Agtech Companies Need to Integrate and Collaborate

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

As technology for the farm has developed, new problems have emerged. Two big ones for autonomous farming, says Carbon Robotics CEO Paul Mikesell, are too many separate applications that don’t integrate, and no way for companies to interact with each other on the farm level.

Mikesell… “We have this sort of field readiness for autonomy problem that I think we're going to have to work together to overcome so that we can have a cooperative environment. Airplanes do this with a system called ADS-B where they talk to each other. We need to have some way for these different companies to work together so that they don't bump into each other, and so that they can schedule around each other. And it's not even just the autonomous stuff, but it’s things like where are the center pivots and what direction are they going? And things like that.”

Mikesell says at an even more fundamental level, all of agtech needs better ways to integrate with each other so that farmers don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to add a new tool.

Mikesell… “What I think would be bad for everybody is if all of these companies went out and had their own independent walled garden platform. And then as a farmer, you don't have any, the ability to jump from one to the other or aggregate the data together. As a farmer, you want to be able to see all that stuff together, and if everybody's doing this separate and there's not an open platform, we're going to wind up in a spot that just makes things worse. You know, like why do you have so many apps on your phone, right? It's because well everything tries to keep itself separate.”

Carbon Robotics is one agtech company seeking collaboration in these areas.