The Over-Hype of AgTech

Banjo Paterson painted the Australian bush with picture perfect prose, romantically telling tales of the struggles and triumphs, passion and pains. As you read, you can feel the galloping horses running for miles as the verse softly falls upon a dreaming mind, a tribulation to those like my ancestors who could hear the hooves making their mark on the ground miles away. The relevance of these poems ever-present, molding the landscape with opportunistic legacy and connecting high rise dreams to the Aussie Bush.

Yet, as our society adapts to a changing landscape overruled by technology, my fear is that the beating Banjo heart may too look to be replaced. And while this may reflect an ageing view of the bush, the romanticism still lies very deep to the core.

The AgTech hype is easy to capture wandering minds. Drones spraying crops or rounding up cattle, collars acting as virtual fences to create fenceless farms or autonomous tractors capable of running the full 24 hours. In a technology driven world, agriculture has never appeared so simple, with the ability to make key decisions from a bustling city street or on vacation.

Yet as advances behind the farm gate clash with the terms of entrepreneurship and innovation, technology and incubators, the farmyard keeps operating like normal. At our farm, Dad still champions the ways of our ancestors, my Pop still living out a dairy farmers dream. It's no surprise when the average age of a farmer in Australia is approaching a retirement age for most industries.

So how does the rise of AgTech, muddled in a historic industry driven by legacy and romanticism, operate into the future?

Gartner Hype Cycle

From a theoretical perspective, the Gartner Hype Cycle offers a process in which we can understand this process. Right now, the sector thrives in the peak of inflated expectations, over promising the short term value of these technologies and what they can do. Those forging new ground have tried and tested these fads, entering a trough of disillusionment with hesitation over the usage.

While a slope of enlightenment appears looming, without strong values and principles around these technologies, I believe the sector may end up further behind. It's evident that there is a disconnect between the AgTech industries and farmers, no greater than the future vision of what happens on our farms.

Understanding AgTech

Advances in the agriculture sector have typically been made with physical or tangible products. Tractors replaced an eager heavy horse, hand shears were phased out through the introduction of mechanical hand-pieces and long are the days of post and rail yards, as steel panels now host livestock. The introduction of Estimated Breeding Values (EBV's) have arguably had one of the most profound impacts on Angus cattle, with the majority of other breeds still wondering how they got left behind.

Today, these innovations happen more to agriculture, rather than from agriculture. Recently, at the MobileTech Conference in New Zealand, it was obvious that developers seem to be flocking to the sector to propose new ideas, while farmers hesitate to the over-promised hype of young innovators and tech driven fads. Upon our shores, we have to look no further than the Farmers to Founders venture to see that there is an inherent feeling that the changes in this space should be farmer led, rather than left to the hands of city innovators.

The romanticism of farming

While there are many reasons to farm (or continue farming), I believe none is greater than the opportunity to continue the legacy of those before. Farmers are quick to pronounce their connection to a bit of land, detailing the generations conducting a type of farming or a time in a single town. This is the story I connect with, the story that takes me in and captures my mind.

It's why the tales of Sidney Kidman's birthday intrigues me, old woolen mills excite me and why a heavy horse working draws me in. It's why I still think an old Banjo poem raises the hairs on my neck, red dirt stirs emotion in my mind and youth getting involved in agriculture is enough to make me cry.

However, I feel that this unrivaled passion is not shared broader in the pursuit of innovation, that the need for a farmer's hands to touch dirt is overlooked and the complexities of the holistic nature of working with the environment is over-reduced to just statistics. While I agree that technology has, and will continue to, play a role within the sector, I believe that it should only become a tool in the toolkit. While the promise of what it could do remains over-hyped, as an enabler, technology can make a huge difference. It just needs to be adopted.

Values to adopt

It's the relentless passion for agriculture that I believe we should be harnessing, drawing upon this motivation to build technology that enables farmers to do their role, rather than take them away from their farms. We want farmers to connect more with their landscapes rather than devices, connect with people rather than apps. How do we use technology to value add to what our farmers are doing, rather than trying to subtract them from the future of the industry?

As we demonstrate what can be compared as the continuance of industrialisation in the sector, we must also ask what the impact of this feat achieves. Can it truly provide the potential to revolutionise the industry, or will our hands off method lead to a raft of other concerns.