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Farmers across the United States are increasingly mobilizing against equipment and seed companies, alleging that these corporate entities are systematically profiting from their valuable agricultural data and, in some instances, leveraging it against them. This growing discontent has culminated in legislative action, most notably in Nebraska, which recently enacted the nation’s first law establishing data ownership rights for farmers. While this represents a significant victory for agricultural producers, similar legislative efforts in other states have, thus far, failed to pass, underscoring the formidable challenges in rebalancing power within the modern agricultural ecosystem.
The core of this burgeoning conflict lies in the vast, often unseen, streams of data generated by contemporary farming operations. For Guy Mills, who cultivates corn, soy, and alfalfa on his central Nebraska farm, agriculture has long been a "giant science experiment." His meticulous approach involves collecting extensive data on soil types, pH levels, and nutrient uptake, often augmenting his handwritten notes and spreadsheets with sophisticated digital tools. Mills utilizes AgLeader software for precise seed placement and performance tracking, and the Deere Operations Center portal for creating fertilizer and seed prescriptions. Yet, even for a data-savvy farmer like Mills, the sheer volume of information collected by a single John Deere combine—36,000 data points during a recent fall harvest—was a revelation and a cause for concern.
"I don’t want people collecting that data, because they can use it against me," Mills states, articulating a fear shared by many producers. He envisions a scenario where corporations possess intimate knowledge of his farm’s every detail: "They’ll know every yield, every input that went on it, how much of the inputs [were there] when it was planted, and what the oil pressure was on the tractor that planted it." This granular insight, Mills worries, could empower corporate monopolies in equipment, software, seeds, and inputs, making independent farming increasingly untenable, particularly for younger generations. Despite corporate assurances of farmer data ownership, a deep-seated distrust persists regarding how these companies might exploit the information collected from their operations.
However, Mills’ apprehension has been somewhat assuaged by Nebraska’s pioneering legislation, the Nebraska Agricultural Data Privacy Act. Passed unanimously in April 2026 and taking effect in July of the same year, this law is the first of its kind in the U.S. to formally establish data ownership rights for farmers. Its passage reflects a wider, national awakening to the critical issue of who controls and profits from agricultural data, at a time when farmers are growing increasingly suspicious of how powerful equipment and seed companies are leveraging their digital harvests. "The new ag data law is landmark legislation," Mills asserts. "We’ve identified data as an asset, and farmers would no longer give that away for free. Now they can’t sell our data either. The law is finally catching up with the technology ag producers are using."
The Genesis of Nebraska’s Precedent
The journey of the Nebraska Agricultural Data Privacy Act, officially designated Legislative Bill 525 (LB525), began in January 2025. State Senator Mike Jacobson, a Republican, introduced the bill at the request of fellow Republican Governor Jim Pillen, garnering support from a coalition of farm groups. Although the bill initially stalled in 2025, it resurfaced and passed without opposition in 2026, marking a significant legislative achievement for agricultural advocacy in the state.
The success in Nebraska has swiftly catalyzed broader national discussions around farmer data rights. In September 2026, Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts, also a Republican, introduced a federal version of his state’s bill, titled the Agricultural Data Privacy Act, to the U.S. Congress. Concurrently, a separate draft of federal legislation, backed by Democrats, is circulating, aiming to advance data rights for agricultural producers. A version reviewed by Civil Eats indicates this proposed legislation would encompass both raw and aggregated data, critically, it would also grant farmers the right to sue suspected violators directly—a key distinction from Nebraska’s current law.
This legislative momentum emerges against a backdrop of increasing economic pressure on farmers, including inflation and tariffs that squeeze profit margins, and budget cuts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that further diminish support for agricultural producers. Moreover, the movement aligns with a broader populist wave of "Big Tech" legislation focused on consumer protection and privacy, which has gained traction across diverse political landscapes, as noted by attorney Reed Freeman, a data privacy specialist at ArentFox Schiff.
The issue of data rights is also deeply intertwined with the burgeoning "right to repair" movement, which seeks to empower farmers and consumers to repair their own equipment rather than being reliant on manufacturers. Right-to-repair bills have successfully passed in 10 states, with dozens more having considered recent legislation, some of which specifically address farm-equipment software, diagnostics, and, crucially, data access. Farmers and right-to-repair advocates alike express profound concerns about how large technology companies and increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools will utilize the vast troves of data generated on their farms. Unlike sectors such as healthcare and finance, agriculture has historically lacked comprehensive regulation governing data handling, a regulatory vacuum that the Nebraska law, and proposed federal legislation, aim to fill. Freeman views Nebraska’s new law as a clear manifestation of a larger, industry-wide struggle over the ownership of the enormous amounts of machine-generated data across all sectors.
