The farming industry is struggling with labor shortages and the climate crisis. But agtech like digital cow collars and AI-quality-control tools are solving problems in unexpected ways.

• Amid the climate crisis and labor shortages, some agriculture workers use tech to mitigate issues.
• They use data-tracking software and AI-powered quality control for operations and crop assessment.
• Still, there are concerns about who owns the farm data and how it's being used.
• This article is part of "Build IT," a series about digital tech and innovation trends that are disrupting industries.

In St. Charles, Illinois, the late-August heat wave was less than enjoyable for local cows. They were too hot, and their appetites dwindled. Sarah and Andy Lenkaitis, two farmers, didn't need to see their 90 cows to know this: They got all that data from their cows' activity collars. 

The activity collars function like Fitbits for cows. The Lenkaitises, who run a dairy farm, Lenkaitis Holsteins, receive updates from the collars on a computer or mobile dashboard about the cows' activities, eating habits, and body temperatures.

The activity collars alerted the couple of the cows' earliest signs of reduced appetite. Sarah Lenkaitis could now get ahead of this and proactively feed the cows a probiotic to help them with digestion and rumination.

The Lenkaitises fixate on the appetite of their cows because it affects their milk production: Less food intake means less milk production. During heat waves, the Lenkaitises lose money because they can't sell as much milk to their local dairy cooperative. But the activity collars have helped them lose a little less milk lately.

"Before, we were making a lot of subjective decisions about how the cow was milking or how she was performing or doing," Sarah Lenkaitis said. "Now we have the actual data to help us make some more objective business decisions."

The Lenkaitises aren't alone. A 2023 McKinsey report found that 61% of North American farmers are already using or planning to adopt agriculture tech, also known as agtech, in the next two years.

"Agriculture, and farmers, specifically, are very early technology adopters," Bill Oemichen, a former deputy Minnesota agriculture commissioner, said. "The pace of change in agriculture from a technology perspective is very, very rapid. In many cases, more rapid than what's happening in the general economy."

Data helps mitigate the climate crisis

The Lenkaitises' farm was just one of many affected by extreme weather this year. Midwestern farmers saw droughts that left some fields without rain for 50 days. Flooding in California decimated berries and lettuce crops, which might further increase food prices for these items. 

Jeff Chemeres knows firsthand how farmers need technology to help them mitigate the quick pace of climate change. He especially sees this with his apple-orchard clients in his role as the chief strategy officer of Croptracker, a software service for the management of fruit and vegetable farms.

The farmers were used to picking apples in mid-August, but with the extreme heat, the apples started ripening earlier. They needed to know when exactly that would happen.

"Make a mistake, and it screws up your whole year," Chemeres said of his clients' economic realities. "You can't staple the apples back on the tree." 

Croptracker created a technology to help apple growers work with the changing climate, called Starch Quality Vision. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze starch tests on apples before harvesting. 

Starch tests are the gold standard of apple-ripeness testing. They use iodine staining to determine starch levels in apples, which discerns the fruit's ripeness: More starch indicates less ripeness and vice versa. The human eye doesn't always accurately assess this, especially since the way starch levels indicate ripeness varies depending on the type of apple. AI, however, can accurately assess starch tests for apples of all kinds. 

Will robots take farming jobs?

It might sound like agriculture automation is taking away farmers' jobs, but Oemichen said he has seen a different trend: Autonomous farming equipment is helping combat a labor shortage. 

Farm owners are struggling to hire because they can't keep up with paying the 4.4% labor-cost increase, cited by the USDA, across the industry and the competition with better-paid opportunities off the farm. This is a big reason farmers often bring in temporary migrant workers to help them. Washington state alone saw a 1,000% increase in visa applications for temporary migrant farm workers between 2007 and 2019, according to the state's 2022 Agricultural and Seasonal Workforce Services report.

Soon, they'll need even more help. The average age of a farmer is 57.5 years old, according to the US Department of Agriculture's most recent estimates. With older farmers about to retire, estimates indicate that young people won't be able to fill the gap; A 2022 survey conducted by The National Young Farmers Coalition and the University of Wisconsin Survey Center found that this is primarily because land is so expensive.

Chemeres said that he saw agriculture tech companies bombard farmers with innovations to mitigate this labor shortage. He believes the future of agriculture tech will be "almost surgical," he said, especially as AI comes into the field and becomes more sophisticated. 

"What worked for your grandfather two generations ago — it's a different climate now. It's a different planet," he said. "You may have to change."

Data concerns still need to be addressed

Oemichen has been paying attention to agriculture tech for years as a lawyer and the former deputy Minnesota agriculture commissioner. He became so interested in this topic that he returned to school to get his Ph.D. in public policy at the University of Saskatchewan. One of the things he's studying is who owns all the agriculture-tech data. 

Turns out, that's not clear, Oemichen told Insider. The farmers can use the data for themselves, but the agriculture-tech companies can monetize it to sell products to farmers, such as herbicides and pesticides, as well as collect data on farmland for hedge funds and investors. 

One of the biggest companies doing this is Bayer, a German company that has 52% of the world's agricultural data, a study that Oemichen coauthored found. Bayer owns a popular agricultural-data platform called Climate FieldView. Though the farmers can use the data on the platform, Oemichen said Bayer "clearly owns the intellectual property rights to the aggregated farm-level data," according to the app's terms of service — and the company can sell that data however it wants.  

These concerns came to a head in 2020, when Climate FieldView was accused of sharing farmers' data with Tillable, a platform that connects landowners with farmers. Bayer's subsidiary denied this, but farmers said they received land-lease letters from Tillable that were too exact not to have inside data.

Oemichen said that this is already hurting farmers. He has reviewed confidential studies that found farm-data aggregators sold farmers' data and predictive analytics to hedge funds and investment companies that wanted to buy farmland. This means that farmers lose a competitive edge in buying new land because they don't have hedge-fund money to buy their own data back from big companies such as Bayer.

"The data has become more valuable than the underlying products and services that they're selling to the producers," he said. 

Not all tech companies do this. Croptracker, for instance, allows farmers to own their own data. 

The US has only a voluntary data agreement for agriculture-tech companies, Oemichen's research has found. Oemichen said he wanted to see more regulation on the government's part to protect farmers. He added that farmers ought to create data cooperatives, which would work like a food or financial cooperative, to protect their data. 

"We need to really study this issue before it's too late," Oemichen said.