Freeman: Expect laws over ownership of ag data to become more complex
Nov. 3, 2026
By Mary Hightower
University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
Fast facts
- Ag data ownership laws shift from asset to property right
- Freeman: Expect ag data laws to become more granular
(1,287 words)
DOWNLOAD file art of ag data example; presenters D. Reed Freeman and Karen Ellis Carr
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Who owns data collected on a farm and how private is it? The answer depends on where the farm is and the type of operation, said D. Reed Freeman, partner and chair of the privacy practice group at ArentFox Schiff.
Freeman and Karen Ellis Carr, chair of the firm’s agriculture and agtech industry group, discussed “Agricultural Data Rights: A New State Law Landscape,” a webinar hosted Oct. 21 by the National Agricultural Law Center.
How did we get here?
The rise of precision agriculture over the last 40 years is built on data, which is now routinely collected by farm equipment such as combines and drones. Paired with GPS and other digital tools, this data enables row crop farmers to better manage inputs such as fertilizer and water, and for livestock producers, it provides detailed means to track animals, water and feed use and manage pastures and forage.
Ag data may also include climate and weather information such as precipitation, temperature and wind speeds, or data about the land, including measurements about soil fertility, elevation and topography.
Further data sources could include management data such as information relating to finances, taxes, and employment records.
As more farmers adopted variable fertilizer rates and, with the advent of yield monitors in combines, GPS and other data collection, farmers began to wonder who owned the information and who was seeing what was being collected in their fields.
“Farmers are not the only party with access to the data being generated through many precision agriculture practices,” said Elizabeth Rumley, senior staff attorney for NALC. “In fact, user agreements with the companies who manufactured such technology may convey certain rights over the data being generated. This has created some privacy concerns, leading to calls for state laws clarifying who owns the data being generated on farms.”
2014 agreement
In 2014, the American Farm Bureau worked with farm organizations and agriculture technology providers to create an agreement on data privacy and security principles to “encourage the use and development of a full range of innovative, technology-driven tools and services to boost the productivity, efficiency and profitability of American agriculture.” This agreement was voluntary, and as Freeman noted, “didn’t carry the force of law.”
A more recent milestone in ag data ownership was Nebraska’s landmark LB525, the Agricultural Data Privacy Act, signed into law in April 2026.
“This marked the first state law to establish ownership rights and safeguards for the wide array of data generated by farmers during their operations,” Rumley said.
According to the state legislature, Nebraska’s Agricultural Data Privacy Act is intended to protect the “economic value” of agricultural data and “the autonomy of Nebraska’s producers.” To accomplish this, the act provides guidelines for the sale of agricultural data by agricultural technology providers or ATPs, establishes a consent requirement, and imposes penalties on violators.
Since Nebraska’s law was enacted, both Missouri and Iowa have introduced proposals related to ag data. Missouri’s was referred to a legislative committee, while the Iowa amendment passed in the House, but was awaiting Senate action. Colorado HB26-1270 was introduced in February 2026 but postponed indefinitely the following month.
The Nebraska law was introduced in 2025 at the behest of Gov. Jim Pillen, Freeman said.
“The original bill that caught my attention took farm and ranch data and put it into a data privacy law framework, the kind of law that regulates individual's personal information,” he said.
“The framework for those laws — now in about 23 states — provide you and other individuals the right to get a copy of your personal data, to ask that it be deleted or corrected and to opt out of certain things,” Freeman said.
However, the Nebraska bill changed significantly by the time it hit the governor’s desk for signing. It dialed back some of the privacy aspects and instead “adopted a producer data ownership monetization model.”
Under this model, the farmer or the producer “has a right, an exclusive right to sell his or her raw farm data. Nobody else has an uninhibited right to sell that data,” Freeman said. “The producer can sign away that right, but otherwise the collector of the data, the vendor for the farm cannot sell the raw data.”
The data that belongs to the farmer includes agronomic, climate, soil topography and fertility, climate and weather information, as well as “livestock data, pedigree, feed genetics, management data, the finances, commodity prices supplied, those aspects of the farm business and the sustainability data, greenhouse gases, water quality impacts — all of those comprise agricultural data, and the raw versions of that are exclusively the right of the producer to sell under the Nebraska law,” Freeman said.
Nebraska does not give the producer any rights in aggregate data or derived data,” he said. “That is to say, the vendor on the land, whether it's an equipment provider or seed company or fence provider, has the rights in aggregate data — agricultural data that's been combined with other data from various sources and summarized in a way that is not attributable to any single producer.”
Asked about information gathered by remote sensing, Freeman said, “I think that if there is a satellite or drone imagery of a farm, and it's collecting raw data on the farm, the land itself or the climate or the weather or the soil constitution, I would think that is no different than any other controller or processor on the land collecting raw data.
“And I would think that the producer would have the right to sell that data or to negotiate away,” he said.
Shifting focus
The issues involving ag data have begun to shift, expanding into other areas of law, Freeman said.
“Agricultural data legislation is — at least in our view — shifting the farm data ownership from a contract-governed commercial asset to a statutorily protected property right,” he said. “Nebraska established the very first property right in farm and ranch data.”
Continuing to develop this area of law, “Missouri and Iowa have introduced bills that added monetization and private enforcement and anti-retaliation protections,” Freeman said.
Further, the Colorado bill may come back in the next legislative session, he said, adding, “We'll see if it serves as a policy signal for a potential model for future agricultural data ownership regimes.”
That state’s “government would get into the business and propose a 3 percent excise tax on the net taxable sales from transformed agricultural data transactions in Colorado,” Freeman said. “It doesn't take long to attract the government's attention to a new market and for the government to find a new source of tax revenue.”
Additionally, there are situations that the Nebraska law doesn’t seem to parse. In an integrated operation, a meat company integrator provides the livestock and feed while the farmer owns the land and the barns and also provides the labor.
“Going back to the definition of agricultural producer, it means the person as the owner, lessee or renter of the farm, livestock, land, device or equipment from which it's produced,” Freeman said; however, “the law seems a little ambiguous as it relates to this type of livestock [production]. So, you'd want to negotiate out in the meantime before there's a legal protection of various rights.
“But it's important because it shows how this area of law may expand into excise taxes, fiduciary duties and broader enforcement models,” Freeman said. “The laws, the bills that have followed Nebraska are becoming more complex, more granular, introducing new issues.”
“It's an area that is continuing to grow in complexity, and it's certainly well worth keeping an eye on in the agriculture space,” said Carr.
To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit uada.edu. To learn more about ag and food research in Arkansas, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station at aaes.uada.edu.
About the National Agricultural Law Center
Created by Congress in 1987, the National Agricultural Law Center serves as the nation’s leading source of agricultural and food law research and information. The NALC works with producers, agribusinesses, state and federal policymakers, lenders, Congressional staffers, attorneys, land grant universities, students, and many others to provide objective, nonpartisan agricultural and food law research and information to the nation’s agricultural community.
The NALC is a unit of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture and works in close partnership with the National Agricultural Library, a subsidiary of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. For information about the NALC, visit nationalaglawcenter.org. The NALC is also on X, Facebook and LinkedIn as @nataglaw. Subscribe online to receive NALC Communications, including webinar announcements, the NALC’s Quarterly Newsletter, and The Feed.
About UADA
The University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, UADA conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.
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