Our Approach

The Yield is on a mission to transform the agriculture and food industries using technology. Today, and 50 years from now. 

We want to make the latest digital technology available to every grower, because we know it is uniquely able to help them make faster, more informed decisions.

It’s also our aim to help achieve sustainable food production, and increase global readiness for future challenges.

Here’s how we do it.

Working with Data

The most important thing to know about data is that it increases in value the more it is used.

There are dozens of ways we can put data to work – from using it to enhance decision-making on farms and creating process efficiencies across the food chain, to fine tuning the products and services available to growers.

Data can also be used to develop new scientific models, like predicting disease risks for certain crops or regions.

As a company, we are committed to working with data in a way that benefits growers. We maintain a secure cloud environment where data is curated, quality controlled and stored, so it can be re-purposed for a positive benefit. Importantly, as a customer of The Yield you own your personal and on-farm data, and the decision to share it for any commercial benefit rests with you.

As the use of data raises many questions from growers, below are some common questions and their answers.

What types of data are there?

At The Yield, we identify 5 types of data:

  • Personal: Information that identifies you, like your name and address
  • Farm: Information collected on your farm by sensors or entered by you into our system
  • Aggregated: A collection of data from many farms and sources that is anonymised
  • Transformed:  A collection of data that has been transformed via algorithms to produce a new set of data that is different from the original 
  • Public: Publicly provided data such as that made available by the Bureau of Meteorology and government agencies

Privacy laws only protect your personal information from being shared without your consent. 

Do I own my data?

Privacy law only protects your personal data. However, our customers own and retain control over their personal and farm data. We do this through our customer contracts in our terms and conditions. We give you transparency, control and incentive to share your data, but the decision to do so is yours.

We won’t give personal or farm data to a third party without your consent, however you might choose to do this because of a benefit. For example, you might want to share your farm data with your agronomist because you will get better advice. Or, a third party might offer you a commercial benefit if you share data that allows them to create better products or services. The decision is yours.

The Yield give a discount on software services if you choose to allow your data to be aggregated and anonymised, and used by us for a commercial benefit.

We also give you a commitment that we will not knowingly provide aggregated data to anyone, when we should reasonably know that this would not be good for your business.

Transformed data belongs to The Yield, as it is completely new data created from our algorithms and data science.

Who can see it?

Anyone you give access to your Sensing+ apps can see your data. For example, you might choose to give access to your Crop Manager or Agronomist. 

The Yield's engineers and data scientists can also see your data, as we are constantly studying it to see where we can improve our algorithms. 

Is it secure?

As a customer of The Yield your data is housed in our cloud hosted by Microsoft Azure, an enterprise-grade platform with high availability and best practice security protocols. We store data in the same country it is collected in.

The Yield retains full responsibility for the management of this platform, including data quality control. Using Bosch technology, we also encrypt your data from the moment it is gathered from the sensor through to when it arrives in our cloud.

Can my data be used by anyone else?

As a customer of The Yield, you own your personal and on-farm data and this information is protected under our contracts. The only exception to this is if a government or court of law compels us to provide the data we store. In the event of this occurring, you would be notified immediately. 

Can I ask The Yield to give my data to another business?

We are often asked whether we will give other companies access to information that is collected, curated and stored by us. The answer is yes, provided that you agree, and that we have a commercial arrangement in place to cover our costs. 

Data curation, analytics and management is at the core of our unique service offering. It is developed using our own IP and delivered at a significant operational cost.

How does The Yield work with researchers?

Trusted publicly-funded research organisations who have signed a confidentiality agreement with The Yield have access to data we collect. It is used to help create new knowledge that can benefit growers. Any new intelligence is built into our data platform to enhance our analytics and predictions.

Creating Scalable Technology

The world needs to produce 60 percent more food by 2050 during a time of unprecedented resource constraints and climate change. This is a pretty scary statistic given 2050 is likely to arrive within many of our lifetimes.

The Yield can play its role by influencing how technology and data science contribute to the governance of the planet. We are working to develop safe, scalable technology and data practices that can be leveraged for multiple purposes, across different locations and industries.

We won’t change the world one farm at time. But we can build technology that helps pave the way towards a more sustainable future – one where every farmer has access to affordable, useful digital technology.

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