As part of its Smart Farming Week Takeover back in March, Farm Journal surveyed the most technology forward farmers in its subscriber community, gathering responses from a large sample of row crop farmers and livestock producers.
The ag media company – recently named one of Fast Company’s 2024 Most Innovative Companies – hosted a webinar to talk through some findings from the data, as well as recent trends and forward-looking statements in the ag tech segment.
Here are five insights that stood out:
Insight #1: Farmers Target These Four Technologies
When we took a step back and considered the bigger picture, it became clear that farmers are incredibly discerning when adopting technology. It must fit the workflow that is already in place, and it must help them farm more efficiently and save on expenses.
Farmers said these are the four cost saving technologies they are most interested in going forward:
- Selective spraying technology, whether that’s via drones or other methods.
- Fully autonomous machinery.
- Grain bin monitoring systems.
- Field level accounting software.
“You see these emerging technologies that our audience intends to increase adoption of focused on things like all around cost savings, and that spans inputs to labor,” says Ben Gist, VP of Intelligence Products, Farm Journal. “And that looks like things that are geared specifically towards optimizing or decreasing input use.”
Insight #2: Age Is Merely A Number
The data clearly showed that age alone is not an accurate predictive metric for successful ag tech adoption.
Rather, farm size (in this case, the sweet spot being 2,000 - 5,000 acres) was closely correlated to operators who self-identify as early adopters of ag tech solutions. And then we observed another common trend line linking farmers with high annual operating income levels to being more likely to self-identify as early tech adopters.
Farm Journal columnist and former Trimble executive Darryl Matthews agreed that, in his experience, age alone is not a reliable predictor of ag tech adoption success. It is the larger, well-capitalized farms that innately understand economies of scale and where the right technology can give one an upper hand.
“And one of the things I also saw is they usually have a close partnership with someone who is advising them as a technology expert,” Matthews says. “That could be a family member, that could be a local agronomist or that could be a tech advisor that’s local… it’s critical to have that relationship.”
Insight #3: Retrofit Is a Sound Strategy
On the heels of the recent Trimble PTx announcement and considering Deere’s Precision Upgrades 2024 kit release at National Farm Machinery Show, there has been a clear commitment from ag tech providers to offer precision ag technology as both factory installed options (as they always have) and as retrofit kits that can be added to older, compatible machines.
Now, as many of you know, that retrofit side of the equation hasn’t always been the case in the precision ag world, but it is making ag tech more accessible.
“Why that resonates is 50% of farmers are operating a mixed fleet,” Matthews says. “And a mixed fleet is not just different colored equipment – it’s also different aged equipment. And so those pieces of equipment – different model years or colors, whatever it may be – are still being utilized on the farm, and farmers want them all interconnected. And the ability to put some technology onto an older machine and upgrade it, that’s what they want.”
Insight #4: Technology and Sustainability Track Together
Farm Journal’s Trust in Food division has done quite a bit of work in measuring farmer sentiment on sustainable practices. In fact, the initiative was highlighted by Fast Company as one of the reasons it honored Farm Journal as one of ag’s Most Innovative Companies for 2024.
One insight President Amy Skoczlas Cole and her team uncovered there, according to Gist, is that the adoption of sustainable practices (No-till, soil health practices, etc.) closely mirrors that of ag technology. The ROI payoff has to be implicit and rapid, but there also has to be some form of support in place to help navigate integration early on.
“What farmers have told us is, whatever the product is, whether it’s buying a new piece of technology or changing a farming practice, it has to easily fit in and not overtly disrupt my operation,” he says.
Farm Journal columnist and technology consultant Steve Cubbage has a bit of a different spin on it, approaching the sustainability angle more from a data/agronomy viewpoint. The sustainability data piece is, for him, more of “a track record of what you did in that field.”
“What we’re finding out is that there’s a lot of missing or gaps with that technology,” he adds. “A good example is that we try to get data like, how much nitrogen did you put on? Well, a lot of nitrogen is anhydrous put on by, you know, 40-year-old Raven 440 consoles. We don’t have a digital record (with) that. I think those are the type of things you must think about, is that if you’re going to be in that sustainability space, what technology do you need at the farm level to address and be ready for it?”
Insight #5: Something Big Could be On the Horizon
Industry observers have opined that ag tech as it stands today is mired in a bit of a flat period. That could change soon, say in the next 3-5 years, according to Cubbage.
“I think that in three to five years, we’re definitely going to see (an) increase in adoption,” he says. “The AI, the ag robotics piece, those continue to ramp up with farmers. There’s always a tipping point that happens – sometimes it happens a lot faster than we predict, but we’re just seeing some of these technologies come to a head.”
Matthews thinks selective spraying technologies are poised on the precipice of becoming the next big ag tech breakthrough. As Upstream Ag’s Shane Thomas recently sketched out, that’s a technology that is available today from a wide array of providers.
“We’re just now in the first innings of that,” he says. “As we gain more imagery and more understanding of the technology, it’s going to improve substantially.”
Matthews has heard from some of his farmer sources in the field that the challenge with the current iterations of selective spray systems, regardless of which brand it is, is “around speed, and, you know, you have to slow down substantially to identify those weeds within a green crop.”
“That will change, and it will be no different than, you know, the way computers have changed, and their speed has substantially increased,” he adds.
Watch the full webinar on YouTube:
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