Your data is your data: YAGRO’s Gold Standard for farmer data rights

Who sees your data?
Are you in control?

With the explosion of technology on farm, data ownership has become a critical topic for UK agriculture. Our industry is maturing away from single software solutions, towards an inter-connected, intelligent network where farmers can unlock incredible value by sharing data. To safeguard this value to farmers, data ownership becomes dramatically more important – and complex.

There is a slow movement towards protecting farm data at industry level. The EU has its Code of Conduct on Agricultural Data Sharing, and the US has the Ag Data Transparent association. Both are voluntary. Both are consensus driven. They therefore reflect the ambition for ‘good enough’, rather than gold standard.

At YAGRO we are obsessed with leading data innovation in UK agriculture. “Good enough” is simply not good enough for YAGRO’s technology solutions – so why would it be good enough on data rights? We want to lead the industry on data rights just as we do on technology – to maintain our role as UK farming’s trusted innovators in data.

Over the past 12 months we have reviewed our legal approach to data, with the aspiration of meeting these voluntary standards – and stretching them – to a new ‘Gold Standard’ for UK data providers. So you know that nowhere is more safe and secure for your data than YAGRO.

Today we are updating our Terms & Conditions and our Privacy Policy to reinforce our commitment to our customers and partners. The section "YAGRO data rights explained" highlights our commitments and how they are expressed in the updated legal documents.

We hope these are fair, transparent, and set the standard we expect of ourselves. In particular, the rigid requirement for explicit permission for any data to be shared outside of YAGRO and YAGRO only – including at aggregate level – shows how serious we are here.

Nevertheless we are on a journey. This update puts the legal foundation for our future interaction with farmers. We aspire to take this further, starting with giving farmers live visibility and control of all data permissions associated to their account, in-built in our system. That’s quite an undertaking, but is absolutely what farmers should be demanding of all software providers, and where the whole industry should be racing.

If you have any questions or suggestions on our updated terms, we’d love to hear from you, please get in touch with any member of the team or email data@yagro.com.