Technology moves fast. For example, five years ago, we were just seeing commercially available selective spraying machines in the U.S., now a handful of companies have hundreds of machines across the country.
Changes in the industry were recognized by Ag Data Transparent, an industry group founded 10 years ago with the goal of bringing greater transparency for farmers and the industry in how data is used, collected and stored.
As such, five years after ADT wrote and distributed its first Model Ag Data Use Agreement, they updated it late in 2025. It’s now available on their website for no fee.
“A lot of companies would come to us and say: ‘We want to do things right, how do we do it? What’s the best way to go about collecting data from farmers?’” says Todd Janzen, administrator for the Ag Data Transparent project. “We created this model agreement that they could use as their primary contract with farmers.”
He says in the past five years, it’s been downloaded hundreds of times.
The committee that recently worked to update it included:
- a new category for sustainability data (carbon, conservation programs, and climate data)
- a new category for usage data and how a farmer is using a platform
- addressing artificial intelligence, adding derived data, which would be new data sets that are created based upon use of the ag data itself
“The agreement tries to be much more specific than others you see outside our industry,” Janzen says. “Also, it starts with a basic framework that a farmer owns the data.”
Reflecting on the origin of the model agreement, Janzen remembers a time with many ag startups all collecting data individually. Since then, there’s been a shift, mostly due to consolidation but also businesses closing, where there are fewer players today.
“Ag Data Transparent was created to first establish a set of core principles around what are the best practices for how data should be collected from farms,” Janzen says. “And then secondly, to do a certification or verification of which companies were adhering to those principles, by going through this voluntary certification process.”
Nevertheless, tools to help farmers ensure transparency are important, he says.
“What I understand, there still is a great deal of concern from farmers about what happens to all this data, and with advent of AI it started to reinvigorate a lot of these discussions about data and what does it mean for these AI models to use data, to train themselves,” Janzen explains.
