Six years of yield maps, and the question of who they belong to.
This farm has soil sampling, yield maps, spray records, drilling dates and weighbridge tickets going back to 2019. That is a genuinely valuable dataset. It is also, in several respects, not simply ours to sell, and working out why is more interesting than the money.
What the dataset actually contains.
Yield maps from the combine, at roughly metre resolution, for every harvested field since 2019. Soil sampling on a rolling grid, with pH, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and organic matter. Every spray and fertiliser application with date, product, rate and weather at application. Drilling dates, varieties and seed rates. Weighbridge tickets with moisture and specific weight.
Aggregated across enough farms, that is the raw material for genuinely useful things: variety performance by soil type, the real economics of a drilling date, the actual yield penalty of a blackgrass population.
Sold as a single farm’s data it is worth very little. That asymmetry — worthless alone, valuable in aggregate — is the central fact of every agricultural data business and the reason farmers usually get the worse end of the deal.
Who has a claim on a field’s data.
| Party | Their claim | How strong |
|---|---|---|
| The farmer | They generated it, on their land, at their cost | Strong in principle, weak in practice without a contract |
| The machinery manufacturer | It came off their telematics, through their platform, under their terms | Frequently stronger than the farmer expects, and buried in an activation click |
| The agronomist | The interpretation and recommendations are their professional work | Real, and usually settled by the service contract |
| The landlord, on tenanted ground | It describes their asset | Contested, and increasingly written into tenancy agreements |
| The buyer of the grain | Assurance and traceability records | Limited to what the scheme requires |
| Whoever aggregates it | The aggregate is their product | Strong, and the reason aggregation is where the money is |
And the data protection problem nobody expects.
Farm data feels industrial and is often personal. A very large number of British farms are sole traders or partnerships, and where a business is not a separate legal person, information about the business can be information about an identifiable individual.
Field boundaries plus a name plus an income figure is personal data. So a marketplace trading it would be processing personal data at scale, in a way likely to be considered high risk, which under Article 35 of the UK GDPR requires a Data Protection Impact Assessment before the processing starts — not afterwards, and not as a formality.
The DPIA is the part that would kill most versions of this idea, and it should. If you cannot describe the processing, the necessity, the risks and the mitigations well enough to write one, you should not be running the marketplace.
What a data marketplace would have to hold.
Six things a real version would need before it took a single field. Every one of them is marked due, because none of them exists in this build.
A register that only ever shows green is not a register. These are all outstanding, and the page says so.
What it would actually be worth.
A realistic subscription for aggregated, anonymised regional yield and soil benchmarking sits somewhere between two and eight pounds a hectare a year to the buyer — agronomy firms, input suppliers, plant breeders, insurers.
On a thousand acres that is somewhere between eight hundred and three thousand pounds a year to this farm. Against a farming enterprise that made £144 in year one, that is not nothing. Against the cost of doing it properly — the DPIA, the consents, the platform, the anonymisation — it is nowhere near enough for one farm.
Which is the honest conclusion: a single-farm data business does not work. A farmer-owned co-operative aggregating several hundred farms might, and that is a co-operative rather than a website feature.
The rules such a thing would run under.
What would never be sold, and what would happen to a farmer who changed their mind.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
The cast page names every person and what they are actually responsible for, which is not always what the programme implies.
No. This is an unsolicited third-party demonstration build, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the businesses it describes.
