Precision Agriculture Stumbles into the New Year

Technology and precision agriculture at the retail dealership is a tale of two distinct, opposing perspectives. The broader view paints a picture of future data compatibility, value-rich farmer interfaces that provide growers with insight and the ability to interact with partners, efficiency-building automation through sensors and augmented machinery, and more.

The current challenges and reality that many retailers will be battling over the next 12 to 24 months is shrouding optimism for the 2020 season and beyond. CropLife 100 research in the December issue of CropLife® magazine indicates that sales of precision agriculture services fared weakly, with nearly seven in 10 retailers reporting flat or decreased revenues in 2019. And this month’s cover story shows just 10% of respondents to the Buying Intentions Survey were planning to invest in precision agriculture equipment.

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For many, the long shadows cast by an unrelenting 2019 season are at the root of the darkened outlook, in particular for the hardest hit regions in terms of weather and prevent plant acres.

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On this front, AgTegra Cooperative was hit particularly hard in a significant portion of its territory in South Dakota. Brent Wiesenburger, Director of Ag Technology Services, says that an estimated 30% of the co-op’s acreage went toward prevent plant — acres for which a prescription application plan had already been developed.

“We are charged on a per acre basis for prescriptions,” he says, “and we as an industry promote getting the work done before the busy season hits. So we’ve aggressively pushed for the production of hundreds of thousands of acres of prescriptions that we’ve been invoiced for, and now 30% of them don’t even get planted.”

The choice is an impossible one: Send a bill to growers who are already in a world of hurt from weather woes and shrapnel from the trade war or eat the invoice and start over. “As you can imagine, we’ll end up eating it all and working with suppliers to try to get refunds,” Wiesenburger says.

Beyond the purely financial, the agronomic challenge of managing the prescription work for 2020 will likely be equally daunting, with crops still in the ground as of mid-December and continued poor weather creating uncertainty about how to build prescriptions — and the threat of yet another round of prevent plant.

“On the brighter side, we’re trying to react and get better at what we’re doing as far as agronomic tools,” Wiesenburger says. “We’re trying to find a semi-automated digital solution that will allow us to calculate untreatable areas of a field in real-time, so that we can more accurately estimate product totals of crop nutrition products. This, in turn, will make our operations department more effective. That’s priority one for our group right now.”

The risk is that growers give up the ghost on a prescriptive program and do blanket fertility application, causing AgTegra to lose a full year of prescription-based data and return on investment opportunity for patrons.

Digital Ag and the Basics

Emerging from the uncertainty and evolution from the last round of mergers and acquisitions, the big basics have been turning attention to digital tools. The impact on the retailer has been mixed so far — concern about the Bayer Plus program and its direct-to-grower approach is causing a lot of heartburn, although some retailers report that Bayer is reviewing its approach based on feedback from the channel.

The approach that BASF has taken so far with the Xarvio Digital Platform is getting better marks so far. Amanda Neely, Ag Technology Marketing and Success Team Lead for Land O’Lakes, is upbeat about its plans so far.

“The digital solutions from BASF’s Xarvio Digital Platform will allow us to provide access to Xarvio digital solutions through our retail-facing ATLAS portal. When the retailer wants to, they can provide online access and login access to growers, and all that is going through the retailer,” she says.

“What I really like about the Xarvio digital portfolio is that they are very focused on positioning product that is needed for the health of the acre and not only on proprietary products … and putting it into the hands of the retailer to recommend the right product. They are saying, ‘Whatever is right for the acre, do for the acre.’ They are not positioning product as much as they are positioning insight, and that feels a lot like the approach Winfield United takes,” Neely adds.

Other Trends to Watch

Technology will continue to incrementally move forward in 2020, creating challenges and opportunities for the retail distribution channel on a number of levels. Some important trends to keep an eye on include:

Focus on Digital User Experience. The aforementioned ATLAS portal from Winfield United, Nutrien’s evolving customer experience hub, and ongoing development of Climate’s FieldView system are a few of the more prominent examples of supplier and retail efforts to get organized and on-demand information into the hands of the farmer. Partnerships, collaboration, and even acquisitions will at least in part be driven by the desire to enhance the grower experience with data portals.

Hope for Machine Connectivity? The announcement in November of an upcoming common machine data interface called DataConnect, supported by Deere, Case, and CLAAS, was among the most compelling and potentially impactful releases from the 2019 AgriTechnica event in Germany. We should know more about its progress later this year, but the system promises users the ability “to control and monitor their entire machinery fleet using their preferred telematics platform, without having to switch portals or manually transfer data from one system to another.” Any meaningful movement toward better data compatibility across machinery colors would be a welcome achievement.

Big Moves on Autonomy

Raven Industries made significant waves late last summer in autonomy and robotics, with two investments in the space. It acquired Smart Ag, a grower-focused tech company that successfully demonstrated its autonomous grain cart system at the Farm Progress Show in the fall, and purchased a majority stake in DOT Technologies, a division of Canadian planter company Seed Master, with promising prototypes of a modular autonomous unit for running myriad field implements.

“Our majority ownership investment in DOT is clear evidence of our commitment to deliver revolutionary autonomous technology to the market,” says Brian Meyer, Division Vice President of Raven Applied Technology. “By bringing together DOT’s unique platform with our machine control technology, industry knowledge, and OEM partnerships, Raven will be the market leader in autonomous precision agriculture advancements.”

While still some time away before in-field autonomy gains meaningful traction, Raven’s investment should lead to some interesting progress through the 2020 season.

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