Intellectual property in the realm of agricultural technology is rightly considered problematic for farmers and for agriculture broadly.
Restrictions for example, that are placed on a farmer's ability to repair the tractor that they rely on daily, or to access data from their greenhouse temperature monitor, can interfere with that farmer’s livelihood. Although the pace of technological development in agriculture has been rapid, recent decades have seen more and more of the tools that have become vital to the farmer’s operations become “closed” -- with access to the underlying technology now requiring expensive service contracts, or special access codes. The useful information that many farmers now collect concerning their farming operation -- environmental data, as well as crop yields, and farm logistics -- is now “rented” to them via proprietary data platforms, which might arbitrarily change the terms of service, or go out of business, leaving the farmer with “bricked”, useful infrastructure, and often with no access to their historical data.
Proponents of "open source agriculture" propose to remedy this state of affairs by creating new opportunities for farmers to easily share technological designs and data; and "open source agriculture!" has now become a significant rallying cry.
And indeed: openly sharing and collaborating on data and designs in agriculture will be absolutely vital for our species to do well in the next 100 years. We will be forced to adapt our agricultural system to an increasingly unpredictable climate, and we must carry out this adaptation as quickly and efficiently as possible. For us to have any chance of success, this process of research, development, and deployment must become as frictionless and collaborative as possible.
However, we must be careful here: “open source technology!”, when deployed as the primary slogan for a movement, focuses far too narrowly on the symptoms, and not the root causes, of the serious challenges we face in agriculture.
A quick, trivial point to be made here: sharing all of one's data, without restriction, is eminently compatible with widespread surveillance, as well as manipulation of the populace -- a condition we arguably already face in our politics and social media today.
Less dramatic, but just as important: when the tools for actually extracting value from data, or for building and deploying new technologies, are restricted to only a few, then it is often of little benefit to the farmer -- and of great benefit to enormous, well-resourced corporations -- for farmers to share their data.
For in fact, the largest companies in the agriculture space possess data mining abilities that far outstrip those available to individuals, or even to small- or medium-sized organizations. Any value that might be derived from aggregated climate data from a large population of farmers will primarily benefit large companies with the resources to extract it; and it will be up to these companies to decide how, or whether, to remunerate individual farmers for their data. (Judging from what we’ve witnessed in the realm of Big Data, and the practices of companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon, the prospect of significant financial gain for farmers is very unlikely.)
Further: the idea that useful data might be shared, but also paid for -- that individual farmers will control a sort of selective 'valve' on their datasets, and request compensation “by the bit" -- is not only a significant technological challenge (to the point that it is perhaps infeasible), but seems fundamentally counter to the "spirit of sharing" that seems to be the indispensable fuel at the core of the entire "open source" movement: If you have produced some new tool or technique useful in agriculture, you should share it with the world, without restriction-- for we find ourselves in urgent need all of the innovation and ideas we can collectively muster.
It is in fact a mistake to think of the concept of "open source" as a novel recent invention or innovation. Through all of human history, to the present day, sharing and collaboration have been the norm, a fundamental dynamic for human societies to flourish and grow. We owe, by far, the bulk of all the technological wonders and advantages we now enjoy to an open, collaborative dynamic among people trying to solve common problems. It is only quite recently in human history that the notion of "intellectual property" was invented, or had any chance of being enforced.
When it comes to intellectual property, our guiding question shouldn't be "how can we introduce this novel notion of 'open source' into agriculture?", but rather: what are the conditions that have resulted in the enclosure of useful ideas and tools in agriculture? What are the barriers to sharing, and the incentives not to? Who benefits from the system of intellectual property, and what incentives would they have to see the system changed?
Of course, the underlying conditions that have abetted the widespread enclosure of useful ideas as “intellectual property” have much to do with politics and economics. Without understanding that political and economic landscape, and creating strategies that are relevant to it, any "open source everything!" rallying cry is doomed to fizzle out, or -- as is currently the case -- to benefit primarly only those who have already accrued the bulk of political or economic advantage.
(And here we can now properly address a common critique of "open source": "If there is no intellectual property, companies don't have the financial incentive or resources necessary to produce new technologies, and technological progress will stall." It is indeed painfully obvious that we don't currently have a viable economic system for supporting open, collaborative research and development; but the answer is not to continue a system of intellectual enclosure, but to reconsider our economic practices and our institutions.)
The freedom to share useful information is meaningless if it is not coupled with the ability to act usefully in light of that information. Instead of "open source", then, a better organizing principle might be "technological capacity" or "technological sovereignty".
Stated plainly: our aim should be to ensure that farmers possess the technological capabilities required to have good lives, and good livelihoods.
Certainly -- and in line with 'open source' ideals -- farmers should have the right to repair, modify, and improve the technologies they use.
But we can and must go further than this, and recognize that this right is meaningless unless the farmer also has the ability, and the means, to make these repairs, modifications, and improvements. This then implies access to relevant tools and knowledge -- or, to a close relationship with a supportive community that possesses those tools and knowledge.
We can be even more specific: the goal of technological sovereignty for farmers is likely, in most cases, to require stable access to:
- viable water resources and land resources;
- systems for producing and storing energy; and
- reliable, private communications
-- a list that could be made even more specific, depending on the local culture and conditions.
Our strategy should thus be to develop specific, actionable lists of the resources that are necessary in order for farmers to achieve a desired level of technological capability; rather than what has become a relatively shallow and simplistic exhortation to "share!"
And, certainly, certain political and economic structures and dynamics will be better at promoting farmers’ technological sovereignty than others …
[To be continued …]