AG TECH MAKES SENSE, IF IT KEEPS ITS PROMISES
We’re not there yet with cost outweighing returns in some cases, Toban Dyck writes.
Technology will make farms better. It will make them smarter. And technology will help farmers feed a world population expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050. These are the promises tech companies are making.
As farmers, we want to believe that agricultural technologies have, for the first time in human history, successfully aligned our desire to possess the incredible things humans are capable of making with the need to make our farming operations more efficient and profitable.
We’re not there yet, though. The scale is lopsided, tipped in favour of desire over need. Many of these gadgets can do things that a previous generation would have regarded as magic or sorcery. For some, that sentiment alone is enough to warrant the suspension of disbelief over the actual benefits of these technologies.
But, advancements in agricultural technologies will not break down the political barriers that keep our production surpluses from entering the markets where much of the population growth is expected to take place. And ag tech comes at a cost, which in some cases outweighs its returns.
Ag technology is expensive, fiscally and otherwise. In many cases, it’s something farmers don’t fully own. And that’s a foreign and off-putting concept to a sector that is used to being independent and owning the things it buys.
Farm machinery companies are putting out products that in some cases the farmer doesn’t have the right to repair or fully own. And some of these implements cost north of $500,000. The electronics packages in some of these machines are so advanced that the companies making them are fighting to get the legal backing to consider the series of wires and screens in my harvester as their intellectual property.
Some eager tech adopters are letting these unsolved problems go on the hope that their operations will be better for it. Others, however, are not going down without a fight.
There is a groundswell of farmers across North America involved in a right-to-repair movement, lobbying lawmakers to make sure it remains a farmers right to work on his or own machinery.
Every farmer I know of has an impressive workshop, full of tools they know how to use.
Fixing software, however, whether farmers are allowed to or not, is not so easy.
Tablet-run farm management software promises to integrate data, share it — say, with a farm’s agronomist — through cloud-like platforms and give the farmer the information needed to make smart, sustainable decisions. But, getting setup with such a system is expensive and most of these programs require annual subscriptions and have other in-app spending opportunities.
Farmers also pay a royalty on most of the seed they buy. It’s a tech fee, really. It’s a levy that pays for the chemistries and biological technologies contained in the seeds and it’s a fee that ensures seed companies are able to keep producing varieties aimed at increasing food production. Seed is expensive. Chemical is expensive.
The tech boom has legs on the assumption that it’s better to know than not to know.
The ability to analyze my growing season at an almost plantby-plant level of detail would be interesting. And current tech would allow me to do that.
The mapping capabilities, the advancements made in sensors, and the ability for most our machines to talk to each other have made farming a fun and attractive arena to play in.
It’s good to know and it’s okay to spend money on acquiring information, but on operations such as farms where cash flow is much higher than profits, the tech we’re paying for needs to produce recommendations or increased yields. It has to be practical.
Things change. The way I farm isn’t the way my grandparents farmed. I am slowly adopting some of these technologies, as it makes sense to do so. We’ll need new technologies on our farms in order to meet production demands, and tech allowing farmers to be more precise about the chemicals they use and the amount of seeds they put down into the soil can be beneficial, if they do as promised.