Digital Supply Chains

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Agriculture is sometimes referred to as the least digitized industry. Whether or not that’s true is debatable, but there is room to bring digital tools not just to the farm, but to the post harvest supply chain. Produce Marketing Association vice president of technology Vonnie Estes sees a lot of opportunities to digitize every step between farm and fork.

Estes… “I think COVID especially, you know, with some of the disruptions and the dislocations that we've had in production and shortages on shelf, you know, we really have started to highlight what are the problems in our supply chain and what's happening. And typically most of the money has gone into really looking at what's going on on the farm, you know, the investment and the technologies. What's going on, on the farm, or what's going on in retail. And I think what COVID has done, it's like, well, there's all of this going on in the middle that we better pay attention to and figure out what to do about that. And I think digitalization is going to be one of the biggest issues of really looking throughout the whole supply chain and figuring out what are all the things that we need to do to be communicating and to make the cold chains work and to get, you know, fresh food from the time it leaves the farm all the way to the retailer or food service and get that digitized, so that works better.”

One important aspect to making this happen is attracting technologists to the industry.