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As new technologies take root in U.S. agriculture and producers' digital footprints grow, statehouses across the country are starting to wrestle with a new question: Who owns the data a farm produces?
Nebraska’s Legislature in April became the first in the nation to agree on an answer, enacting a law that declares farmers own the data they generate and bars companies that collect data from selling it without written consent. But lawmakers in three other states — Iowa, Missouri and Colorado — have pushed bolder, more sweeping versions of the same idea, seeking to reshape how farmers’ data may be used and whether outsiders who want it must pay.
Only Nebraska’s bill has achieved passage so far. Iowa's measure, which was attached as an amendment to a right-to-repair bill, cleared the House but stalled in the Senate before the session ended. Measures have also been introduced in Missouri and Colorado.
Reed Freeman (ArentFox Schiff photo)Reed Freeman, a partner and chair of the privacy group at ArentFox Schiff, said the Nebraska bill’s passage might be the first time in the world any legislative body has “applied a privacy regime to data that’s not about people,” noting most data privacy law to this point has been focused on the personal data of individuals. As the use of artificial intelligence grows, he expects discussions over frameworks for data ownership and privacy will continue in statehouses across the U.S.
“I would say we’re at the dawn of this conversation,” Freeman said. “We’re at the very beginning.”
A new kind of harvest
The fight is over a byproduct of modern farming technologies that largely came into use less than 30 years ago. Yield monitors and soil sampling were commercialized in 1993. Over the decade or so that followed, farmers also began using mapping tools, GPS guidance systems, and variable rate technologies that adjusted their seed and fertilizer applications within fields, according to a 2023 report from USDA's Economic Research Service.
Around 27% of U.S. farms and ranches surveyed in 2022 and 2023 used some form of precision agriculture to manage crops or livestock, according to a 2024 Government Accountability Office report that draws from USDA data. At least half of the largest 40% of farms by acreage that responded to the 2023 ERS survey had adopted yield maps, soil maps, variable rate technologies or guidance systems, which was true for about a quarter of the smallest 20% of farms, except for cotton.
Increasingly, high-tech farm machinery collects data on yields, soil conditions and planting rates, along with other metrics, which farmers can use to track progress, diagnose problems and guide future decisions. But as the use of these technologies grows, so do concerns about who the data is being shared with — and why, according to some farm organization leaders who spoke with Agri-Pulse.
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“If you go to almost any farm meeting over the last number of years and you ask producers what’s on the top of their mind, it always seemed to come back to their concern about their ag data and the protection of it,” said Mark McHargue, president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau, one of the groups that backed the Nebraska bill as it was going through the state’s legislature.
Some surveys have shown farmers are wary of sharing their data, particularly with those looking to profit off of it. However, others suggest producers are still unaware of what their data is worth or, in some cases, if it can even be owned or sold at all.
A 2016 American Farm Bureau Federation survey of almost 400 farmers found that 77% of respondents have concerns about which entities can access farm data and whether it can be used for regulatory purposes; 66% believe farmers should share in profits stemming from their data; and 61% fear it could be used to influence their own decisions in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, a 2023 North Dakota State University study found that farmers' comfort levels depended heavily on who was receiving the data. Around three-fourths of surveyed North Dakota producers were fine handing it to a banker, crop insurance agent or crop consultant, while only 33% said the same of government representatives. Just over 16% were comfortable sharing it with third-party firms that profit from the data but give producers an incentive in return, while only about 7% were comfortable when the firm offered no incentive at all.
A 2022 survey sent to 211 Florida farmers found more than 64% of respondents hadn’t even conceptualized their data as “a new kind of harvest” that could be commercialized, while nearly 43% were unsure of the value of their data. Almost 63% had never learned about data as a form of property, though 46% considered agriculture data a type of intellectual property.
And a 2025 survey of crop input dealers found that 33% of respondents believed data privacy concerns may limit customers’ use of precision agriculture services. Sixty-three percent of dealers who responded to the survey, which was conducted by Purdue University and CropLife magazine, reported having a customer data privacy statement or data terms and conditions agreement, while 52% said they archived and managed yield, soil test and other data for future use.
Additionally, while around 46% of responding retailers said they worked with producers one-on-one with their farm data without aggregating any, around 35% reported aggregating farmer data within the dealership. Another 17% said they aggregated farmer data, including for use outside of the dealership.
Farmers can be inherently distrustful of outsiders, and a wave of venture capital that in recent years has brought new players into the ag-tech industry may be feeding into some of the budding interest in privacy legislation, said Todd Janzen, an agricultural attorney and the administrator of the Ag Data Transparent project, which created a voluntary certification process for companies that commit to meeting a set of data transparency principles.
Kansas State University economist Terry Griffin told Agri-Pulse that data doesn’t generally “play well” within the legal concept of private ownership under British common law, a predecessor to much of the U.S.’s legal tradition. He said he’s pointed out in past discussions with farmers that data’s characteristics tend to fit more closely with the idea of a “public good” than a “private good,” though he added that’s generally been an unpopular message.
“A lot of farmers would say, ‘I don’t care what you say, I own my data,’” Griffin said. But he added, “It’s not like owning grain or livestock or a pencil or land. It’s got very different characteristics than those physical goods.”
