The precision agriculture revolution is coming, just slowly
Since the 1990s, precision agriculture has promised to revolutionize farming by giving growers granular information about what’s happening with the crops in their fields and new technology to actually put that data to good use.
Some of this has come to pass, with many advancements over the years boosting precision. New tractors can use GPS to steer themselves and farmers now have the ability to change the rate at which they apply seeds or fertilizer on their fields. Even crop genetics and how weeds are managed have advanced.
“The only thing we have not advanced is the sensor,” said Pablo Sobron, founder of Impossible Sensing. “The ability to see things that matter in both the plants, the soil and the roots.”
Sobron and his small team of scientists out of St. Louis now are working on the second iteration of a prototype of sensor to do exactly that, designed to be mounted to the back of a planting machine.
He explained it will help farmers see exactly what’s happening in their soil in real time as they drive through their fields, revealing information about nutrient levels, soil health, water conditions and other factors around individual plants.
“Our thinking is that having more precision on knowing what areas of the farm can take more or less [fertilizer] will allow them to apply what’s needed,” Sobron said. “The real value and the real need here is to give insights, give knowledge; prescribe what to do and when.”
All of that data should help farmers make choices that will not only boost their bottom line, but curb the overuse of fertilizers and other chemicals and be more targeted about irrigation.
Still, Sobron admitted all the new developments in precision ag have yet to fully transform farming.
“It’s not delivering on the hype that it was sold,” he said.
And it’ll likely be years before promising tools, like that laser, are adopted on thousands, let alone millions of farming acres.
“Experimentation is a risk,” said Bill Leigh, who farms about 2,200 acres of corn and soybeans with his brother in Marshall County, Illinois.
Since he started in the early 1980s, Leigh said he has introduced more precision tools to his arsenal of equipment, which have helped him more efficiently plant seeds or apply fertilizer, herbicides and fungicides.
But this change has been gradual, he explained.
“It’s not a jump in with both feet, it’s a process,” Leigh said. “It’s just too expensive and there’s too much at risk to take that flying leap and realize there’s not a high jump pit at the end, it’s a piece of concrete.”
New technology for a farm can cost more than $100,000 in some cases. Leigh said he’s willing to make that kind of investment as long as he sees an economic return — it’s a financial equation lots of food producers have to think about because, most of the time, farms operate on slim margins.
There’s still a gap between the new technology available and the farmers who put it to use because many can’t foot the bill to try something new on all their fields, said BioSTL Agrifood Director Chad Zimmerman.
“We can’t be asking them to take on more risk, to just take a decrease in their profit to accomplish somebody else’s goal,” he said.
That puts pressure on big and small companies to prove their precision ag tech really delivers. And many companies are working on that.
It’s a trend right now in agriculture, said Alison Doyle, associate director at the Iowa State University Research Park.
“A lot of the ag companies are positioning themselves more in the tech space than they are traditional ag,” she said.
Labor is a big driver of this, she explained. There just aren’t as many farm workers today than in the past.
And today’s farms are much bigger than they used to be, Doyle added.
“When you have an operation that large, where commodity prices and all the input prices are where they are, you’re looking for a tiny little bit of margin wherever you can find it,” she said. “So these precision tools become necessary.”