The emerging literature about ethical, legal and social aspects of digital (or ‘smart’) farming usually starts by describing the promises it brings for the future. It highlights how robots, drones and digital technologies help farmers to make well-informed decisions that improve the quality and quantity of their production, with less labour and less impact on the environment. These technologies are in widespread use in irrigation, monitoring the health or location of cattle or driving a herd in a direction, sowing of crops or milking of cows or sensors and weather satellites that offer information that is helpful to tailor irrigation, fertilizer or pesticides to plant’s needs or to define the right moment for seeding. The digital revolution in farming bears with it the promise to contribute to resolving the looming challenges posed by world food insecurity. As more food, which is safe and nutritious, is produced in a more environmentally friendly way, it is expected to help feed the growing world population in an era where climate change is foreseen and resources become scarce. 
This promising frontier in farm technology can, however, only become a reality when farmers are willing to share their data with other stakeholders, such as the agribusinesses that are developing the digital farming technologies. Yet surveys carried out in Australia and interviews in Europe and North America point out that farmers are not always eager to do that. Farmers often distrust the agribusinesses as they could reuse their data to build other businesses and services, while the farmer is excluded and thus is not able to share in the benefits. Alternatively, these agribusinesses may do other things with their farm data, such as using it to influence or inform decisions on the stock market, profiling the farmers and selling those profiles to third parties, such as input suppliers, who are interested in farmers’ preferences, or they can sell data to other stakeholders such as researchers, governments, NGO’s, banks, insurance companies etc.
Ethicists and legal specialists in Australia, as well as New Zealand, North America and Europe have only recently begun thinking about the issues that cause distrust. Sometimes issues are understood as a privacy-protection problem, as farms are private businesses and therefore farmers should be in control over data that contain information about their farms. Sometimes, they are explained in terms of data ownership as farmers ask who is the owner of the data and therefore who has the right to monetize and profit from the data’s value, and sometimes the farmers’ unease about data sharing is conceptualized as a response towards shifting power relationships that the digital technologies (and the companies that make them) affect in the social network surrounding farms, raising questions about fair and equitable distribution of benefits and responsibilities within that network.
In the absence of clear and carefully elaborated perspectives of the appropriate ways to deal with ethical legal and social implications of digital agricultural technologies on farming enterprises and relationships, stakeholders (farmers, their stakeholder organisations and agribusinesses who make or deliver digital farming technologies) began to shape their own guidelines to improve ag data management practices and provide a basis for trust. In different parts of the world, agricultural privacy and security principles and data codes of conduct have been developed. In 2014, in the US, the American Farm Bureau’s Privacy and Security Principles for Farm Data were the first to draw attention to some of the concerns farmers had about the way their data was being managed and shared. Following this initiative was the development of the 2014 New Zealand’s Farm Data Code of Practice and more recently in 2019, we saw the development and launch of the EU Code of Conduct on agricultural data sharing by contractual agreement (hereafter referred to as the EU Code), and in 2020 the Australian Farm Data Code was launched (National Farmers Federation).
The main purpose of these ag data sharing principles and codes of practice is to establish trust between farmers and agribusinesses, by means of a contract agreement. Although entirely voluntary, the principles and codes encourage agribusinesses to give information about what they do with farmer’s data to the farmer, in order to reassure farmers and help them make an informed choice about sharing their data (or not) with the agribusinesses that develop and deliver tech-services. We believe, however, that there is need to examine these principles and codes more closely. While it is worth noting the efforts that were undertaken to initiate and shape a responsible data sharing practice, the focus on a contract appears limited. Contract agreements between human actors can only play a limited role in fostering trust relationships that remain largely virtual. This is what we want to argue in this article. We will focus on the EU agricultural data code of conduct by first providing an overview of its development and key features, followed by critical reflections and observations about the function and role of contracts in fostering trust. In so doing we draw upon the literature on (e-) trust, more specifically on the distinction that has been made between contractarian– individualist approaches to trust and phenomenological-social approaches to trust. We will argue that both approaches have a role to play, but that they need to be combined. To do that we will draw on the work of the bioethicist Onora O’Neill about the relation between informed consent and trust, to highlight particularly important functions contracts can have in mitigating unequal power-relationships, such as between experts (such as those who possess digital knowledge and skills, such as the agribusinesses) and people who are not digital experts (such as farmers). Starting from O’Neill, we will argue that contracts cannot function as a foundation for a trust relation, such as the contractarian–individualist perspective supposes, but only as maintainers of trust in social contexts in which trust relations are already there and are supported by norms, obligations, rights and principles that organize social interactions. Given the role of contracts as trust maintainers, it becomes possible to draw attention to some of the shortcomings of the present EU Code in providing guidance for stakeholders who aim to enhance trust in data sharing by means of a contract.
This blog article is an excerpt of a scientific paper written by Simone van der Burg, Leanne Wiseman and Jovana Krkeljas. You can find the full article here.
