operation.
Data security is simply making sure that the farmer or rancher the information when they need it. Achieving this requires actions to prevent the data from being lost, corrupted or destroyed, and that the data is portable, meaning that if the farm decides to make a switch from one vendor to another that they can keep the data generated by the first vendor.
Pifer said that since data is a non-tangible asset, the concept of ownership becomes less clear than it might be for something tangible, because data’s value increases if it is shared. The comparative example he used is a table.
“With a table, sharing it doesn’t increase its value. It’s just one table,” Pifer said “Data, if more people have access to it, its value can be increased. I think that’s reflected when you think of aggregated data, that each individual farm is generating data that gets put into an aggregate into a larger system. There is a greater value because now it has the predictive value which farmers can then use. So the farmers generate data, it gets aggregated. It comes back and the farmer can use that data.”
Currently available tools available to control how data is applied are use agreements, privacy policies and trade secrets, though Pifer said there are concerns about each because they’re voluntary.
One step farmers can take is to look for the Ag Data Transparent (ADT) seal of approval. ADT, which grew out of a series of roundtable discussions set up by the American Farm Bureau Federation in 2014, which offers certifications for companies selling Internet of Things products to farmers. ADT also has an Ag Transparency Evaluator Tool. To use the tool, visit https://www.agdatatransparent.com/.
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