The political economy of agricultural data governance: Farmer perspectives on trust in data sharing

Digital agriculture is generating massive amounts of data; however, there are fragmented and inconsistent approaches to how these data are managed, stored, stewarded, and shared in the agri-food sector. Improved agricultural data governance will need to account for farmer perspectives on data sharing, privacy, and trust. In this paper, we explore the emerging political economy of agricultural data governance through farmer perceptions on trust in sharing data. We surveyed 1000 farmers across ten Canadian provinces to assess their comfort levels with sharing different types of data, at various levels of granularity, with diverse agri-food actors, and across diverse data sharing scenarios. Our findings highlight that neither agricultural data itself nor potential data users can be treated as homogenous, resulting in a high level of complexity around data sharing and data governance. We compare these results to other studies on agricultural data sharing and describe recommendations for improving agricultural data governance. This research can be used to inform future agricultural data governance mechanisms in diverse regional and global contexts to support equitable and sustainable technological developments in agriculture. • We explore the political economy of data sharing through farmer perspectives. • Farmers feel differently about sharing different types and levels of data. • Data governance should account for the complexity of agricultural data. • Attention to trust in data sharing can inform agricultural data governance. • We make recommendations for farmers, governments, and tech service providers.