Digging Deeper...

Opening the Agricultural Business Council of Kansas City’s 8th Annual Ag Innovation Forum at the Downtown KC Marriott earlier this month, Event Emcee Kristie Larson, Strategic Relationship Manager of the DeBruce Foundation, characterized farmers and ranchers as searchers, survivors and innovators. She noted Kansas City could be considered ground zero for agriculture innovation and renovation. “Kansas City has been innovating for years,” Lawson said. Forum featured speaker Aidan Connolly, President, AgriTech Capital, claimed innovation is accelerating and “the survivors in farming will be the ones who adopt technology fastest.”   ByDennis McLaughlin, McLaughlin Writers LLC

Agriculture Gets Precise

 One of the featured speakers at the forum, keynoter James Lowenberg-DeBoer, Ph.D., a specialist in the field of precision agriculture, pinpointed 1983 as the genesis of modern agriculture innovation. That’s when President Ronald Reagan authorized the use of Navstar – or GPS as it became known – for use by commercial airlines to improve navigation and air travel safety. The success of GPS guidance is not a surprise, Dr. Lowenberg-DeBoer said. “Given the ease of use, relatively low cost of trialing and quick and easily visible results, we predicted quick and widespread adoption for GPS guidance.” That prophesy has been more than fulfilled.  Agriculture businesses can use GPS technology to manage their operations, collect information such as soil composition and weather conditions and can guide farmers and agricultural workers through their fields.

Looking down the road, Dr. Lowenberg-DeBoer, who is a professor and Elizabeth Creak Chair of Agri-Tech Economics at UK-based Harper Adams University, suggests swarm robotics would be a paradigm changer, cutting labor and capital costs. “But because a shift to swarm robotics would involve major changes in farm size, organization and management, it may take some time.” Achieving widespread adoption of ag tech innovations requires great technology, he concluded, that involves effective business models for manufacturing, distribution, and implementation; determination of on-farm benefits; estimating physical, financial and social constraints. “Predicting short run adoption patterns is very difficult and not needed for most strategic planning and public policy,” Dr. Lowenberg-DeBoer noted.

In an entertaining presentation that he facetiously referred to as “a review of 10,000 years of ag tech,” keynoter Aidan Connolly, president, AgriTech Capital, Wilmington, N.C., boasted that farming was the basis of modern life. Agriculture was the impetus behind the evolution and development of villages, towns, cities and civilizations – from which emerged art, philosophy, thinking and invention. “Every human development has been a function of our ability to farm,” he said. As for problems facing ag tech innovation, Connolly cited requirements for significant investment sums and a disconnect between investors, tech developers and end users. “AgTech start-ups,” he said, “need to consider actionable benefits for farmers, instead of focusing on cool tech.”

That notion was an overriding theme throughout. At one point, Nic McCarthy, senior vice president, Central Valley Coop, addressed it bluntly: [High tech platforms and systems] “might have solutions, but they’re not solving problems.” He recalled a situation where three tech people in a field implemented a program that required the three same people to be on hand to see if the technology worked - so, new technology does not always bring gains in labor efficiency.”

Panels

This year’s Innovation Forum featured three panels discussing the implementation and implications of innovative technology in several areas of agriculture: Soil Health; Artificial Intelligence; Livestock Technology Adoption.

Soil Health: Moderator Michael Doane, Global Managing Director, Food & Freshwater Systems, The Nature Conservancy, oversees TNC’s efforts to scale up conservation outcomes across productively managed farming, ranching and agroforestry landscapes – and restoring degraded croplands and grasslands with advanced soil health, grazing and nutrient management techniques. That imperative dovetails with Aidan Connolly’s observation that advanced, available analytic technology is allowing researchers to monitor soil structures and microbial populations in real time, preparing organisms for optimal nutrient uptake and promoting root development for increased yield potential.

Panel member Nick Guetterman, Guetterman Brothers Family Farms, Bucyrus, Kansas, said his family started no-till farming in 1982 and converted it to 100% of its operation in 1990. “No-till got us through the 1980s crisis,” he noted. 

