On April 14, 2026, Governor Jim Pillen signed the Agricultural Data Privacy Act, LB525, after it cleared the Nebraska Unicameral 49-0. It is the first state law to set default rules for who owns and controls the data a farm generates. Iowa took up comparable language in the 2026 session with HF 2763 and stopped one chamber short. With the 92nd General Assembly convening in January, the two measures together mark out the protections an Iowa law could carry.
The problem is familiar on any operation running modern equipment. A standard late-model combine logs yield and grain moisture every second, along with ground speed, engine load, fuel burn, and position to within inches. AI-powered weed control systems photograph plants in real time and decide, plant by plant, whether to spray them. Each decision creates a record, and most leave the property over a cellular connection before the operator reaches the end row. Collected across enough acres, this data becomes raw material worth millions to seed companies, insurers, lenders, and commodity traders alike.
The terms governing that data flow have been set entirely by contract. Producers accept them in a "clickwrap" terms of service agreement when they open an account on a farm management platform, or when a dealer activates telematics at delivery. The agreements grant the equipment manufacturer or agricultural technology provider a broad license to use, analyze, and share whatever the machines collect, almost entirely absent negotiation.
Nebraska's LB525 changes the starting point for this exchange. The agricultural producer owns and controls data originating from his farm, land, devices, and equipment. A company holding it receives a nonexclusive right to use it for delivering services, maintaining equipment, and performing authorized processing. Selling it requires separate written consent, disclosed apart from the primary terms. Beginning January 1, 2027, contracts covering agricultural data must say so, and any clause waiving the protections is void as contrary to public policy. Anyone possessing the data owes reasonable security practices, and the attorney general enforces the Act with penalties of $1,000 per violation.
The Act's strength lies not just in the ownership declaration but in the consent it requires. Farm groups and technology providers have long agreed that farmers own the information their operations generate. This has changed little in practice, because ownership can be licensed away in a single click. LB525 regulates the consent itself, separating the routine license a service provider needs from the affirmative permission required to sell.
Notably, the Act excludes aggregated and derived data from its protections. Derived data, defined to include agronomic insights, reports, and predictive models, is the more consequential of the two. The nonexclusive right a company receives covers the services it provides, and the Act counts internal algorithm training among them. Train on a producer's records as an authorized service, and the output is derived data, beyond the statute. One operation's records carry modest value. The models built from thousands carry a great deal, and the producer's share of that is zero.
Iowa took up the same question with an emphasis on the analytics and monetization at stake. House File 2763 passed the Iowa House 70-18 on April 27, 2026. Its second division, the Iowa Agricultural Data Ownership and Market Competition Act, gives producers explicit ownership of raw data and its transformed derivatives while banning clickwrap consent, with crop production data assigned by default to the landowner. Additionally, it guarantees fair market value compensation, mandates sales accountings upon request, and authorizes private suits with statutory damages of $10,000 per violation (or actual damages if greater) and attorney fees. The bill moved to Senate Ways and Means and drew a subcommittee, but failed to reach a floor vote before adjournment. Colorado and Missouri took up versions of the same structure this year, though neither has passed.
Measured against LB525, the Iowa bill is the stronger instrument. It reaches the analytical layer Nebraska excludes, puts a price on the data, and lets a producer enforce his own rights rather than wait on the attorney general. Two differences, however, perhaps leave Iowa with room to improve. The rights it creates may be waived by express, informed, written consent, likely returning farmers to essentially the same position the bill was written to correct, with one added signature. Nebraska voids any waiver outright. Iowa’s enforcement also reaches only the monetization section, leaving the ownership allocation and the clickwrap ban without a remedy.
The Iowa House has already voted, almost four to one, that a farmer owns what his machines record and is owed fair market value when it is sold. With Nebraska's law as a reference, HF 2763 reintroduced with the waiver and enforcement gaps closed would let Iowa lead the nation in farm data protections.