Data Ownership – is it a thing?
Alrighty folks – this topic is getting hot and I love it! Time to move out of my lane and talk a bit about producer data – I’m referring to the wealth of data collected on dairy farms, sheep operations, swine, poultry, and the list goes on. A conversation I’ve sat in on a couple of times now during our cybersecurity events at the University of Guelph.
Let’s change my scenario from my “Elephant in the Room” blog post to a more relevant producer scenario. In my blog post – in case you haven’t read that one – was about a list I created in Excel for books that I read and ranked. I own the physical piece of paper that I wrote my rankings on and I can also say that I own my representation of that information that I created with my Excel spreadsheet. I think we can all see this and can agree to this statement. Now, remember things started to get a little fuzzy when I gave my excel spreadsheet to my friend to create an Access database that included my results along with our book club members’ results. I suggested STRONGLY that rather than data ownership – we should talk about who has the rights when it comes to the data – how it can be used, shared, analysed, etc….
Let’s translate this to data collected on a farm. Producer “ABC” owns the animals – they paid for them, feed them, house them, care for them, etc.. you can go out into the barn and See/Touch the animals. Now, producer “ABC” collects information on their animals, weights, maybe feed consumed – let’s leave the milking information out of this conversation for a moment. This information may be written down on a piece of paper or notebook, and may be transcribed into a database at a later time. See the parallels to my book ranking scenario?? Alrighty – now producer “ABC” also milks their cows and has an agreement with company “XYZ” to gather that information through their really cool robotic milking machine. So… where is THAT data? Who OWNS that data? There is NO piece of paper or notebook – the data is automagically moved to a database in the cloud. AND… this is where it might be easier if we talked about the rights to use, share, etc.. the data rather than who OWNS the data. It gets murky and fast!
This week Taylor Leach, wrote an excellent article on this very topic for Dairy-Herd Management! So rather than reading my babbles – check out “Who Really Owns Your Farm’s Data?” They do a great job at highlighting the challenges and you’ll see my thought process is very much in line with theirs! Enjoy!
Have a great week all!
