A Long Ways From Full Autonomy on the Farm

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

In agriculture one size does definitely not fit all. What may work for one operation or field could be completely wrong for another. Connie Bowen of Farmhand Ventures believes that’s why it would be challenging to ever fully automate production agriculture. She says it would take a major shift towards uniformity to even begin to try to eliminate humans from the equation.

Bowen… “100 percent automation inherently requires uniformity, right? And like I just said earlier, farms are kind of like snowflakes, fields are kind of like there are patches. Anyone who's walked fields knows that like, there are patches that are wetter, there are patches where blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is happening. And that's inherently constraining full-tilt automation. And so that's where I think we are going to be, certainly as someone who's like investing and trying to make money off of products in this space, I think we are going to be much better off, at least midterm, investing in solutions that are definitely going to have humans in the loop in their daily operation. Because I don't think you can fully automate most of outdoor agriculture. And if we did fully automate most of outdoor agriculture, we would have to move towards an even more monocultural uniform system and I think we could talk about the downsides of that.”

Again, that’s Connie Bowen of Farmhand Ventures.