From left, Bev Paul of the American Soybean Association, Deb Casurella of MyAgData and Tom Worth of the Risk Management Agency listen as Tara Smith of the Crop Insurance and Reinsurance Bureau asks a question at the CIRB annual meeting in Bonita Springs, Fla. (Jerry Hagstrom/The Hagstrom Report)

BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. — A year ago the potential for big data — the gathering of information from individual farmers and combining it with other information to come up with prescriptions for farming — was all the rage.

But a session here at the Crop Insurance and Reinsurance Bureau annual meeting to discuss the impact of big data on crop insurance seemed to signal that its acceptance and impact are far from certain. Several attendees noted that as crop prices have fallen, big data companies have had to decrease their prices as they try to convince farmers to use their services.

Deb Casurella of MyAgData, a product that allows farmers to put collected data together, said that data collection has the potential to make the knowledge-base about farm acreage, planting and production more precise.

A camera can provide more accurate data than what a farmer currently reports, she said, noting that farmers go into Farm Service Agency offices and work with county office staff to record on maps what they have planted. But those maps do not show small areas of fields that cannot be planted.

Information collected through these systems could mean that the number of acres insured will go down, but also that indemnities would be paid on fewer acres in the case of losses, she said.

Tom Worth, the chief actuary for the Risk Management Agency, which runs the crop insurance agency, maintained that RMA’s information base is already of a high quality, but he said that big data collection might reduce costs and increase efficiency.

RMA has “very good data” through grain elevator receipts, Worth said, adding he is not sure satellite data provides new information.

He added that RMA makes its payments based on what the farmer reports, not what a satellite reports.

Worth noted that RMA is forbidden from releasing information about individual farms but that there is more and more interest in aggregate data.

RMA is interested, he said, in increasing rate accuracy but needs more than the one-year snapshots that big data reports currently provide.

“Risk is about yield over time,” he noted. RMA needs a data base that is “geographically specific but also over time,” he added.

Bev Paul, a lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, said that farmers are interested in how big data can help them farm better, but are also worried about who owns the data collected about them and where it may go.

Paul noted that ASA is involved in an effort by key farm groups to determine what should be in contracts between farmers and agricultural technology providers and to educate farmers about getting involved with big data.

She described big data as an industry that is changing more quickly than many farmers are comfortable with.

In addition to the questions about who owns the data and whether farmers can remove it from one company’s system if the farmer changes providers, data companies are merging and it is unclear what happens to the farmer’s information under those circumstances, she said.

Farmers are “very, very touchy” about potential data breaches, Paul said.

Farmer education on these issues is vital, she said, but there seems to be more time to educate them because lower crop prices have slowed adoption of prescription farming.

In addition, many farmers say “what I know in my head is more valuable than what is coming out of that machine,” Paul noted.

Data collected by satellites and drones without the farmer’s knowledge is another issue.

Casurella warned that farmers are not going to be able to control data collected by satellite.