Logical endpoint of data collection efforts?

[helmsdale]

Im struggling with where this ends up going... my mind ends up envisioning MC=MR graphs like I plied through in university.

Im reminded of errols thread earlier this week that, "cash is king" in the upcoming reset. If cash is king, or certainly liquid assets, much as it has been for eternity, then in the current context, DATA is the modern printing press.

Those that collect, collate, and disseminate data are the modern day robber barons. In the consumer sphere, facebook, apple, amazon, and alphabet are in that exact game. They offer consumers "widgets" that are cheap/free and then mine you like a natural resource. YOU are more akin to a commodity for sale than the consumer of a resource. As their values indicate, they have made out like bandits.

As SF3 would say, "follow the money". How the hell do companies that offer much if not most of their software/hardware for free or little cost amass the stupendous amounts of wealth that they have?

Now, drag that model into the agricultural world...

1) Bayer openly floating regional pricing on all seeds stateside(through climateview)

2) seed companies looking for farmer financing, while maintaining control of any new varieties.

3) farm at hand offering new "pricing" for their app

*there's a hell of alot more examples, and surely there'll be plenty more coming*

Bayer is trying to sell this as a "risk sharing initiative", but clearly they will be using harvested data to assuage guys fears of covering a fixed cost on a poor production year, but capitalizing HUGELY on a banner year.

Seed companies want a cut of the good years as well if they look for a $/mT on sale.

The "farm at hand" one pissed me off yesterday... I signed up for their app years ago to figure out irregular field sizes via Google earth satellite data to cross check it with my Trimble250. Heres the guts of their email

Over the past 8 years, we have offered a free version of our platform to help farmers make managing their day-to-day operations easier. In order for us to continue to provide our user-friendly tools and integrations, we are launching new pricing effective December 9th, 2019.

There will be two pricing tiers to choose from:

Standard ($120 CAD/year) - log your farm information by tracking:*

Fields & Field Activities
Storage & Transactions*
Equipment & Maintenance
Contracts & Marketing*
Settings & Integrations

Premium ($500 CAD/year) - includes Farm At Hand Standard, with the addition of:

Crop Planning Direct Cost & Revenue Tracking
More Settings & Integrations
More tools coming soon...

As a Farm At Hand user, we’d like to thank you for being part of the farmily by giving you a Premium account until March 1st, 2020.

The amount of data they would be in control of there is ASTOUNDING, and they think YOU should pay for the priviledge of having them collect, collate, and likely ultimately disseminate it! They have learned well from mother Deere and mother CNH.

Im rambling here, but getting to the point...

All of these (and plenty of others) are either looking to capitalize massively on data that as Tweety said, the GOOD farmers are all to willing to hand over for nothing. Or are thinking that there is such tremendous rent to be extracted, that increased company profitability lies in essentially share cropping with growers. If they can assuage fears of unrecoverable costs on the bad years they can pilfer us based on hard data in the good years.

At what point do:
-input suppliers,
-Machinery dealers,
-Financiers
take a flexible stake, and blunting the top end potential?

Take data collection to its extreme and put it into the hands of grain buyers? If they know everyone's financial situation, their tonnage on hand, and their liabilities due dates will they be able to further tighten stocks to use and offer only what the data says is necessary to induce movement?

At what point do we lose complete and utter control of our own destiny?

We are the creators of all this data, and we should be getting paid for it rather than the other way around... but much like the personal sphere, you convince the actual resource that they're the consumer, and then turn around and offer the resource to other well healed consumers and make out like a damned bandit!

[TASFarms]

I was talking to guy on Wednesday that uses farm at hand. He was showing me stuff about cost of production and his bins. I told him is started using when it first came out then quit. Way too much data there that someone can see. He says they get you to sign a paper saying they won’t use your data.

[farmaholic]

Way too much data there that someone can see. He says they get you to sign a paper saying they won’t use your data.

Isn't that backwards?

Then how could you prove they didn't sell it or use it?

[burnt]

I was talking to guy on Wednesday that uses farm at hand. He was showing me stuff about cost of production and his bins. I told him is started using when it first came out then quit. Way too much data there that someone can see. He says they get you to sign a paper saying they won’t use your data.

Sure. Right.

[dmlfarmer]

Even more scary, one of the major farm data firms announced yesterday they are teaming up with a Canadian bank and will be sharing farm data of their customers who use that bank the opportunity to get better loans. How long instead of this being rate setting incentive, will loans cost more if farm data is not supplied? How long until this data becomes a requirement of applying for a loan enriching the data company further and costing all farmers more?

[Sheepwheat]

This stuff is so far beyond me. I haven’t heard of these company’s. I hear rumblings about Deere and cih.

For someone like me, can someone on here tell me a bit in plain English what is going on?

Who has been signing on for this crap? When did Deere start collecting data? Why would farmers even think about enabling this crap? It would old NEVER cross my mind to do so. I just don’t get it?

I just don’t get it, so I feel like I am missing something, henceforth the question...

[farmaholic]

You're probably not paying a subscription fee for some one to collect your farming data that is used by suppliers of goods and services to market their products to you.

[macdon02]

Bayer was financing independent input retailers at one point, I don't know if they still have the same agreement with GROW or who ever they morphed into. Microsoft is stepping into data now as well. Linking the data to finance like DML pointed out is the goal in my opinion, there'll also be bundling of data going on, essentially they are turning data into a commodity. This isn't gonna be a single stage operation, i believe next they use the data to determine how "green" your farm is. It's all about yield on the financing due to the low rates set by Central banks. They are either looking to garner a premium on the sale of the bond, (all our debt gets bundled up and sold by issuer) or set a higher rate against the farmer. Thinking slightly outside the box they could be attempting to blockchain our production. The industry needs more lbs of flesh, they are bleeding like us because everyone thought it was different this time and we'd never go back to the pre 08 price levels. As far as i know, most of the sat imagery comes from a couple EU satellites. Turns out there are "free" providers of your imagery. You don't need to be paying for sat imagery. Somewhere along the line it will be a requirement to provide your data for crop and hail insurance and financing. Just my 2 cents, I honestly have no idea what evil plans the phuckers are scheming. But if Microsoft is stepping in, it's big.

[BreadWinner]

We have taken the approach to not have data collection in our equipment. We have yield and mapping but leave it in the combines. Downloading it does nothing for your bottom line. The variable rate guys, seed companies, chemical companies, could show you anything from a map to show you that their gimmick works. It costs you $ for variable rate $$ for weather stations $$$ for data collection $$$$ for someone to analyze it $$$$ to market your grain $$$$..... pretty soon you have no $. Ive been around long enough to know that mother nature decides what you get and what you don't, not some pile of data.

[TASFarms]

Isn't that backwards?

Then how could you prove they didn't sell it or use it?

I think it would be next to impossible to prove. You would have to have a good in for the company that buys it to know

[fjlip]

Every NEW high tech machine could have data collection and we don't even know. Vehicles had it 20 years ago. The receivers can transmit as steering your machine. Location is precise as we know. George Orwell...1984.