At the Farm Progess Show this summer, New Holland rolled out a new concept tractor that appeared mostly conventional but had one stand out feature — it runs on methane rather than diesel. My first impression when seeing this was — didn't we have this same concept 50 years ago?

DuPont Pioneer's $300 million acquisition of Silicon Valley based Granular might have you wondering what happens to all that data a provider collects after it is sold? This post answers that question.

You would have to live under a rock to not have heard about farmers’ issues with dicamba this growing season. Arkansas banned the pesticide, Missouri temporarily banned and then changed the label, and complaints are skyrocketing in Indiana and Illinois.

In the race to the cloud, we must also be cautious so that the American farmer is not left behind. Today I will address the issues facing farmers as digitalization occurs and how the industry has begun to address these issues.

Over two years has passed since American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) led an industry coalition to address issues of surrounding ag data ownership, privacy, and security. When AFBF published the "Privacy and Security Principles for Farm Data"--or as I call them, the ag data's "Core Principles," I expected the industry uptake to be swift.

You just spent six figures on a new piece of farm equipment. Now you read the fine print and realize that you must also sign-up with the equipment manufacturer's cloud based data platform. You want the equipment, but not the proprietary data platform that comes with it. What do you do?

If you haven't heard from now, Monsanto has terminated its agreement to sell its Precision Planting division to John Deere.  Only those inside these companies really know what led to the end of this agreement, but the press releases help us piece together what happened.

Dicamba drift issues are a big concern this summer, making me wonder how willing farmers will be to trust the recommendations from their ag data platforms on when it is OK to spray. An even better question is: what happens if the platform's recommendation gets it wrong, resulting in Dicamba drift and nearby crop damage?

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?