Federal law prohibits price fixing or collusion among competitors. As more ag data moves from farmers' tractors and computers into the cloud, the temptation to price fix by ag technology providers grows. Is it inevitable that sooner or later, ag data platform providers will conspire to fix prices?

A number of poultry growers have filed suit against Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, and other poultry integrators alleging that growers’ production data was shared among integrators to depress grower payments. This is the first case where farmers’ ag data is the center of the lawsuit.

The clouds that house America’s agricultural data are going to see a lot shifting in 2017. The ag data platform space has been on a constant growth trend for the last few years. But all good things must come to an end, and I think 2017 will be the year when farmers demand results to part with their ag data.

Janzen Ag Law is celebrating our first year. What better way to celebrate than write a blog post about the highs and lows of what it meant to start a business in late 2015. Here are my highs and lows from the past year.

Now a few years into the movement of ag data from the farmstead into the cloud, we are seeing two different models of cloud-based platforms emerge. There are cloud-based storage platforms with aggregated data sharing; and there are cloud-based platforms without aggregated data sharing. It is important for all farmers to know the difference.

The past two weeks I have been on the road, traveling to Chicago and Orlando to speak at two very different ag data conferences. The first was the Big Data Dairy Management conference held by the American Dairy Science Association.  The second was AgGateway's annual conference. The audiences were different, but many of the issues were the same. Here are few of my reflections.

Earlier this year, Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA) with near unanimous support. Since so many of my articles about ag data have focused on the law of trade secrets, I thought it makes sense to see what impact, if any, the DTSA has on ag data issues.

Talking with a few more precision retailers, there’s not been a consensus on an expected outcome of the U.S. Department of Justice intervening on John Deere’s planned acquisition of Precision Planting. Some forecast a restructuring of the original deal, which would pare down the power position that Deere would assume in the planter technology market should the deal be approved wholesale.