IoT, Machine Learning and Digital Twin – the three technologies that are at the center of every industry’s “hype” circle. But is it all just hype, or do these concepts truly have something foundational to offer? What are the best implementations these technologies have to offer for the agriculture industry? These questions are bound to be answered as time goes by, but the pressure of a rising population and their demands for more food have to be addressed, or we will soon face one of the biggest potential problems that have ever faced humanity – lack of food and resources. In today’s article, we are going to talk about how these 3 concepts can contribute to the average farmer’s workflow and what will be the future trends in farming that will be created by these concepts.

Millennials – The Biggest Innovators Driving The Adoption of Technology

Most people are aware that the age of the average farmer tends to extend towards the end of the spectrum (around 50 to 58 years), but we can see that the average trend that involves farming and millennials is starting to grow as they consist of more than 8% of farmers in the US and the numbers are growing. Some expert agronomists believe that millennials will drive the agriculture industry forward and help it incorporate the newest emerging innovations we hear about all the time, namely the Internet of Things. Since the overall amount of knowledge about technology and its uses is sparse in the circle of the older demographics, we must encourage the youth to participate and take interest in professional farming as this will help bridge the gap between innovation and one of the oldest industries out there. Moreover, with the constant and continuous investments in AgTech, this becomes a great opportunity to make farming an attractive and sensible choice for the young generation.

The Impact of Precision Ag Technology

Young millennials who are effectively introduced to farming can put their focus and use their good understanding on technology to help precision agriculture develop itself. One of the biggest trends that are seen thus far is the implementation of automatic machinery that serves mainly two purposes – reduce manual workload and increase efficiency by automating crucial farming processes. The kind of knowledge we have now cannot be successfully utilized due to the simple fact that precision Ag hasn’t reached the stage of full maturity and mass adoption yet – millennials can help solve this. If precision agriculture will reach the stage of mass adoption, the Internet of Things (IoT) will be the main trend that will pave us the way towards successfully increasing food production, whilst reducing field sizes and the negative impact to the environment at the same time.

The Biggest Trends That Will Impact Food Production – The Internet of Things

Besides fully automating the most labor-intensive processes we have in agriculture such as planting and harvesting, IoT will open new doors to opportunities that will involve effortless crop health monitoring, plant maintenance and the ability to make the produce disease-proof. Technology that will be capable of achieving these objectives is estimated to be worth billions of dollars, thus the trend of merging IoT and farming is quite apparent.