The farm data landscape was littered with many different programmes, McEwen said.
Like scattered cogs they often failed to mesh with one another to create a viable, powerful gearbox for farmers to use to run their businesses.
“One of the reasons for signing up to the code was to say we do need to share a lot of data to provide effective information but in order to do so we need farmers’ permission. They need confidence the company will do the right thing with their data.”
Farmers had left it in no doubt about how much they hated entering data more than once.
“And so often the core data required by different systems is the same. So it comes back to the code facilitating that data to be shared responsibility and saving what farmers hate the most – entering it twice, sometimes three times.”
A typical scenario for his company was being able to have farmer clients’ Fonterra milk data downloaded straight into the Farmax system seamlessly.
McEwen also hinted at a concept to let farmers electronically tick off what companies they were prepared to share their core data with.
He acknowledged the question of how much farmer data contributed to new products or services and their value was “an interesting can of worms”.
“People will argue the data is important but so too is the value added to it by that company’s technology. It is a symbiotic relationship when the technology is being offered back to farmers.”
He cited LIC’s MINDA programme as a classic and celebrated system that evolved efficiently thanks to access to farmer data.
McEwen acknowledged his company was only just scratching the surface on the issue of “big data” and how it was used.
Farmax was using its whole client data sets to help develop key benchmarks for individual farmer clients to compare themselves to.
But he agreed there was value for New Zealand in large farm data sets that could be harvested – for example, analysing milk flows for better national volume forecasting and for improved supply chain efficiencies.
“Under the Privacy Act the company can only use the information for the purposes you signed up for. It can’t just go and do anything with it just because it has it.”
David Chin
LIC
“If we can be better at that as a country we could all stand to benefit from that sort of data.”
LIC territory manager and market analyst David Chin was confident the Privacy Act and the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act (DIRA) comfortably covered farmers’ rights around use of their farm data.
“Companies can acquire the rights to compile, analyse and utilise data for commercial application and, on signing up with a company you may grant those rights.”
He points to LIC where farmers’ data had to be acquired for calculating the Breeding Worth index and under legislation LIC’s herd testing status required that information to be passed over.
“But under the Privacy Act the company can only use the information for the purposes you signed up for. It can’t just go and do anything with it just because it has it.”
Further, DIRA ensured farm data use must pass through an access panel that would allow its use only if there was industry benefit there.
He welcomed the code as a means of weeding out “cowboy” operators on the digital frontier.
“There are a lot of outfits there who may collect data but may not have the security protocols and systems. That risks loss of privacy.”
Chin said the value element for companies like LIC in the data avalanche lay in the algorithms companies developed to turn data flow into predictive tools for farmers.
The challenge was to not only make money from it but to deliver tools that would genuinely add value to a farmer’s business.
He likened the data scene to shale oil and gas deposits before fracking was developed.
“People know it is there but they are just trying to work out a way to get it out. For us it is to turn it to a benefit for farmers.”
