6 Tech Tools and Trends To Watch In 2024

Farm Journal's Smart Farming Week is here! Stay with us all week (March 11-15) for exclusive content that we hope will encourage you to explore and prioritize the technology, tools and practices to help you farm smarter.

Farm Journal’s Smart Farming Week is an annual week-long emphasis on innovation in agriculture. The goal is to encourage you to explore and prioritize the technology, tools and practices that will help you farm smarter. Innovation today ensures an efficient, productive and sustainable tomorrow.

Even with commodity prices flagging below levels most would prefer, farmers remain open-minded to new machines and technology going into another production season.

Here are a half dozen examples of trends coming to your farm gate.

Let’s Get Predictive

Pattern Ag is promoting the release of its 2024 “Predictive Ag Report.” The free report looks at a variety of predictive agronomic metrics and data points in corn and soybeans, perhaps the most notable being its pest and pathogen predictive maps for the upcoming growing season.

The dataset Pattern uses to draw these insights is reportedly the world’s largest soils database. Satellite imagery and weather data are also part of the equation.

Pattern predicts high corn rootworm pressure in the western Midwest (Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota), high fusarium and pythium pressure in the eastern Corn Belt (north-central Indiana and Ohio) and a high risk for tar spot across a wide swath of the Midwest from western Missouri and northeast Kansas all the way to central Ohio.

The report even offers predictions for soil biofertility properties such as mycorrhizal fungi distribution – which currently appears strong across northern Indiana into eastern Illinois.

“[Farmers] can use this information to get their yields higher,” says Mike Tweedy, vice president of sales for Pattern Ag. “We're looking to maximize the genetic potential of the seed they're putting into that biological environment and inform them on what's happening in that biology to enable better decisions. This is the ultimate due diligence for a grower going into the next season.”

The report also features a couple interesting customer case studies that show how real farmers use Pattern’s analysis to save on seed and insecticide and boost yields by selecting the right biofertility products.

You can download the 2024 Predictive Ag Report at Pattern.Ag for free.

Manage Those Grains

AGCO subsidiary GSI has a couple relevant grain bin monitoring and automation solutions it is talking to farmers about for 2024.

Greg Trame, sales director for the northwest Corn Belt, says soybean growers have approached him about using GSI’s GrainVue system to capture additional revenue this harvest season. Trame says the bin monitoring systems are especially useful right now when temperatures and humidity levels are rising after a long, dry winter.

“We can actually rehydrate soybeans, and that water we can put back in is the most valuable pound of water growers can sell, and it's the easiest crop to rehydrate,” he says.

Adding one or two additional points of moisture into a 30,000-bu. bin can pay for an entire system in one shot, Trame adds.

GSI Connect is the companies’ new web-based dryer monitoring and automation system. The system uses a cellular card installed in the dryer controller to give a grower full control (other than starting) of the grain dryer from any mobile device or internet connected computer. GSI service techs are also able to log in on the backend and monitor for potential breakdowns.

“We know dryers may break during harvest, but it's about how quickly we can get it back up and running,” Trame says. “You can have the biggest combine you want, but if it can't go through the dryer, it's sitting. Let’s use that data to keep that dryer running at its most efficient levels, all the time.”

Trame also shares that grower interest in grain bin monitoring and automation systems is perhaps at the highest level he’s witnessed.

Retrofits & Connectivity

Case IH made some sizable waves in farmer circles with the release of its massive high-capacity AF11 combine in February.

The manufacturer also recently detailed a new model year 2025 Magnum tractor (265 hp to 405 hp). That’s on top of focusing on precision ag equipment retrofit kits for farmers interested in getting every operating hour out of what they already own.

“One of the quickest opportunities to increase efficiency is adding guidance to a machine that doesn't have it, or even adding section control,” says Kendal Quandahl, precision field team manager for Case IH. “You pair that with a Pro 1200 display, for example, and now you can execute a prescription or section control to make sure you're turning off your implement and planter when you cross into areas you've already planted.”

Through Case IH’s AFS Connect ecosystem, Quandahl says growers can now “connect nearly any piece of equipment they have on their operation.”

“What's super exciting is we can partner our Soil Command seedbed sensing technology with AFS Connect, and we can start to write tillage prescriptions,” she adds. “So not only are we recording what each individual segment of that [tillage] implement is doing, we're also able to control it in advance.”

The benefits are two-fold: greater visibility into tillage practices for soil health and carbon credit programs and getting more accurate and intentional with tillage practices in general.

