There has been a triumph in how farms interact with the agribusinesses for which they supply and work. Farmer’s collect a lot of data on how much they plant, how much other inputs they use, and various other things in order to determine profit maximizing decisions for coming years. Until this recent agreement between businesses and farmers, businesses such as Monsanto, DuPont, John Deere, and Dow had access to much of this information. They had begun to offer data collection services which incited worries about who had access to this information. Although the article remains vague about whether or not these companies actually exploited their previous access, it assures that now there is a legal framework to prevent potential problems.
I’m not entirely sure how much of a victory this is, but one potential issue that was noted in the article is that these companies could have used famers’ data to speculate on commodities. That could definitely be a potential way for these companies to further exploit farmers. However, I applaud them for conceding to this new legal framework.
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