Farmers are suspicious about sharing data, but a new company aims to assure farmers that they always have control over who buys, sells and uses their data.
Ucrop.it is an Argentinian company that wants to be the platform that companies and organizations use to provide incentives to farmers for on-farm research and assurance of environmental practices. The founders all have backgrounds in agriculture and work experience with large companies like Monsanto and Cargill.
Why it matters: Farmers often need to assure buyers and suppliers about their impact on the environment, but data ownership and economic value are debated.
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The goal is to give farmers control of their ‘crop story’, who gets to tell it and how they get paid for it.
The platform aims to “really help them be able to tell their story of what they’re doing on their fields,” says Pandora Sota, global operations lead for Ucrop.it. She was at the recent Ag In Motion farm show in Saskatchewan talking to farmers and other potential partners about the platform.
Ucrop.it is built on blockchain, a way of securing data across multiple computers that lets the data owner control the information.
“If you look at it from a farmer’s perspective, this gives them the security that their data is encrypted, and that it is not free to use. It’s really something that they have to sign off on to be able to share their data,” says Sota.
The farmer has to sign off on use of their data, using a digital signature, before any of that data can be used.
“So they will see that specific licence to be part of that program with all its details,” says Sota.
No one can see anyone else on the platform and clients can be assured the data they receive is unaltered.
The first Canadian client of Ucrop.it is UPL Agrosolutions Canada, a crop protection company.
“Their interest was in understanding how their products were performing on the fields,” says Sota, an agricultural engineer. That includes comparisons between treated and untreated fields. Companies can do their own field trials, but they are increasingly interested in actual farm data.
UPL was also looking to understand carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions, she says.
Once the program is set, Ucrop.it can tell a farmer what data it is looking for, how it will be used and what it might be worth in incentives. Those incentives can vary from cash to better deals on product programs.
There are numerous ways farmers can put their farming information into the Ucrop.it platform, including entering it directly or sending it to the platform through an integration with other software, such as John Deere Operations Centre or Climate Fieldview.
With so many requests for information sharing and assurance programs, Ucrop.it aims to be one place where that data can live. Farmers can share information from the same acreage at the same time, with an input provider, financial institution or a buyer of their products.
“I think it’s a complicated journey going through traceability. I think sustainability is quite new and it sounds like a lot. A lot of farmers don’t know really what to do with their data, or how to go towards a more sustainable road map. So I think this is a very simple, an upfront way of helping them go through this process,” says Sota.
