Midwestern politicians are drumming up support for increased oversight of foreign ownership of US agricultural farmland.  At the state and federal level, there are bills seeking to reduce or increase reporting obligations for foreign ownership of farmland. Arkansas even went so far as to order Syngenta (whose parent company is Chinese) to divest 160 acres of Arkansas farmland used for research and development.  Although these efforts may seem new, the reality is that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been requiring “foreign persons” to identify themselves when pu ..read more

Farm Journal’s recent article featured one of our long-fought cases against the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) for crop damage (Damned by Data: State Destroys Farmer’s Yield, Pays $810,000 in Damages). As explained in the article, our case depended on explaining periodic and partial flooding of farm fields over a course of years to the court. Fortunately, our client, Charlie Houin, had been collecting good data about the Houin family farm fields for years. And this helped us win our case. The Houin case involved a lake dam that had been mismanaged by the Indiana DNR. About a doz ..read more

Artificial intelligence (AI) use is on the rise in agriculture and elsewhere, thanks to generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AI is often described as a Black Box, where data is fed into the box and decisions are made, without anyone knowing exactly how the Black Box arrived at the result. Considering that the AI decisions are made in secrecy, is there room for a discussion of transparency when talking about AI? Yes. AI tools require vast amounts of training data to make informed, accurate decisions. Where that training data originated, and from whom, matters when building an AI tool ..read more

I was fortunate to be asked to testify before the US Senate Agricultural Committee recently about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on agriculture. Although AI and its simpler cousin machine learning (ML) have operated behind the scenes for years already, 2023 is the first time that AI and ML really entered the public discourse. It is clear to me that agriculture, like other industries, needs time to digest what AI means for the future. This post explores how to apply AI’s often discussed legal issues to agriculture. Bias. AI “bias” refers to the implicit biases in the values that det ..read more

A recent story has been making the rounds on ag websites about how a Canadian farmer agreed to a grain contract by texting a “thumbs-up” emoji. The farmer received a text message with an image of a grain contract offering to purchase 86 tons of flax for $17 per bushel. The contract was signed by the purchaser and asked the farmer to “please confirm flax contract.”  The farmer answered with a thumbs up emoji, which a Canadian court determined legally signified his agreement. Farm Journal asked me about this case and I responded that I thought the result would be the same in the US. He ..read more

The USDA’s Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program represents an investment of over $3.1 billion into US agriculture.  The statistics for the program huge:  USDA selected 141 proposals from corporations, non-profits, and universities were selected to study ways to increase climate-smart production practices for US farmers and livestock producers. USDA estimates that over the next 5 years more than 60 million tons of carbon dioxide will be sequestered as a result of the program. You can learn more about specific programs on the USDA’s dashboard for Climate-Smart Commodities ..read more

FBN recently unveiled “Norm,” an artificial intelligence (AI) advisor for FBN members. Norm may be the first dedicated artificial intelligence platform for farmers, but it will not be the last. AI is definitely on the rise in agriculture and elsewhere. This post explores questions about AI’s use in general and for agriculture. What is AI technology?  First, some basics. AI stands for “artificial intelligence.”  According to Dr. Anastasia Lauterbach, contributor to The Law of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Machines, AI should be thought of as “narrow” AI or “general” AI. Narro ..read more

Autonomous farming machines are coming. John Deere now sells an autonomous 8R tractor. Various companies offer large, commercial sized unmanned Ariel vehicles (UAVs) that can autonomously apply pesticides. Lely sells robotic milking machines. Some farmers may lament the loss of a person controlling these tasks, but the trend for more automation in farming is clear. Still, there are existing laws that will need to be updated to foster widespread adoption of these new technologies. Here are just a few. OSHA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) establishes worker safety stan ..read more

ChatGPT is all over the news lately. If you missed it, ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) operated by OpenAI. ChatGPT is trained on data from various sources, including books, articles, websites, and other publicly available text type data. Users can ask ChatGTP questions in a search bar about nearly anything and ChatGPT responds based upon its training data. As ChatGPT is fed more training data, it gets smarter about how its answers questions. ChatGPT promises to replace a lot of human tasks that involve creation of text, such as writing articles about specific subject matters ..read more

Most agricultural landowners are familiar with the concept of “mineral rights.”  Real property law has long recognized the right of a landowner to sever the surface rights with the subsurface right to extract minerals from the land.  In legalese, these two property interests are referred to as the “surface estate” and the “mineral estate.”  This is all well settled in the law, as mineral rights have been recognized as long as we have been extracting oil, gas and other minerals from the land.  But how are property rights to underground caverns apportioned? One response to cl ..read more