“Maybe we have a highly erodible area and now we've got a new operator in the seat who doesn't know our ground as well as we do – let’s use AFS Connect and let’s write a prescription for that,” Quandahl says.

Beyond Just Spraying & Planting

Seth Crawford, senior vice president and general manager, precision ag and digital, AGCO, met with Farm Journal to discuss the tech stack the Duluth, Georgia, manufacturer has been steadily building.

“What it does is allow us to really spread across that full crop cycle now,” Crawford shares.

AGCO is a name long synonymous with application technology. Acquisitions of Precision Planting (June 2022) and a majority stake (85%) in Trimble’s Precision Ag division (closing soon, according to Crawford) as well as other key buyups have extended the companies’ reach considerably.

“We've really honed our efforts to be the most farmer focused, farmer first company in the industry,” he adds.

Efforts today are presently being improved within AGCO’s precision ag division. Crawford is proud of progress on both its selective spraying product – Symphony Spraying – along with its Radicle Agronomics localized, end-to-end soil sampling logistics suite.

“Just as you're able to update your existing planter [with CornerStone] with the latest technology, you're also now able to update your existing sprayer with the latest and greatest technology,” he says.

“With Radicle, this year we're going to have between 10 to 15 labs running, and, in total, our target is 65,000 samples by the end of the year through those labs,” Crawford continues. “We'll be able to look at your soil profile and your nutrient levels in the offseason to prepare for the season.”

Lastly, Crawford remains bullish on AGCO’s go-to-market strategy, which he says is built to embrace a market that seems to be trending to more aftermarket add-on options than ever before.

"The other thing we do that we believe strongly in is we have a dedicated channel – we have a Precision Planting channel where about 90% of those dealers are not equipment dealers,” he says. “They're the independent agronomist, or maybe a precision ag dealer or maybe a seed and chemical dealer, but they're taking this portfolio to farmers in a different way than the traditional equipment business.”

Land Lease Management Play

OAKEN is a new digital “relationship management solution” for farms that launched out of Purdue Universities’ DIAL Ventures tech accelerator.

It is targeted to farmers who have lease agreements with 10 or more landowners, to help them digitize and manage all aspects of the landowner-land leasee relationship. Today the platform is desktop-based, but plans for a dedicated mobile app are also in the works, according to founder and CEO Sashi Raghunandan.

“Typically, a sizeable farm in the Midwest could be leasing from anywhere between 5 to 100-plus landowners today to farm their land, and the way they manage that is in manual folders and things like Excel spreadsheets, emails and even just in somebody’s head,” he explains. “It makes things inefficient for the farming operation, they’re spending time and effort to track all of this and eventually it can lead to poor relationships.”

Raghunandan says the value in the OAKEN platform is to help those farmers build more clarity into that relationship, as well as helping with succession planning and keeping all communication in one place, easily accessible to all parties.

“We have not had a single person say, ‘I don't know what you're talking about’,” Raghunandan says. “Anybody who has leased land, they look at this and say, ‘Yep, we manage it on our phone or in manual files, and it’s a real problem’.”

The OAKEN concept must carry value: It beat out 120 prospective startup pitches at DIAL Ventures to secure funding to take it commercial, according to Raghunandan.

“We're excited to get to work with growers who are seeing the value [in the platform], and are willing to move their data over,” he adds.

Accelerated Farm Trials

Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) are ubiquitous throughout farming today, but a fully focused, farm trial-centric approach is what sets INTENT.ag apart, according to Kyle Kaufmann, sales lead.

“It's software that we can use to collect and analyze all the data that comes along with doing farm trials, so it allows us to bring in data, clean and standardize that data so we get a representative understanding of the trial and what took place,” Kaufmann explains.

Like the OAKEN concept, INTENT is taking a mostly static, Excel spreadsheet managed process and bringing it into the information age with a dedicated, customizable digital platform with full data visualization across a farm or ag business. There is also a service agronomy aspect, according to Kaufmann.

“We can manage trials for some of these ag business companies that may not have boots on the ground to take soil samples and tissue tests, that sort of thing,” he says. “Then we develop models to really help them kind of geospatially understand where does our product perform best?”

New ag products face a significant in-field evaluation climb that can last up to seven years before enough data is collected for full commercialization. INTENT intends to leverage its network of farmers to speed that process up for users.

“We accelerate [it] by putting trials out on a number of farms throughout the U.S. to get a better data set that gives them better insights into whether that new product fits the farmer workflow – because it has to in order for farmers to adopt it,” Kaufmann says. “It can save them millions of dollars in determining whether to continue to go forward with a product launch or not.”