Ag Tech Sunday - How do Farmers decide what technology to adopt?

By: "Farm Tender" News
Ag Company News
Mar 09, 2019
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What resources and tools exist to help farmers evaluate what technology to adopt?

This is the question we’ve explored on the last two episodes of the AgTech So What podcast, with guests Viv McCollum (AGK Services), Margaret Ayre (University of Melbourne) and Jen Medway (AgriFutures).

Insight 1: Knowledge networks are key

Within localised agricultural communities, word of mouth is still king. Viv and Margaret spoke about their research and neatly summarised what’s unique about rural innovation: agriculture’s social structure. The role of personal networks for knowledge exchange is critical in ag especially, given the clusters of family-based SMEs and the role that geography plays in creating communities.

Jen elaborated on this from an operator perspective, discussing examples of when hearing other’s experiences helped her — from learning the ropes of the family business, to being in the ‘Golden Triangle’ surrounded by other operators, to learning from large agribusinesses in her local benchmarking group.

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Insight 2: Overnight success takes seven years

Viv has worked in precision agriculture for twenty years, but has not yet seen a solution to one big problem: unlocking the promised value of technology by turning data into insights. How can individuals grapple with the overwhelming amount of data (and tools) available to get real value?

Twenty years later, she thinks we are only now on the cusp of solving this problem and unlocking valuable insights, decisions, and practices from data.

Jen’s recent experience in the MLA producer innovation fast-track adoption program echoes the need for patience and sheds some light on solutions to the data vs. decisions problem. Jen’s project involved using EIDs and flock profiling to get a handle on their genetics. It’s taken them a few years to implement all the tech, and they’re still a little while from having all the data needed to make decisions, but they’re confident that the project will pay dividends in the long run. Her insight? Start with the “why”.

AgTech So What is a podcast brought to you by AgThentic. We feature innovators working at the intersection of agriculture and technology, to go beyond the jargon and dig into the key question not enough people are asking… AgTech:

So What?

As an R&D manager at AgriFutures, Jen knows better than most that there are myriad tools available. This can be confusing and prevent farmers from knowing where to start. Jen, instead, started by defining the decisions they were targeting, rather than starting with a bunch of data collection tools and no clarity on the end goal.

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The technologies available to choose from multiplied along the way, so it was critical that they defined at the start of the project why they were adopting the technology — what gains they were looking for, and what decisions they were targeting.

The Digital Value Assessment (DVA) tool that Viv and Margaret are developing also targets this insight. The DVA is an evaluation framework that helps advisors, researchers and farmers to assess the strategic value of investing in a piece of technology by comparing across dimensions including economic cost/benefit, social license, and legal and compliance. Rather than relying on vendors to ‘get better at selling’, the DVA tool aims to help operators ‘get better at buying’ by thinking systematically about their goals and how technology can — or can’t — help.

Where to from here?

Look forward to a future with empowered agtech buyers demanding strong value propositions.

Just as we’ve seen with other products outside agriculture (think of all the resources we have available to helps us choose a restaurant or car), we’re increasingly putting the power in the hands of the buyer to assess whether technology has a value proposition for their business. And, with more empowered agtech buyers, solution providers will be under pressure to stay laser focused on a strong value proposition: an outcome for their customers, not a flashy product.

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There’s way more to unpack in the full episodes, covering everything from career advice to the changing landscape of agronomic consultants. Listen to the conversations with Viv and Margaret and Jen and check out our other episodes from this season — we’ve had some awesome conversations on topics like commercialising tech vs staying on farm, how to tackle the GMO conversation, and more.

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