The AI revolution is making its presence felt in agriculture. However, farmers aren’t just jumping on the bandwagon, as many are cautious about adopting any technology that cannot easily provide a tangible benefit, as a panel at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in Mexico City discussed last month.
While most farmers (62%) want to learn more about AI, only 6% currently know much about the technology, according to Bayer’s Farmers Voice survey of over 2,000 farmers in 2024. Improving yields, input cost savings, and improved quality were the top three drivers of digital adoption, with 88%, 85%, and 84% of farmers, respectively, citing them as top drivers, Bayer added.
The inconsistency around gathering and reporting agriculture data is a hindrance to the adoption of AI and agtech solutions, Aidan Connolly, president of Agritech Capital, argued during the panel. AI needs standardized data to make accurate predictions, he explained.
“We have to be honest and say one of the reasons why agriculture has been so slow to adopt technology is because the databases are not very good, and they are all over the place. ... Without the quality of information, it is very hard for AI to scrape what is out there to make good [decisions],” Connolly said.
He added, “In agriculture, the information is not in easy-to-access databases. It is not uniform. It comes from different sources. It makes it extremely difficult to make good decisions. And even within companies, when you see how they collect information from feed mill to feed mill, sugar mill to sugar mill, farm to farm, it is not consistent. That is going to be a huge challenge in really achieving the full benefits of AI.”
Many farmers are willing to embrace new ways of working, but some need convincing that a new way of working – whether through AI or digital farming platform – is better than the method that they are currently using, Connolly admitted.
“I visited a farmer, and he [showed me] a photograph of his iPad – it was a notepad full of scratched numbers. And I said, ‘Why are you using this? Why are you not using an iPad?’ ‘Look at my notebook,’ he said. ‘It never runs out of electricity. The screen never breaks.’”
Does agtech have an ROI & messaging problem?
More than anything, farmers need assurance that whatever agtech solutions they invest in provides a tangible benefit to their farm, as many growers have been stung before with biologicals and robotics not working as intended, Connolly noted.
“If something really can... make a farm more profitable, I have no doubt it will be accepted — AI included — very quickly. What we failed to do, unfortunately, in agtech in general, we brought too many things [that] were still being proven that maybe want to win a Nobel Prize more than to make somebody money,” he added.
However, farmers can more easily calculate the benefits of technology these days through technology that can calculate return on investment (ROI), Johanna Ballesteros, LATAM business development manager for Swarm Engineering, noted on the panel.
“An exercise we do —and I’m recommending to everyone implementing a new agtech solution — is an express ROI calculation. You have to always drive any of these implementations with an ROI,” she added.
