Last month, I had the opportunity to share some of the results and analysis from our most recent benchmark study at the Western Equipment Dealers Assn. meeting in Arizona. During the course of my discussion, one of the questions I posed to the room was how many are offering some type of data management service?

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.

Good news can sometimes be hard to find. We’re often inundated with negative crawls, feeds and tweets to the point where finding a positive is the needle in the haystack.

Research into remote sensing has been taking place for over 40 years, but it is only more recently with advancements in technologies, lower cost and ease of use that we are on the cusp of routinely using it as part of precision services.

The last couple of years have seen hiring in the precision department slow as dealerships have been more conservative with where and how they invest in personnel. More emphasis has been placed on retention and cross-training of existing staff, to provide more flexibility with customer service offerings and sales.

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.

One of the precision markets often identified by dealers as holding the most revenue potential is planter technology. Recent years have seen the debut and development of electric drives, high-speed seed delivery meters and hydraulic down force systems.

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.