What will Elon Musk's impact be on agriculture? This is what I kept thinking after reading his biography by Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future) and, although the only part about agriculture was a brief period in Musk’s life working on a family farm in Canada, I think there is a lot agriculture can learn from entrepreneurs like Musk.

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.

One of my favorite end of the year activities is to reflect on the past 12 months and ask: What were the big stories of 2016?

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.