Technology versus Adoption: Is Agriculture embracing new Technologies or is it all smoke and mirrors?

Sitting in my parents house on a random Friday morning, I noticed something odd. My fathers behavior! He is acting in a manner I have never seen before. He sits motionless glaring at a screen with intent. From time to time he lifts his head and utters a price which is quickly accompanied by weight in kilos. Bemused at the sight I interject and ask “What are you looking at”? He looks up and smiles, turns his ipad around for me to see. Now in his eighties, he is watching cattle parade around a sales ring in the local livestock mart. My father in his later years, as a farmer, has adopted a new technology. Mostly out of necessity.

For many generations technology has been ahead of adoption. What does this mean? Simply put, what technology can do for us is much more advanced than what we need right now. There have been numerous examples of this in the past. The internet is the classic modern day example. In the 90s when it started to gain traction, it was a superior technology developed by some very clever people. But it remained a play-toy of the tech people only for several years. If you are a 70s or even 80s child can you remember the internet being used much before 1995? I doubt it. With the internet, technology was born, but for the first few decades it was a solution looking for a problem. It was a perfect example of technology being ahead of adoption. Today how things have changed with the internet. Its tentacles are like mycelia touching every part of society. Adoption has caught up to technology and there are very few people in the world that don’t use some form of the internet on a daily basis. An even more modern example is block-chain. Block-chain is the underlying technology behind crypto currencies. It's a distributed ledger that is impossible to manipulate. It's an ideal way of ensuring transactions between multiple partners are kept honest. But as of yet, it is still a solution looking for a problem and hence another case of technology being ahead of adoption (to be debated again).?

What about agriculture?

The agriculture sector is no different when it comes to technology and its adoption. There are plenty of examples of great technologies being invented globally at present. Block chain (as mentioned before), remote sensing, IoT (internet of things) sensors, AI (artificial intelligence before you get that confused!) are just a few new ground breaking technologies that are flirting with agriculture right now. But when you look deeply into their impact are we seeing uptake? Perhaps not as much as you might think. When we mention adoption we mean at scale. Not just the elite few large scale farms or wealthy sectors of the industry. We are talking about meaningful scale across the mainstream in agriculture. Most innovations can find an early adopter. An enthusiast who will take on a technology and try it out. They are intrigued by new things, they are curious and they are few. Innovations rarely have true impact until they break down barriers and enter mainstream markets (early majority and later majority in the figure below).

Choose a technology that emerged in Agriculture in the last 100 years? The Tractor. Ok let's have a look at how successful the tractor has been as an adopted technology. Tractors first emerged as a more nimble and mobile version of the steam engine in the 1880s. The big problem being solved by tractors is undoubtedly the labour-intensity of farming.. Moving from horsepower to mechanisation was of course, a revolution. But was it instant adoption of the technology? Of course not. It was gradual and remains gradual to this day. In developed nations you would assume that tractors are fully mainstream now. With 22 tractors for every 1000 hectares in OECD countries your assumption would be right. But if you take some parts of Africa (Malawi for example) this figure can be as little as 1 tractor per 1000 hectares. So the adoption of tractors was not instant. And if you take a global view it becomes obvious that adoption is continuing and even only getting started in some countries.?

Necessity is the mother of invention

The dominant driver for adoption of new technologies is “viability”. In simple terms, are the savings I get (normally time or money) from the new technology paid back in a short period of time or even if the savings are quickly realised can I afford the technology? A second driver is “necessity”. Policy might have changed and now I have no other choice than to adopt a new way of doing things. What if labour is running out. No more people want to work the land or have left the land for bigger and better things. Do I need a tractor now or else I go out of business. The drivers will vary, probably depending on multiple factors but it is almost guaranteed that the real decisions are made around the dual drivers: Viability and Necessity.?

There has been a lot of talk about new technologies for Agriculture in its battle against the global issue of climate change. Farming along with every other sector needs to decarbonise. Achieving a Net Zero future in farming and doing it quickly is a very common strategy if you trawl government and corporate ESG claims. Technology is touted as the answer to doing this.? This claim however lacks one critical point: “Adoption”. We can create the most powerful and advanced solutions ever known, but without adoption at a farm level it's meaningless. No AI, Block-chain, IoT or robots will have an impact on our climate targets if during their development they forget two key things: Viability and Necessity. You might argue that necessity is a given if a particular technology will help us fight climate change. But if it fails to be necessary for farmers and their lives, it is guaranteed to be another case study in technology versus adoption.?

Reverse the thinking

Recently I attended a national workshop for the agriculture sector in one of the countries FARMEYE operates in. A wide mix of technologies were highlighted as a menu of solutions for agriculture to tackle. But a dominant message came from the technologists: Farmers aren’t taking up our technology and they must (bemusement and frustration usually accompanying this statement). I struggle to agree with this sentiment. As innovators, companies need to reverse the thought process here and ask themselves: How can I make my technology viable and necessary before all else? So instead of blaming our clients/customers/audience for not “getting our technology” or “not being interested in change”, instead blame ourselves for not understanding what's needed in the industry right now. The world is full of solutions looking for problems and we don’t need anymore of them. It's time to look at technology square in the face and ask a few honest questions. Are we developing technologies just because we can. Perhaps! Maybe it's time to look at things differently? Let's look at the problem first. Understand it from the farmers perspective and create a solution that is viable and necessary. Thinking about technology this way strips away functions and features and gets us out of our own development budgets and gets us to think of the value first.?

The year 2020 will be forever etched in history. The COVID pandemic gripped the world with a callused hand and shook it like a snow globe. The vibrations disturbed normality on a global scale not seen since the mid twentieth century. The consequences of the pandemic stretched to every corner of the world and every part of humanity. But this disturbance also brought opportunity through necessity. Society had to adapt or die. And so it adapted. Necessity drove adoption of technology at a pace rarely seen before. Online meeting platforms became and still remain a normal part of daily life. Before 2020 the technology to live stream livestock sales existed and was even well advanced you might argue. So why was it that before 2020 it wasn’t being adopted? Well it wasn’t necessary. Once you take away the ability to attend the local livestock sale, a need arises. That need is why I now look at my father watching livestock sales online and will continue to do so well into the future.?

Disruption isn’t always a welcome thing, but within a disturbance opportunities lie dormant. Once awakened and fed and nurtured with the staple foods of technology adoption (viability and necessity) magical things can happen.