Raby applauds the addition of precision agriculture, which includes artificial intelligence platforms, as a qualifying category under the EQIP, and urges the inclusion of restrictions on foreign software providers.
FarmMind Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Colin Raby applauded the Senate Agriculture Committee’s draft farm bill text, which includes “precision agriculture technology” as a qualifying category under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to help farmers adopt artificial intelligence tools to reduce the use of inputs such as pesticides, fertilizers, and water.
Raby highlighted the bipartisan nature of the legislation and the urgency of promoting the use of artificial intelligence for successful American farming, but also warned that the legislation, as written, may lead American farmers to adopt technology associated with foreign adversaries, posing a national security risk to American growers and agricultural consumers.
“The inclusion of precision agriculture technology language in the Farm Bill is a great step toward promoting these useful and innovative tools, but neither the House’s nor the Senate’s version included foreign adversary restrictions on EQIP to protect American farmers’ sensitive data from being collected by foreign adversary-owned platforms,” Raby said. “The provision is well-intended, but may end up inadvertently subsidizing the transfer of American farmers’ sensitive data to companies affiliated with foreign adversaries. We must not let the data of America’s growers and agricultural ecosystem flow into the servers of foreign adversaries who can and will use it against us.”
Section 2201 of the Farm Bill alters the definition of what qualifies under EQIP to include the phrase “precision agriculture technology.” Under that definition, artificial intelligence platforms that help farmers reduce waste and maintain environmental quality will qualify for the cost-sharing program that many farmers use to pay for technology or equipment that enables them to achieve environmental goals effectively.
“This language is bipartisan because it supports two objectives,” Raby said. “First, using modern technology like AI properly can help reduce the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and water, which reduces grower input costs while benefiting the environment. Second, the yield monitors, soil mapping, and variable-rate technologies, as defined in the statute, will generate the data needed to help farmers improve their bottom line by enabling them to purchase and deploy such inputs more efficiently. We need to make sure that the software powering these devices and analyzing their data stays owned and controlled by the growers who produce it and is backed by domestic providers.”
Notably, the Farm Bill already contains the tool needed to close this gap. Section 12510 of the Senate draft, titled "Promoting Precision Agriculture," defines a "trusted" provider as one the Secretary of Agriculture has determined is not owned by, controlled by, or subject to the influence of a foreign adversary. That same section already directs the Department of Agriculture to coordinate only with "trusted" private-sector stakeholders when developing interconnectivity standards for precision agriculture. The EQIP precision agriculture provision (Subtitle B, Section 2201) includes no comparable safeguard.
"Congress has already done the hard part. The bill defines what a 'trusted' provider is, and it already applies that standard to the precision agriculture interconnectivity standards in Section 12510," Raby said. "Lawmakers used the right logic in one part of the bill and left it out of another. The fix is straightforward: hold EQIP-funded precision agriculture technology to the same 'trusted' standard the bill already establishes. That single change protects growers' data without slowing adoption or adding new red tape."
Raby called on rural lawmakers to act before the Farm Bill is finalized, urging Congress to hold EQIP-funded precision agriculture technology to the bill's existing "trusted" provider standard to protect American farmers’ data sovereignty while preserving the provision’s core promise: to help American farmers reduce input costs and promote environmental health.
