Farmers irate after company—maybe using private data—tries to rent the land they farm and sublet it by online auction - Entrepreneur Generations

Many Midwestern farmers are furious after a new company tried to rent their farmland out from under them and sublet it through online auctions, possibly using privileged data to target the best farmland, Dan Charles reports for NPR.

Not all farmers own the land they till: about half of farmland in the Midwest is owned by landlords, and 81 percent of those landlords aren't farmers or even local. Many are investors, some foreign.

But farmer-landowner contracts can go for decades and can feel personal. So many farmers were upset when they heard that Chicago-based company Tillable recently sent thousands of letters to landowners, offering cash up front to rent land that was already being farmed. The venture capital-backed company wanted to rent the land and then sublet it to the highest bidder online, Charles reports. CEO Corbett Kull told Charles he thinks Tillable can be a farmland answer to AirBnB.

But Parker Smith, who grows corn and soybeans outside Champaign, Ill., sees it a different way. "They're reaching out to our landlords, that we have relationships with, to sort of go behind the farmer's back," he told Charles.

The farmers already renting the land are upset for other reasons. Many say they use equipment that collects data about their operations and they pay a company called the Climate Corporation to manage and interpret that data. But last fall, Tillable and the Climate Corporation announced a partnership, which made some farmers suspicious that Tillable had used Climate Corporation data to target the most productive farmland for cash offers, Charles reports.

A few weeks ago, farmers started sharing suspicions about the partnership on Twitter. Kull denies that Tillable used Climate data, but the hubbub prompted the companies to cancel their partnership. "Kull says this is not a major blow to Tillable's plans to expand. But the controversy could have one lasting effect. Parker Smith says that he never worried about his farm data before, and who might be able to to see it. Now, he and a lot of other farmers probably will," Charles reports.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2Iet0R2 Farmers irate after company—maybe using private data—tries to rent the land they farm and sublet it by online auction - Entrepreneur Generations

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