Here is my presentation to the Indiana Horticultural Congress on January 21, 2015. You can follow along online by clicking below: Farm Data Privacy: What You Need to Know Please check out other articles about the agriculture and technology on this... Read More
A crisis can destroy a business’s reputation and bottom line. A crisis can come from anywhere: a surprise EPA, OSHA, or other regulatory inspection, a natural disaster, or a man-made catastrophe like the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion last... Read More
A recent comment on one of my articles addressing big data concerns in farm leases asked why I used the term "big data" instead of just "data." This got me thinking about the definition of "big data" and what the term really... Read More
By Todd J. Janzen, Partner, Plews Shadley Racher & Braun LLP The web has been abuzz the last few weeks with articles and editorials about the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) use of aerial flyovers to look for violations of the Clean... Read More
I was recently lucky enough to be interviewed by Gerry Dick for his television show Inside Indiana Business. I was joined by Beck's Hybrid's Jim Shertzer who leads FARMserver , a web-based farm data storage and analysis tool. These are exciting... Read More
What will be the hot topics in ag law for 2014? Here are some predictions for the coming year: 1. Clean Air Act Targets Farmers . Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970 to clean up the nation’s air. The low hanging fruit of air pollution—power... Read More
This past year some of America’s leaders in agricultural technology products worked together with American Farm Bureau Federation and industry trade organizations to come up with a set of core principles for data privacy. The principles identified... Read More
The last leg of our Indiana Ag Leadership class was to Liberia, West Africa. What we saw was dramatically different than the highly structured and sophisticated agricultural systems of Northern Europe. Liberian agriculture struggles in every area where... Read More
A few people have asked me for a link to the farm data core principles document released by ag technology providers and industry trade organizations. Below is the entire document, which represents a collaboration of American Farm Bureau Federation, American... Read More
I am certainly old enough to remember a variety of doomsday scenarios, usually built around decreases in agriculture productivity or population growth (or both). There have also been some modern scholarly papers that posit that things are going to get... Read More
The problem with stereotypes is that a) they are often wrong, and b) they prevent appreciating that what we thought was true is, in fact, not. For example, that economic expansion leads to building booms seems to have been as true 6,000 years ago as it... Read More
A few years ago, concerned Indiana residents raised complaints with their elected officials about the storage of manure in remote ponds, or “lagoons” that were not sited next to existing livestock farms. There was also concern that poultry... Read More
By Todd J. Janzen, Partner, Plews Shadley Racher & Braun LLP While most farmers go quietly about their spring planting this year, a storm is brewing over the Mississippi River Basin of which few are probably aware. I am referring to the legal... Read More
By Todd J. Janzen, Partner, Plews Shadley Racher & Braun LLP A class action lawsuit alleging that the herbicide Atrazine contaminated various Midwestern water supplies has been settled. As part of the settlement , Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc... Read More
By William A. Ruskin The publication of " Diet for a Small Planet " in 1971 by Francis Moore Lappé was a conscious-raising event for many Americans. The book makes the case that grain-fed meat production is wasteful and a contributor... Read More