How we handle your data
Contents
- Who we are
- What type of information we have
- Registering on the website/for newsletters
- Registering for a meeting or event (via Eventbrite)
- Becoming a field lab member
- Sensitive personal information
- How we get the information and why we have it
- Obtaining information
- Removing consent
- How long will we keep your personal information for
- What we do with the information we haveMain activities
- Data sharing
- How we store your information
- Your data protection rights
- How to complain
1. Who we are
Innovative Farmers is a partnership programme, with Linking Environment And Farming, Innovation for Agriculture, Organic Research Centre and Waitrose, led and managed by the Soil Association (acting as the data controller). Also known as the Duchy Future Farming Programme created in 2012, Innovative Farmers as a brand, with a subscriber network and website, was launched in 2015.
Soil Association is a registered charity and certification business made of several entities, therefore this privacy policy is in addition to the Soil Association group’s privacy policy, which can be read in full here (www.soilassociation.org/privacy-policy/).
2. What type of information we have
a. Registering on the website/for newsletters
When you join/register on our website (www.innovativefarmers.org/join) or sign up to the newsletter, we may process and store the following information:
- Your name, email address, county and postcode (required)
- Your address, telephone number, and some professional title information e.g. whether you are a farmer, student, veterinarian, or press, etc. (optional)
b. Registering for a meeting or event (via Eventbrite)
When you register for an event or field lab meeting using meeting service Eventbrite, we process and store the following information:
- Your name, email address, telephone number, and postcode (required)
- Your address, and some professional title information e.g. whether you are a farmer, student, veterinarian, or press, etc. (optional)
- Dietary and access requirements
- Option to join the newsletter
Information for the event/meeting is processed only for the purposes of the event described on registration, and all copies of data are deleted within 6 months of the event being held. Exceptions include if a person has agreed to sign up to the newsletter in which case the information provided is stored on our database as a new subscriber, excluding any personal information regarding diet and access requirements unless specific additional permission is granted by you for us to store these data for future reference.
c. Becoming a field lab member
When you become a member of a field lab group, we store and process the following information on you:
- Your name, email address, details on whether you are a trial host , telephone number (required)
- Business name, professional details e.g. farmer, researcher etc., address (optional)
- If applicable, farming system e.g. organic, non-organic, zero tillage, conservation agriculture, scale of farming business (optional)
- Information submitted by you or your coordinator on how the field lab trial is progressing (required)
- Business invoicing details if you are to be a recipient of a field lab research grant (where applicable)
d. Sensitive personal information
We do not request or store sensitive personal information such as:
religious beliefs, ethnicity, political preferences, marital status (unless a partner is also involved in the programme and it makes sense to reference this in the database), trade union identifies, any health, biometrics, or sexual orientation data.
3. How we get the information and why we have it
a. Obtaining information
Most of the personal information we process and store is provided to us directly by you (or via your coordinator or researcher if you are part of a field lab group, with your expressed permission) for one of the following reasons:
- For monitoring and evaluation of your experiences, so we can continually improve the service and understand our impact.
- For staff in the programme team to contact you (as members of field lab groups), for the purposes of discussing field lab progress or to create informative external communications about the research happening in the network
- To send regular news, updates on events and opportunities in the network to people who have opted into email communications
- We never give your personal information to anyone, including our partners, without your explicit permission.
b. Removing consent
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information is your consent. You are able to remove your consent at any time.
You can consent to Innovative Farmers using your information (i.e. for tracking field lab progress) whilst at the same time removing your consent to receive newsletters and bulk mailings. You can do this by unsubscribing to our newsletter by using the link at the bottom of each email, or by contacting us directly at info@innovativefarmers.org, telephone 0117 987 4572.
c. How long will we keep your personal information for
We will only keep your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for as explained below in ‘what we do with the information we have’.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the purposes for which we process your personal information, whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.
In many cases, we will keep your personal information for seven years.
The exception to this where we would consider you qualify as legitimate interest for us to maintain contact with you without requesting re-consent, as detailed below. Where we believe we have a legitimate interest to contact you
We would consider you legitimate interest where:
- You are continuing to regularly open (defined as more than 3 times in the last year) our monthly newsletter after the 7 years have passed. This is based on the assumption that we would be neglecting our responsibility to provide you with regular updates with a service which you are interacting with and therefore risking our public reputation should we cease to email you.
- You are part of an active or past field lab, or expressed clear recent interest in a developing field lab group.
- You are a partner to the programme or involved in any of our governance groups.
4. What we do with the information we have
a. Main activities
- Part of your membership services include a monthly newsletter about the programme which you will have had the choice to opt into when you registered with us. You can opt out of these at any time by clicking the unsubscribe button at the bottom of all mailings.
- Members of field lab groups are collaborating and therefore the coordinator may ask if you would like to share your personal contact details with other members of the group for either email, mobile or WhatsApp (and other social networking) use to communicate whilst the trial progresses. Your information will be shared only with your explicit permission.
b. Data sharing
Data may be shared by our partners in the following circumstances:
- Where projects are related and collaboration has been requested by a group, coordinator or researcher, we will contact you for permission to share your details with the related group, where appropriate.
- Innovative Farmers may share your contact details with the LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) field lab administrator where this is necessary for the purpose of group administration and support. This will only be the case for members of field labs that have been assigned support by LEAF and you will be made aware of this arrangement. The information will be used only for the purposes of administering and supporting the field lab group, and not entered into LEAF’s own contact databases or used for their independent marketing purposes. All personal data from the field lab group members will be deleted when LEAF are no longer involved in the field lab.
- The Innovative Farmers programme will share your contact details with our independent evaluation partners, for the sole purpose of external evaluation of Innovative Farmers. Contact information used in evaluation is coded and anonymised during analyses and removed from their system at a maximum 6 months after the evaluation is complete and the final report accepted.
5. How we store your information
Your information is securely stored on our password protected CRM database, held on servers in Bristol, UK.
We will only keep your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements as part of the Innovative Farmers programme.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.
In many cases, we will keep your personal information for up to six years after the programme has ceased.
6. Your data protection rights
Under data protection law, you have rights including:
- Your right of access - You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.
Your right to rectification - You have the right to ask us to rectify information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.
- Your right to erasure - You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.
Your right to restriction of processing - You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your information in certain circumstances.
- Your right to object to processing - You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal data in certain circumstances.
- Your right to data portability - You have the right to ask that we transfer the information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.
- You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.
Please contact us at info@innovativefarmers.org or telephone 0117 987 4572 if you wish to make a request.
7. How to complain
You can complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data or handled your requests for information.
The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF