Last month, I was invited to sit on a panel aimed at addressing this question: How can precision livestock farming technology move from promising innovation to investment-ready solutions? Here are a few of the ideas I had while listening to my fellow panelists.
“Scaling precision livestock farming is a global challenge.”
—Daniel Berckmans, professor at KU Leuven
Around the world, scaling precision livestock technology globally may be related more to connectivity or infrastructure than in North America. But technology around the globe still faces an uphill battle. Dr. Berckmans says that technology, at its core, is usually disruptive, requires infrastructure, remains difficult to scale across diverse farm and ranch environments, and proves difficult to accurately capture ROI on a large scale. “Scale drives cost; cost blocks scale. That is like the chicken and the egg problem for precision livestock farming.”
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“Most livestock farmers would rather be with their animals than they would in the farm office. So why don’t we automate all that office work? Get rid of all that first, and tell them to just go spend their time with the animals.”
—David Speller, founder and CEO of Optifarm
A lot of tech aims to solve very complex biological systems and predict outcomes from those systems. Farmers have an intuitive sense about these systems already and are understandably suspect as to whether this computer can produce the same outcome that their years of experience working with animals directly can produce.
Maybe the place to focus technology’s greatest gains would be to automate and make more efficient the desk work they really don’t want to do, so they can spend more time with their animals in the field. Oftentimes, technology seems to be asking them to come back to their desk to look at a report or a dashboard to be able to manage their animals, and that’s not a intuitive for them.
“The ability to monitor the physiological biomarkers of individual animals is very exciting. With these technologies, we can see where feed energy is going, and that is the key.”
—Daniel Berckmans
Tech providers would do well to trace back how their solution with technology on a farm is helping improve energy conversion. If an animal doesn’t get sick, how does that maintain her energy conversion from feed to milk? Farmers, of course, look at avoiding the cost of treatment as a return on investment, but I don’t think we always trace back the value of maintaining energy conversion. This is a hidden return on investment that is not calculated. If she doesn’t have to portion off energy to engage her immune system, how much money does that save us in feed cost?
Academic researchers and technology providers could do a better job in helping estimate these returns for technology adopters.
“Farmers are emotional decision-makers. They’re very empathetic and very good with their animals. That’s not the profile of someone who sits at a desk and makes a decision based
on an ROI.”
—David Speller
Technology has evolved to the point where connectivity cost, ongoing maintenance and even capital expense are not the reasons that farmers in the developed world are not adopting technology. One of the main reasons farmers may not be adopting technology is that the technology doesn’t state clearly the problem it solves for a farmer and even more important how that solution saves the farmer money. See the point above about feed conversion to milk and meat as an example.
If the technology solution doesn’t answer a clearly stated problem, it’s not likely to overcome a farmer’s general skepticism about technology – what data is being collected, where it’s going and can it help make the right decision? In other words, farmers and ranchers are asking: Do you even know my problem better than I do before you offer a solution?
– Can I fix it myself? If not, who do I have to rely on to fix it when it breaks?
The answer to these questions determines much of the future success of a technology’s adoption in the dairy and beef industries.
– Don’t look for the next technology you need to add; make sure you’re using the current technology you have at its fullest potential.
Often, farmers are using the technologies they have at a fraction of their potential. Always ask the technology providers you use: How are others using this technology in ways that I am not? And why should I consider adopting those uses?
These are messages I often repeat to audiences and reiterated to the more than 380 registered participants.
Watch the entire dialog below.
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