Making Digital Ag Easy

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

The concept of digital agriculture is not new, but has it really revolutionized agriculture yet? In some ways, it has certainly made in impact, but in others, the real changes are yet to be seen. A big reason for the lack of digitization is really because, well, farming is complex.

Ethington… “If you're really going to unpack this incredibly complex dynamic system of crops growing and how your actions are impacting them, you need that data. You need that data to do it. You just have to make it incredibly easy to get.”

That’s Jim Ethington, CEO of Arable, an agtech company that offers systems that are easy to install on any farm to enable data-driven decisions using Measurements that Matter. He says that new hardware must be not only useful, but easy to implement into farming operations, and easy to maintain.

Ethington… “Oftentimes there's an assumption that as soon as you introduce any sort of hardware into this equation, it's going to make it too hard. That's often true. It's because it's so hard to make hardware that's really easy and reliable. And so that tells a little bit of the Arable story, which is providing something that's so easy to go set up in the field gives you complete information about really everything that's driving crop yield and crop quality, as well as the crops response to those conditions. In something that comes out of box push one button sets up in two minutes. It's gotta be incredibly easy to deal with. There's so many other things going on on a farm. They don't have hours and hours for you. They just need the value as quickly as you can get it to them.”