Co-operatively growing farmer data

Very productive day with the good folk from Birchip Cropping Group yesterday. It was our second workshop in the Farming Together sponsored project being undertaken by BCCM to help grain growers from the Wimmera-Mallee explore a data coop.

In a new land speed record, by the end of the workshop we had crossed everything off our wish-list in terms of things we needed to draw up a draft set of Co-operative Rules – once again proving that farmers and nurses are the most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse.

The data coop can be a big concept, and there are some key pieces of the puzzle that are still formative in their shape and readiness, so it was really encouraging that the farmers present were beginning to have concrete ideas about how it may work. There were some cracking specific examples that are likely to prove fertile ground for testing of the data coop mechanics and economics.

Perhaps more encouraging still was that we got the sense that the farmers were starting to take formal ownership of the project, thinking that they could build it from the ground up (rather than having a structure imposed on them). Notably, it was suggested that the data coop could leverage the BCG infrastructure to provide a springboard to get started.

Also, really interesting discussion about farming practices, quality assurance and compliance. Noting that the thinking to date has been that precision agriculture would lead the use cases for the data coop, we discussed the rising cost of compliance and increasing accuracy of testing and standards and whether this pushed ‘traceability’ higher up the priorities.

We were also lucky to have Leanne Wiseman and Jay Sanderson from Griffith University so we could untangle some of the trickier questions around rights to data. We sketched out some of the key structural elements that could be developed for the coop – such as members agreeing to an “Ethical Good Governance Code” that would be updated every year and would require things like disclosure of conflicts of interest, disclosure of 3^rd party data sharing arrangements and agreement to minimum standards around data being shared, accuracy and types.

Finally, the emerging view seemed to be that the data coop would be akin to social infrastructure and would be best structured as a non-distributing coop. This would better align member and community interests and also enhance the collaborative business model with customers.