For farmers to go global, we need to think local

Steve Jobs and his team at Apple did not invent the smartphone. In fact, when IBM launched its Simon Personal Computer (SPC) in 1994, Jobs was still exiled from the company he founded.

Yet, the SPC and many of its more successful descendants, such as the Blackberry, were rendered nearly obsolete when Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world in the summer of 2007.

Until then, smartphones had repeatedly “improved” by adding additional features and buttons to make accessing business emails easier. Their manufacturers worked hard to make the hardware as technologically advanced as possible — and it operated incredibly well. We may have tucked it away in our memory, but we all thought the stylus and those three extra buttons were pretty cool at one point.

Then Apple introduced the app store, and suddenly the definition of what made a phone smart changed forever — it became more individualised and less restricted by key space. The invention of the app store and Apple’s promotion of it to developers unlocked benefits we never thought possible in a keypad-dependent world. Sure, you and I could both have an iPhone, but the app store allowed us to customise the phone to fit our needs.

So why am I, a farmer and an agtech company CEO, telling you something you already know about the iPhone? Because it is incredibly relevant to what is happening in agricultural equipment right now and the massive transition that is about to take place.

It is 2007 right now in agricultural equipment

As farms have scaled to meet rising global demand, so has the size and scale of our equipment. And just like the Blackberry, this equipment performs exceptionally well at what it was made to do — to cover as many acres as possible in very little time.

However, this farming system we refer to as ‘conventional’ has left us with some downsides, and it’s time that we discuss them. From highly compacted soils and oversprayed fields, to a consistent reversion towards “answers in a can” — the type of thinking that assumes every agronomic issue can be solved by some chemical that can be sprayed over the top of a field, there are some real challenges in our farming system.

Moving beyond these challenges will require us to consider the equipment that we farm with today consciously. Namely, we need to rethink how we approach farm equipment innovation.

While many companies are chasing autonomous agriculture, claiming to be bringing a new paradigm to farming, the reality is that very few organisations are actually introducing new ideas; much of the “new” technology is the same old game with a shiny new feature list. Just like Blackberry in 2006, most companies are happy to keep things going in the same direction as long as they can add yet another button to make their tractors driverless or enable a robotic attachment.

This has forced growers into a hardware-dependent acquisition strategy to take advantage of the most innovative technologies. Layer on top of that the fact that the needs of farmers vary between locations, farm types, and management practices, and many growers have found themselves catching the ‘falling knife’ of equipment, knowing that they need new equipment to take advantage of new technologies, but even if they can swing that added cost, it is likely a solution that is not built around their farm’s needs.

Local problems have taken a backseat to industrial scale for far too long because three companies create 95% of the modern farm equipment in the US. Building a solution for a small subset of the marketplace can take a lot of work. In many cases, it needs to make more sense financially. So today, many producers are left modifying their tools and equipment on-farm or living with less-than-ideal solutions to the unique challenges they face in their area.

Members of the SwarmFarm team. Source: supplied.

There’s another option

And that’s what we are building with SwarmConnect, an autonomous equipment ecosystem specifically formulated to address the issues in your locality; a breakthrough operating system network that enables developers to create an array of innovative applications for users of our autonomous platform, opening the door for local solutions to local problems enabled through highly efficient hardware and rapidly adaptable software.

Most solutions start with technology — the machinery — and end with the farmer, but we took a different approach and began with the farmer. This led us to realise that the path to truly valuable technological transformation was through a community of like-minded developers working with us to solve the problems of modern agriculture; we realised that we needed to get off the conveyor belt of treating every problem in the same way and start allowing for farm-centric customisation in our equipment.

Our team at SwarmFarm calls this farm-centric, customised approach to autonomy — Integrated Autonomy. Delivering more than another driverless system or a niche robotics solution, we are putting the farmer’s needs first and creating a technology ecosystem around them, providing seamless access to developers who can quickly deliver meaningful answers to specialised challenges.

We aim to empower farmers with new farming techniques, allowing them to choose who supports and maintains their equipment and creating demand for a network of rural-based professionals to service that ecosystem.

We are not the first company to pursue autonomy in agricultural equipment, but we are redefining what implementing that technology can mean for our farms, supply chains, and planet through Integrated Autonomy. We’re here to change the thinking in farm equipment, we’re here to build the “app store” of autonomous agriculture, and we’re here to give local agriculature a seat at the table. The incumbents can keep adding more buttons.

Andrew Bate is the founder of SwarmFarm Robotics. This article was first published on LinkedIn.