Catlett Shares Thoughts On Precision Agriculture

I recently got the opportunity to attend a Precision Agriculture Summit in North Dakota, and it was really a tremendous experience. The inaugural event, hosted by North Dakota Farmers Union and the Red River Valley Research Corridor, drew more than 150 attendees and by all accounts, they were attentive and eager to learn. My friend Dr. Terry Griffin, who  just announced that he was leaving the University of Arkansas to take a senior position at CrescoAg, a Tennessee-based ag consulting company, said he came away with the same feeling. 

Automatic steering is very well established here, and there is solid yield monitor adoption. Some of the key messages from speakers at the conference revolved around problems everyone is having: what do I do with the scads of data I have on disks and hard drives, and what new technologies should I consider adopting in the coming year?

A particular treat for me was getting to see economist and futurist Lowell Catlett speak for the first time. I got the chance to interview him as well about the state of precision agriculture. The video is here: 

His statement that the term 'precision" is doomed to go away at some point in the future, the same way the word "mechanical" was dropped as a prefix to describe any "farmer" who used a tractor instead of horses and oxen, makes perfect sense. Eventually, everyone became "mechanical," and eventually everyone will be "precision" farmers. 

In the meantime, it's still a convenient way to describe the implementation of technology to achieve best management practices, and for better or worse, we have a good bit of evolving to do to get there.