Jason Tatge, CEO, PrairieFood stated that conventional farming practices have rapidly turned much of the country’s healthy soil into barren dirt. But he asked, “What if you could nourish soil with native microbes to become more resilient while reducing your synthetic inputs by half?” He answered, “Weaning your fields from synthetics and investing soil health is one of the
most strategic activities with the highest ROI’s any grower can undertake.”

Dan Poston, vice president, research and field services, Pivot Bio, described how his company’s technology meets the demand for nitrogen consistency and dependability by enabling microbes to convert atmospheric nitrogen and deliver it to crops, providing a source of nitrogen throughout the growing season. “We collaborate with leading agricultural universities and research organizations to conduct structured trials that demonstrate how our breakthrough technology maintains or improves yield, helping growers achieve better profitability, predictability and sustainability.”

Artificial Intelligence:  Moderator Jonathan McFadden, Ph.D., research economist, USDA-Economic Research Services, is involved in the commercialization and adoption of ag technologies and the environmental performance of agriculture overall. “Our research and analysis covers a broad range of economic and policy topics,” Dr. McFadden said, “including precision agriculture and increasingly AI, which are important inputs in agricultural production.”

He explained that U.S. agriculture faces a number of challenges: rising production costs; labor shortages; climate change; population growth. “Increasing awareness of these issues has led to further calls for the agricultural sector to develop innovative solutions,” he explained. “And digital agriculture, increasingly reliant on AI, presents an important opportunity to respond to many of these challenges.”

But Pascal Hitzler, Ph.D., director of the Center for AI and Data Science at Kansas State University, warned about becoming too infatuated with AI. Beware of the AI hype, he warned. “Despite fast progress in AI’s development, actual reliability and trustworthiness of current AI systems is limited.” He expects that will be overcome, but more research is needed.  

Nic McCarthy, Central Valley Coop, wondered if AI would develop further, fast enough, to interest and keep the next generation of farm families on the farm. He hinted it very well could. “But the larger issue of farm land wealth transfer might still remain a deterrent to keeping younger people on the farm.”

Livestock Technology:  Moderator Dustin Johansen, senior vice president, livestock division, Farm Journal, had a terse but poignant message regarding agricultural technology and AI that is applicable to all – including ag tech developers, farmers and retailers: Be aware of what [tech] exists.

Paul Koffman, executive director, Livestock Technology Solutions, Merck Animal Health, noted the cattle industry tends to be reactive – fix it when it happens. “But we need new products to get ahead of cattle illnesses.” Over the last four or five years, Merck has made significant investments in building its own technology through either its own R&D or through acquisitions, Koffman said.

Jerrod Westfahl, chief strategy officer, Innovative Livestock Services, Inc., is emphatic when he says, “Livestock ag is not a monolithic industry.” That rationale has prompted ILS to look at each operation it deals with as a unique entity. At the same time, Westfahl said, “Technology is not a threat.” And ILS uses that line of thought as it matches various solutions to individual livestock operations.

Coby Buck, director of strategic accounts, Agri-Webb, made a case for introducing more technology innovation to the livestock industry. He asked the question: “Does the [short] food animal life cycle have something to do with the lack of investment in technology?”

Data-Led Agriculture

Ranveer Chandra, chief technology officer of Agri-Food at Microsoft, presented a riveting argument highlighting the importance of global data-led agriculture. Resources once considered plentiful, he said, have been hit by the combined effects of an ever-growing world population and climate change, leading to rising global temperatures and extreme weather. “Our goal is to build tools that help all individuals and organizations, including farmers, to achieve more.”

Chandra described how technology can be used to grow more food, more sustainably. “The soil is not getting any richer; the water levels are receding; there is climate change – these make the farmers’ life much harder. One approach that can help is that of data-driven agriculture, where our goal is not to replace the farmer but to augment the farmer’s knowledge with data and AI.”