While adoption rates for some high-tech innovations such as auto steer in tractors is high – around 80 per cent in the broadacre farming sector – on-farm adoption of a myriad of other ag tech and precision farming products has been stubbornly slow.
That was a topic addressed by a range of speakers at this week’s 400M Agrifood Innovation Forum at Toowoomba in Queensland.
In a panel session titled ‘Ag Tech Stories of Success’, DataFarming managing director, Tim Neale; Auctions Plus chief executive officer, Angus Street; Goanna Ag chief operating officer, Tom Dowling; and Infarm managing director, Jerome Leray, fielded questions on the challenges of commercialising ag tech products and services for farmers.
Why are adoption levels of so many ag tech products so low? What can be done to successfully commercialise those products?
Tim Neale said technology companies in the past had let agriculture down because, in such a small industry where money was tight, the technology had often not been up to spec.
“We get frustrated that some guy in a backyard develops a sensor and tries to sell it to the market. It doesn’t work, everyone gets frustrated, and then when someone else comes along and says I have a really good sensor the farmer says “I’ve tried five of those”,” he said.
“The way to solve that is to have a deep understanding of the industry in the first place, and then it needs investment. That’s what drives it because we have to get it right to deliver to the marketplace, otherwise people will get annoyed and dis-adopt.”
Mr Neale said usability was the key to a successful product that farmers would want to adopt. It needed to be simple and intuitive to use.
“Everyone has a smart phone. There has not been one manual written for a smart phone that anyone reads. So, everything is intuitive in a consumer grade product. What we need to do is bring the same thinking back into agriculture and not overcomplicate it,” he said.
Data Marketplace for sharing and monetising data
Angus Street said for ag tech products to be successful they needed to make, or save, money for the farmer, and save them time.
“Money and time are the two greatest assets for the agricultural community. If it doesn’t tick those, it goes on the junk pile.”
Tom Dowling said the way to increase the adoption of ag tech was to build a product from the field up, not from the engineer down.
“A lot of our product development comes from the field, comes from our client feedback on what they want from a product. It’s that part of your relationship with your client that does your products a lot of value,” he said.
“When bringing new products to market, I’ve always tried to be heavily involved in research and the validation that comes with it. Our researchers are very highly respected in Australian ag. That gave me a shorter path to cracking the market and selling the product.”
Jerome Leray said a lot of the time it was the farmers who initially had the innovative idea, “all they want you to do is give it to them in the form that they can buy”.
“Australia is well regarded from an innovation point of view, but we are no good at commercialising things and getting it to the next step. Proving that the tech works is something we have excelled at as a nation, but then it goes overseas, gets commercialised and sold back to the very farmers and innovators who created it,” he said.
“So, listen to the farmer, build a small project, partner with the big guys to help you scale up, then you can start to hit the ground running.”
Who owns the data? Is it the producer or is it the system supplier?
Angus Street said Auctions Plus considered that the person who collected the data was the person who owned the data.
“From our perspective, the producer owns the data and they can do what they choose to do with it,” he said.
“It is an interesting discussion, because businesses now are trying to grab data and have big pools of data. Data becomes their asset. But as a business, our point of view is that you actually shouldn’t get a secondary, kick-on benefit from the data.
“What you should be aiming to do is add enough value to the data decision making, and that is when you can charge for it.
“Businesses need to become comfortable that they are creating value with products and services that they can charge up front.
“The data is owned by the farmer, and if we are providing the data solution the solution should be good enough and add enough value to the farmer that the charge is on to the farmer. As a sector, that should be the way we look at it.”
Jerome Leray said farmers were often giving up sovereignty over their data without realising that it could be valuable to them.
He said farmers could agree to have their data ‘anonymised’ and on-sold by the system supplier, and then share in the revenue for providing that data.
“That is how we view it: you guys own the data and if you have given us permission to go and anonymise it then you actually get a clip of the ticket for being part of that entire process,” he said.
“So, it’s helping the industry as well as helping yourself in the sense it has incentivised you to provide that data and go to the digital farming system.”
