Patio Pondering: I Do Not Consent
I woke earlier than my alarm this morning, my mind full of thoughts and ideas after a few conversations at the Fort Wayne Farm Show yesterday. I filled my coffee and made the Drop Off Run to the high school, enjoying the sunrise from the car seat, not the patio, this morning.
My thoughts about crop farming and my swine farming customers are more pointed today as profitability discussions are once again at the heart of every conversation. One ironic thought hit me while returning from the drop-off line: if you spend enough time scrolling social media, you will eventually run across First Amendment auditors or sovereign citizen types, the ones who declare “I do not consent!” when someone in authority gets too close for comfort.
It is easy to chuckle at those videos. But lately, I am starting to wonder if agriculture should not borrow a page from that playbook.
Because a whole lot of people in this industry keep taking our information, private, financial, operational, genetic, inventory, yield, and quietly building reports, datasets, and business models from it without ever once asking if the folks generating it actually agree to the terms. There is no opt-in in spirit. There is no informed consent in practice. And there is certainly no conversation.
This week’s USDA report was just the latest example. It blew up marketing plans, shifted prices, and lit every farm group chat on fire. But the most interesting part was not the report itself, it was the reaction inside our own house. Anyone who questioned the numbers was instantly gaslit as ignorant, emotional, or “too slow to market when you had the chance.” Others were told that if their local reality did not match the national model, then their reality must be wrong.
That is not debate. That is conditioning.
But let us be honest, this is not about a single WASDE release. It applies across the entire reporting ecosystem. Ask any hog producer how well the Hogs and Pigs report reflects modern contract barns, vertical integration, or genetic flows, and you will get a polite chuckle. Yet that report still moves futures and dictates income, using survey methods built for an industry that has not existed for twenty years.
Meanwhile, the private side is not much better. Ag retailers, packers, integrators, equipment companies, and software platforms collect more data on farmers than most farmers realize, field by field, animal by animal, bushel by bushel, and we rarely know how it is stored, shared, packaged, or sold.
There are checkboxes and signatures, sure. But informed consent, transparency, and a real conversation? Those rarely show up, and when producers ask, they usually get silence.
And this is where the gray area lives. Most of us assume that checking a box or signing a form means our data will be used for a specific, narrow purpose, like sharing yield maps with a seed dealer to compare hybrids. What we do not see is the part where that same data gets uploaded, aggregated, resold, or blended into county, state, or national assessments. We did not say “no,” but we never truly said “yes” to all of that either. It is in that foggy space where the blame game starts, and the industry falls back on “well, you should have known,” as if implied consent and informed consent are the same thing.
So maybe it is time we try something different. Maybe it is time agriculture learns to say, calmly and clearly:
“I do not consent.”
Not in the melodramatic YouTube sense, but in the quiet, serious, grown-up sense:
I do not consent to being an uncredited data source.
I do not consent to systems that profit from my information without transparency.
I do not consent to black-box reports that move markets but ignore the actual ground truth.
I do not consent to being ghosted when I ask basic questions about methodology, accuracy, or intent.
Farmers will share data, we always have, but the price of that data should be mutual respect, transparency, and a seat at the table. Not gaslighting. Not binary thinking. And definitely not silence.
Where in agriculture have we been giving consent without ever being asked, and how long are we willing to keep letting that slide?