Ten years after data analytics promised to revolutionize agriculture, the technology has yet to fully pay off. According to a survey conducted by consulting firm McKinsey, less than half of farmers are using farm management software and only a quarter are using remote-sensing and precision agriculture hardware. Furthermore, only 3% of American farmers plan to adopt software or precision agriculture hardware in the next two years.
One of the main reasons for this slow adoption is the difficulty of using the technology. Many farmers are overwhelmed by the amount of data they need to process, and the software can be slow and complex. Additionally, some of the tools require manual data entry, which can be laborious and time-consuming.
Recently, tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have begun offering tailored cloud-computing, data, and artificial intelligence services to agriculture in order to make the technology easier to use and to better manage farm data and analytics. Hopefully, these developments will help farmers take advantage of the digital farming tools available and, in turn, benefit from them.
