Who Benefits as Farming Gets More Data-Driven?

As agriculture becomes more data-driven and increasingly tech-focused, one question keeps coming up across the industry, in different forms and from different directions: as more businesses ask farmers for more data, who is that data actually working for?

Maggie Jarrett, a 2025 Nuffield Scholar and Orange wine industry executive, spent this year travelling to twelve countries researching exactly that question, funded through one of Australian agriculture's most prestigious scholarships. She'll present the full findings this week at the Nuffield Australia National Conference in Darwin, and The Land carried an early look at her research ahead of that.

What she found, across the twelve countries she visited, was a pattern repeating itself: reporting systems designed from the top down, around what a business or a government needed to report, rather than around what actually worked for the farmer supplying the data. That gap, she found, was steadily eroding farmer trust in the institutions doing the asking, not just corporates but government and research bodies too. She traced a version of the same pressure landing in Australia, where banks, processors and retailers working through mandatory climate reporting requirements are increasingly asking beef, grain and wool producers for data many of them don't have the scale or dedicated staff to easily provide, and at the extreme, that pressure can threaten a farm business outright without any offsetting return. Among her recommendations is farmer-led risk mapping run through Research and Development Corporations, so what actually threatens a farm business gets identified before research and capital get directed at solving it.

It's a much bigger and more rigorous piece of research than anything we've done ourselves (obviously!), but some of it echoes what came up in our own conversations with producers and value chain partners earlier this year. Producer trust in sharing data, we found, is built through personal relationships far more than institutional messaging, and the real burden producers described wasn't the reporting platform itself so much as pulling together records that live across different people, formats and systems on the farm before a report can even begin.

None of this is unique to one relationship or one company. It's the same question showing up at every scale, from a Nuffield Scholar's year of international research down to the farm gate conversations we've had closer to home, as agriculture works out what data-driven farming should actually look like from the ground up rather than the top down. It's also the question Ruminati was built around: giving producers a single record they control, rather than something rebuilt from scratch for every partner who asks. It doesn't answer the question on its own, but it's a start.