The Renewed Case for More Precision Agriculture
May 25, 2022 
Editor’s note: Kenneth Zuckerberg of CoBank will be presenting on “New Supply – Demand Dynamics: Adapting To New Realities” at the upcoming PACE Executive Forum taking place October 27-28 in Kansas City, MO. The PACE Executive Forum is an exclusive, new conference born out of CropLife Media Group’s longstanding PACE Initiative. For over 25 years, the PACE Advisory Council has been effective in breaking down silos among the many sectors of agriculture and ag input distribution by sharing challenges and opportunities, learning from one another, and developing strategies for future action. Get insights on how the ag retail industry can respond to volatile market dynamics. Learn More.
Like many commentators in 2022, I’ve spent a good portion of my time talking about the ongoing supply chain issues.
In a recent one-on-one video, I discussed this point with CoBank’s Ken Zuckerberg. In his opinion, supply chain issues will continue to dog agriculture (and the rest of the world) for at least the balance of 2022. And this potentially opens the door for one segment of the industry to thrive: Precision agriculture.
“We have a situation where global supply chains and their recovery is going to take much longer than we think,” said Zuckerberg. “If there was ever a case for precision agriculture, it would be now.”
Zuckerberg went on the explain that in today’s supply chain environment, growers’ ability to get the crop protection products and/or crop nutrients they need for the season is limited in many cases — or substantially more expensive than in prior years. For those customers without the option of not using these inputs in their farming operations, the desire to “stretch their dollars” will definitely be a motivating factor.
That’s where ag retailers come into the equation. “At that point, where growers feel pain without certain inputs, ag retailers can help them to move to precision agriculture,” he said. “Can we forget about volume, and advise them to only put product where it’s needed?”
Equipment manufacturers are already embracing this kind of market logic. At the 2022 Commodity Classic show this past March, both John Deere and a partnership of BASF, Bosch, and Raven Industries showed examples of what could be called “precision spraying systems.” These technology-oriented products offer users the chance to run their self-propelled sprayers through the field, but “spot spray” in only those areas of the landscape that contain weeds.
“The cameras that are the eyes of the system,” said Franklin Peitz, John Deere’s Marketing Manager, Sprayers, at a recent field day event showing off the company’s See & Spray System. “Computer processors attached to the boom are the brains. The cameras are constantly scanning, and the processors are identifying the images of what’s a weed and what’s a crop and sending a signal to the nozzle, to only spray the weed. The process of scanning, identification, and spraying is about 0.2 seconds, or the blink of an eye. And that’s operating at speeds up to 12 mph in the field.”
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