The Digital Pathway to Power report suggests the growing complexity of on-farm decision-making means farmers need to adapt to the times, or risk getting left behind.
The report aims at triggering a deeper relationship between farmers and the supply chain, detailing key considerations for farmers, farm input companies and other supply chain businesses to increase accuracy in their business decision-making by implementing and better using technology.
This could include everything from fertiliser and ag chem application to optimal stock feeding programmes.
“Over time, we believe this approach will be a game changer for agricultural supply chains,” report author, Rabobank agricultural analyst Wes Lefroy said.
For many farmers, Lefroy says, it remained a challenge to transition to making decisions based on hard data rather than on past practice and intuition.
With the increasing complexity of on-farm decisions, pressure is mounting for technology to take a lead.
“On-farm, the complexity of decision-making has been increasing for some time, driven by factors such as growing farm size, changing climate and increasing regulation,” he explained.
“The intellectual power to optimise many on-farm decisions has now moved beyond human capacity and there is a greater need for technology to play a central role.”
Lefroy acknowledged there will be hurdles to adoption.
For many farmers and farm input companies, extracting value from existing technologies requires significant investment of funds, time and technical expertise.
“Two major hurdles have been limiting the capacity of technology to play a fundamental role in farm decision-making,” Lefroy said.
“Firstly, technologies have lacked the ability to collect data from the required number of variables.
“Secondly, in many cases, analysis tools do not account for different relationships between these variables and the actual process of collecting data, analysing it and acting on it is arduous and complex.
The report outlines a framework for farmers and farm input companies to enhance the capability of technology in the sector focusing on four steps that need to be considered.
These cover collection of the right data for all the physical on-farm variables in the required resolution and quality, and the automatic transfer of data collected to an analytical platform in a safe and timely manner – highlighted in the report as currently the key pain point for many farmers across the globe.
Analysis tools that process a solution in a form that is easy for farmers with little or no experience to interpret, and autonomous execution of a response with greater speed and accuracy than traditional execution techniques, complete the outlined framework.
“This type of framework, when up and running, could fundamentally change the way that we see decisions made on the farm,” he said.
“We could either see machines, or platforms that do it all – data collection through to execution.” As an example, Lefroy said a drone could scout for pests, process and then analyse the data on an invasion and then execute on that data by going and spraying them – all without farmer intervention.
Alternatively, there could be an app-store approach where users can choose different applications for each step in the pathway and the platform facilitates that process along the pathway.
Farm input companies have a key role to play in developing and facilitating this approach and in doing so, this would enable these companies to play a bigger role in farm decision-making.
“Companies, and more specifically input companies, are in an advantageous position to implement solutions like this to support farm decision-making,” Lefroy said.
“The access they have to many farmers enables input companies to achieve scale and build solutions with the required accuracy and to support decisions based on a wide-range of data sets and experiences.
“Further, it enables the relationship between farmers and those in the supply chain to deepen, with the role of the farm input company effectively moving to that of coach to improve users’ decision-making.”
Lefroy said it will be important for farmers to assess the strategic implications of what this systemic change may be for their farm business, such as their approach to data sharing, the types of skills employed within the business and the partners they engage.
While some of these new platforms may be at least five years away, Lefroy said the Digital Pathway to Power approach could help provide direction for long-term investments in ag tech.