States weigh giving farmers control over ag data
Of the ag data privacy legislation that has emerged so far this year, Nebraska's law takes the narrowest approach. It declares that the farmer owns agronomic, land, climate and livestock data they generate — yields, soil tests, input prescriptions, and livestock breeding and feed records, for instance — and that controllers or processors of that data hold only a limited right to use it for whatever service they provide, whether it's maintaining equipment, running diagnostics or doing other forms of producer-authorized work. Any sale of that data requires the farmer's written consent, which must be obtained separately from the fine print of a service agreement.
“Whoever has the data, whoever has the information, has the power. And we think landowners and the producers should have it,” Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen (R), who helped to champion the effort in Nebraska, told Agri-Pulse in an interview.
Enforcement of the data provisions falls to the state attorney general, with penalties of $1,000 per violation. Companies get 45 days to fix a violation before the attorney general can act, unless they were selling data without consent. And the law does not establish a private right of action, which means producers themselves cannot sue.
An earlier 2025 version of the measure would have let producers withdraw consent and force a company to delete their data. However, this early draft of the bill drew concern from some industry members, like equipment dealers who worried its language could be applied too broadly, said Phil Erdman, the director of dealer and government relations for the Iowa-Nebraska Equipment Dealers Association.
One of the concerns dealers had was that the data deletion provision might be read broadly to allow customers to request dealerships to delete any agricultural records, including those simply indicating the customer had bought a tractor, Erdman said. Dealers use that information for determining market share and tracking whether they are meeting obligations to manufacturers, he added.
“There was just a lot of disruption that could have happened,” he said.
Lawmakers reworked the bill significantly this year to address some of those concerns, and the updated measure generally was received better by manufacturers, dealers and other earlier critics, said Republican Nebraska State Senator Mike Jacobson, its lead author. The new version focuses primarily on the concept of ownership, he said.
Mike Jacobson (Nebraska Legislature photo)“It essentially set up the framework and what I would say is the concept that the producer owns their data, that anyone that handles their data must provide a duty of care to protect the data, and that they cannot resell the data without the prior written consent of the producer or the owner,” Jacobson told Agri-Pulse in an interview.
The measures introduced in Iowa, Missouri and Colorado take a more expansive approach, each following a core idea: that the producer owns their data and may profit off of it. They even share the same title — the Agricultural Data Ownership and Market Competition Act.
These bills distinguish between two kinds of data, and assign ownership of both to the producer, according to a summary published by ArentFox Schiff. The first type — raw data — is unprocessed information recorded by an instrument, which Iowa and Colorado say cannot be copyrighted under federal law. The second — transformed data — is the product a company builds from the first, like a predictive yield model, a field prescription or a report comparing one operation with others.
Under the Iowa and Colorado bills, a farmer would own the raw readings and the transformed product built from them, and could copyright, license or sell the transformed work. Missouri's bill doesn't formally define raw data, using a broader "agricultural data" category instead, and gives the farmer only a "proportional" stake in transformed data.
All three measures would allow a farmer to request a copy of their data in a portable format, take it to a competing service provider, and require a company to delete it. Waiving these rights requires a producer’s written consent, which cannot be placed in a terms-of-service agreement.
Additionally, companies would be required to pay farmers for their data at a fair value, with any revenue-sharing terms set out beforehand in a written agreement.
Willie Cade, CEO of Graceful Solutions and an advocate for these bills, said under those bills' provisions, whoever is seeking access to farmers’ data “would have to negotiate” with the farmer to determine compensation. He said the overall total would depend upon what the two parties agree upon, but stressed that he hopes producers begin to see their data as something of value as a result of these bills.
“You may not think your data is valuable, that it’s only valuable when there’s a whole lot of it aggregated together. That’s just not true,” Cade said. “Every element of that data has value going forward.”
However, Erdman expressed concern with these bills, saying they could have “far-reaching implications.” He noted that equipment dealers are concerned they’d need to pay for data access just to repair equipment, which could potentially be passed on to the customer as part of the repair costs. He also called the level of penalties “astronomical.”
“The approach is very different,” he said, comparing these bills to Nebraska's. He added that the Iowa and Colorado measures currently lack buy-in from dealers and other parts of the agriculture industry.
These bills route enforcement through the states' consumer-protection laws, with Colorado's treating a violation as a deceptive trade practice while Missouri's and Iowa's tie violations to their consumer-fraud statutes. Unlike Nebraska’s bill, all three would enable farmers to bring their own lawsuits over violations, allowing them to seek up to $10,000 per violation, along with attorney’s fees.
Still, the bills diverge in a few ways. According to the ArentFox Schiff summary, Missouri’s caps market concentration, barring companies from collecting agricultural data from producers representing more than 25% of the total farmland in any single county. Companies that exceed that limit would have 90 days to stop collecting data in that county and delete enough of the excess to come back under the cap or face penalties.
Meanwhile, Colorado's bill would levy a 3% excise tax on transactions involving transformed data and put the revenue toward a state loan program for beginning farmers, though this would require the approval of Colorado voters. The bill refers the question to the statewide ballot in November.
Both the Colorado and Missouri bills would sunset if not renewed, with Colorado’s listed to expire in 2037 and Missouri’s set to lapse six years after taking effect.
The Iowa measure was folded into a broader right-to-repair bill, HF 2763, as an amendment. The Iowa House passed that bill 70-18 on April 27, but the state Senate did not take it up.
Pillen expects to see other states follow Nebraska’s lead by passing their own ag data privacy bills. He believes it's important for farmers to own and control data in a changing technology landscape.
“We’re excited to be the first to do it,” Pillen said of the Nebraska law. “We’re really sure many more will follow it, because it’s just pragmatic, common sense.”
