Sponsors (2)
The bill centralizes and standardizes agricultural data and analysis to improve producer decision-making, market credibility, and research access while imposing new data-reporting burdens and leaving unresolved risks around data quality, market impacts, and potential re-identification of producers.
Farmers and agricultural workers gain USDA-backed decision tools and analyses that show how conservation practices affect yields, soil health, and profitability, helping them make better on-farm management and investment choices.
Farmers, market participants, and researchers get standardized, peer-reviewed methods and public datasets to verify ecosystem service outcomes, supporting development of more credible ecosystem service markets and tradable value for conservation actions.
Producers and rural communities may see better-targeted USDA programs and more efficient use of resources because improved data and analysis can increase productivity and ecological benefits on working lands.
Farmers and agricultural workers may face additional administrative burden to collect and provide field- and farm-level machine-readable data, increasing time and cost for compliance.
Aggregating and integrating diverse datasets risks errors, methodological problems, or misuse that could produce misleading guidance for producers or produce verification errors in markets and programs.
Use of USDA analyses to influence program implementation and markets could shift payments or incentives in ways that disadvantage some producers or regions if models favor particular practices or geographies.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires USDA to develop a data strategy and to collect, standardize, analyze, and share farm and conservation practice data while protecting privacy and reporting to Congress.
Introduced May 12, 2025 by Amy Klobuchar · Last progress May 12, 2025
Directs USDA to build a department-wide data program to collect, standardize, analyze, and share information about conservation practices and other production practices on farms and ranches. It requires USDA to inventory existing data across its agencies, create standards and verifiable methods for measuring practice impacts and ecosystem services, provide tools and public datasets to producers and markets, protect privacy and proprietary information, and report results to Congress (initial report within one year and then at least every three years). Requires USDA to inventory and securely host producer and program-level data about effects of conservation and production practices on crop yields, soil health, ecosystem services, risk reduction, and farm profitability, and to offer technical assistance and data products to support better conservation outcomes, agricultural resilience, and development of ecosystem service markets.