If John Deere is becoming a vertically integrated tech monopoly, the next step is for them to begin buying up the farms themselves. They'll have data as to which fields have the yields, best soils, best conditions, and are the most productive.
The tractor and combines are sending real time crop data, it isn't hard for someone to look at that data and see across all farmers that yields are a bit different from what the market is predicting and make a large profit trading on that insider knowledge.
Those who work on that software and the admins of the database are registered with the SEC as not allowed to trade commodities. All that money they could make is directly out of our customers pockets and they wouldn't let us have that data if were were not protecting it.
Not that it could not happen... there are various hedge funds that do this already, with mixed success. They generally lease back to a farmer.
John Deere doesn't have any data that the farmer wouldn't have, and they certainly don't have better access to large sums of capital than hedge funds. I can seem them participating in a capital lease agreement for someone doing this sort of operation, but operating a farm is a very different proposition.
Sure they do. They have the data from all the farms that use their service. The farmer only has data from their own farm. Deere can tell who's doing better.
As an example, Zillow had all that house price data, and then blew half a billion dollars because it thought it could use that data to start buying and selling houses itself.