Understanding Nebraska’s Law and its Nuances
The Nebraska Agricultural Data Privacy Act defines agricultural data as a "proprietary business asset," explicitly granting producers ownership and control over data generated from their farm, land, or equipment. The law broadly applies to data across six critical categories: agronomic, climate and weather, land, livestock, management, and sustainability.
A central tenet of the legislation is its prohibition on third parties controlling or handling farm data from selling it without the producer’s prior written consent. This consent must be separate from other terms of service or data-use agreements, ensuring farmers are fully aware and actively agree to such transactions. Businesses processing farm data within Nebraska are mandated to update their contracts to comply with the new regulations by January 1, 2027. For violations, the Nebraska attorney general has the authority to seek an injunction or impose a $1,000 penalty per infraction.
Interestingly, when LB525 carried over into 2026, it faced no formal opposition during its February committee hearing. Among the four parties listed as "neutral" was April Price, Assistant General Counsel for Deere & Company. Price reportedly advocated for replacing the term "ownership" with "control" in the bill’s language, but the final version retained the stronger "ownership" terminology. Other prominent agricultural technology giants were conspicuously absent from the legislative record during this crucial phase. Freeman found this lack of overt corporate opposition "curious," suggesting that the bill’s final form might not have presented a significant threat to their existing business models.
In response to inquiries, a Deere spokesperson indicated that the company is "currently in the process of developing a full data policy that supports farmers" in light of the new law. AGCO similarly stated it was reviewing the legislation’s impact on its offerings. Conversely, Bayer, the provider of Climate FieldView software, maintained that Nebraska’s law would not affect its current practices, according to a company statement. Corteva did not respond to requests for comment.
Farmers’ rights advocates and data watchdogs offer a critical perspective on the apparent lack of corporate resistance. Kevin Kenney, a diesel equipment engineer and vocal critic of current practices, suggests that companies may not have publicly objected to the Nebraska bill because its amended form did not demand substantial changes to their operations. Kenney, who has controversially labeled precision agriculture as "the biggest transfer of wealth from traditional farm families to a few corporate entities that share this data among themselves," views Nebraska’s law as incremental progress, albeit with several notable limitations.
One such limitation is that while the law prohibits third parties from selling farm data without consent, it does not explicitly prohibit them from sharing data for processing or authorized services. This distinction allows precision agriculture businesses to continue practices they describe as routine and benign, such such as outsourcing the storage of massive data troves to cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. It also permits companies to send equipment performance or maintenance data to tractor dealerships or to run data through proprietary algorithms or AI models—practices that are central to their current operations and value generation.
Furthermore, the law mandates that companies processing farm data employ "reasonable safeguards" to protect the data, but it notably refrains from defining what constitutes "reasonable." This ambiguity could create loopholes or challenges in enforcement. Crucially, if a company violates the law, individual farmers lack a direct legal right to sue. Enforcement is exclusively vested in the Nebraska attorney general’s office, and companies are afforded a 45-day curing period to rectify potential security violations before any fines are applied. These provisions, while a step forward, leave farmers without immediate recourse and could hinder swift justice for data breaches or misuse.
The Broader Fight: State Failures and Federal Aspirations
Concerns among farmers about data ownership are not new, dating back at least to 2014, when a coalition of farmer organizations and software companies collaboratively established Ag Data Transparent. This initiative was a voluntary code of conduct designed to address questions of ownership and access to farm data for ag-tech businesses.
These early principles informed a wave of farm-data rights bills that emerged in other states in early 2026, often proposing more expansive protections than Nebraska’s final version, yet ultimately failing to pass into law. These bills typically sought to extend data rights to include aggregated data (information combined from numerous sources) and "transformed" data (insights generated by proprietary algorithms, analysis, or predictive models). They also frequently included more substantial penalties for corporate violations.
In April 2026, the Iowa House overwhelmingly voted to incorporate data-rights protections into an existing right-to-repair bill, HF2763. This amendment covered farmers’ rights to data from their farms, as well as data that had been "processed, analyzed, aggregated, compiled, or otherwise transformed through the application of proprietary algorithms, analytical methods, creative arrangement, or other intellectual processes." The legislative text of the Iowa bill clearly articulated a pervasive grievance among farmers and their advocates: "Seed companies, insurers, commodity traders, agricultural technology firms, financial institutions, government agencies, and others pay premium prices for agricultural data insights, while agricultural producers receive no portion of that value." Bruce Rieker, senior director of state legislative affairs for the Nebraska Farm Bureau, succinctly captured this sentiment, stating, "I call agricultural data the second harvest. It’s another way in which farmers produce value that can go to market and make money, if they aren’t excluded from it by corporate restraints." Despite strong support in the House, the Iowa Agricultural Data Ownership and Market Competition Act ultimately did not receive a vote in the state Senate before adjournment.
