The Future

“I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.”?? - Rem Koolhaas

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I have been giving a lot of thought to the future of agriculture recently, especially to how we can set ourselves up to successfully take advantage of technology that will be available in the future. One of my favorite topics is discussing the future of ag mainly because no one can actually predict the future so if I am wrong it was a fun thought exercise and if I am right I’ll be the first to admit it was dumb luck. What I want to discuss today are technologies that are already here, how we might adopt them in the future, and how soon that could be.

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In the short term (less than 5 years), AI will be the single most impactful and widely adopted technology in agriculture. This is for a few reasons. The first one we can look at is the input side of agriculture. Our seed and crop protection companies have a new ability to analyze data at a speed and in a way that was either not possible or not practical before. I see this happening the most in two key areas: seed variety breeding and biologicals. The amount of data that needs to be crunched in these two areas is immense and utilizing AI will greatly speed up the process. I also see the quicker development of crop models helping both of these areas as well. We should be able to get to a point where you purchase a corn hybrid with a management prescription that updates in real-time to include what products (fertilizer, CP, biologicals) to apply and when. To me, the more exciting side of AI is in the production agriculture space. We as farmers collect or at least have the ability to collect an incredible amount of data on our fields. The downside is that often we are at a loss of what to do with that data. Yes, it can drive some decisions like seed selection or we can design and carry out our own on-farm trials to learn from but why should it stop there? What if we entered a space where my entire farm and all of my management decisions both current and historical were being analyzed to help me make the best decisions possible in the moment? Today we as farmers do this mentally and sometimes that memory of what happened last time we had this scenario can become a bit hazy or we can let emotion drive decisions rather than logic. In agriculture we hear a lot about spatially managing our fields now let's imagine a world where we not only spatially manage our fields but we take into account trends over time, current and historical weather patterns, along with what management tools are available in our operation to make data-driven decisions both in the preseason planning and during the growing season. I also think that farmers have a great opportunity to work together in this space by partnering with like-minded neighbors to pool data to learn even more about how to better their operations.

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In the mid-term (3 – 10 years) there will be a huge push to utilize technology in the computer vision space. My biggest focus here are tools that fall under the optical spot spraying category. Although there are others with imagery and even in field sensors but having a background in primarily midwestern row crops I’m going to talk more about See and Spray type technology than any of the others. The biggest driver here will be reduced crop protection usage and there are definitely a few key issues behind this. I do believe we will see our consumers demand this more and more as time goes on, I also think potential sustainability incentives could help bolster this technology, but the key piece will be farmer profitability. If farmers can achieve the same results while buying fewer products it is a huge win for their bottom lines. Some things will slow down the widespread adoption of technology in this space though. First is the complex logistics of it. If I am going to go spray a field today, I know I have a certain number of acres at a certain rate which makes it really simple to figure out how much product to load. This will complicate not only the spraying season but could make it more challenging for farmers who want to prepay for chemicals and for retailers to manage their inventories. There is also a lot of spraying done by retailers in the Midwest and those retailers make their profit selling crop protection products and applying those products. Investing in a technology that would apply on fewer acres and less product seems counterintuitive for retailers. Finding the balance of how to charge for a service to make sure the retailer still has enough margin to operate on and the farmer realizes some of the savings will be a learning curve for sure. Finally, the cost of this technology could slow the adoption rate. As time goes technology gets both better and cheaper which I think will cause many farmers and retailers to sit and wait in this space because the cost to be on the leading edge can be prohibitively expensive at times.

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Now for the long-term (7 years plus). This is where I see autonomy adoption really begin to happen at scale. Originally as I thought about the timeline for autonomy adoption my inclination was to move it much sooner but looking back to how something like autosteer was adopted it really did take a long time to see it widespread in operations. We started with things that were less sensitive operations like tillage which makes it an interesting correlation that a lot of focus in the autonomy space has been on tillage. Then is gradually moved to harvesting, and planting and it can still be hit or miss with in-season applications like spraying. Why will we see this be a slower or more gradual adoption comparatively? Trust in the systems, cost, and honestly farmers, myself included enjoy running equipment. The adoption of autosteer was really helped by the natural pattern of farmers trading equipment and autonomy will be no different. As early adopters trade in equipment there will be many ready to upgrade to a technology that has had the bugs worked out of it and this cycle will continue until like today with guidance systems where it is more uncommon to find a used tractor without one than with one.

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While all of these predictions and timelines are certainly subject to change, one thing will remain constant. Technology will have a great impact on the future of agriculture, and those who take advantage of it will be able to set themselves up for success while the rest of the industry catches up.