Similarly, in Colorado, House Bill 26-1270, which would have granted farmers rights to own and monetize both their raw and transformed data, faced open opposition from Deere and other equipment manufacturers and was postponed indefinitely in March 2026. Missouri House Bill 3409, another unsuccessful effort, also aimed to encompass farmers’ rights to data aggregated by equipment companies and third parties, proposing penalties of up to $50,000 per violation and allowing farmers to sue for $10,000 in statutory damages for each infraction.
Despite these legislative setbacks in other states, the battle over farm data rights is widely expected to intensify. As Rieker noted of the Nebraska law, "This is an important step. We recognize that agricultural data policy will continue to evolve as technology advances."
Ag-Tech Anxiety, AI, and the "Second Harvest"
The increasing digitization of agriculture—with AI-enabled weed sprayers, GPS-guided auto-steer tractors, and smartphone applications for tracking field conditions—raises fundamental questions about who should ultimately profit from the immense value generated by agricultural data. This debate is unfolding within the context of a rapidly expanding precision agriculture market, which was valued at $9.35 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow by 12.2 percent annually to reach $16.73 billion by 2030, according to the Business Research Company.
Advocates for farmer data ownership frequently cite Deere & Company’s own 2022 description of an "incremental addressable market opportunity" of $150 billion across its various businesses, including precision farming, connectivity, and autonomous technologies. While Deere has stated this value would be shared with customers, and estimated its connectivity and digital technologies could deliver $72 per acre in value to a theoretical Iowa commodity farm, the actual distribution of this value remains a point of contention.
Ben Craker, president of the nonprofit Agricultural Data Coalition, observes the core tension: "People see how big these companies are and the money they’re making, and they know they’re collecting all their data, and say, ‘I should be getting a piece of that; my data is clearly worth something.’" He adds, however, that "on the flip side of that, the aggregated data set is what’s worth something."
This distinction between individual farm data and aggregated/derived data is critical. The Nebraska law, in its current form, does not protect "derived" data that has been "modified, processed, analyzed, or compiled," which could include "agronomic insights, reports, and predictive models." Nor does it protect aggregated data—the type of information whose value exponentially increases when combined and analyzed across thousands of farms. Such data currently occupies a murky intellectual property middle ground between individual farmers and the proprietary corporate algorithms, including emerging AI models like John Deere’s JD AI Assistant.
Joshua Hjelmaas, a research specialist at the Iowa State University Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation, emphasizes this point: "The raw data is not worth really anything on an individual scale, but when it’s scaled up to thousands of farm operations, put into a model where they can derive analytical insights, that’s worth millions."
However, Willie Cade, an agricultural rights advocate and board member of the Repair Association, challenges this narrative, arguing that even data from a single machine or field can yield significant, lucrative insights for both farmers and software providers. "There’s a myth that only the large row-crop guys have data, that it’s only valuable data if you aggregate it in a large sum," Cade states. Farms of all sizes generate valuable data, and as producers increasingly use data to differentiate their products, they can create more value, particularly in areas like sustainability benchmarking, according to attorney Todd Janzen, founder of Janzen Schroeder Ag Law and administrator of Ag Data Transparent.
While artificial intelligence holds the promise of delivering invaluable insights to farmers from their agricultural data, Guy Mills and other producers remain skeptical of needing tech giants to analyze their operations. "Anyone can learn," Mills says, reflecting on his 52 seasons of farming. "I continue to learn."
To advocates on the ground, however, unrestricted access to these data sets has already granted agribusinesses an unfair and potentially devastating advantage. "The assault versus the family farm is way more efficient when they have your playbook," engineer Kenney warns. "They’ve got our playbook, and they’re playing it against us."
For many, state data legislation is not merely routine business regulation but a fundamental struggle for the survival and autonomy of the family farm. As Willie Cade passionately concludes, "I call agricultural data the second harvest. It’s another way in which farmers produce value that can go to market and make money, if they aren’t excluded from it by corporate restraints." The Nebraska law represents a critical first step in reclaiming this "second harvest," setting a precedent that will undoubtedly shape the future of agricultural policy and power dynamics across the nation.
