Most of the farmers that I’ve dealt with now, especially over this past year, I’ve seen similarities with their approach to data from their precision technology. Whether I was in Kansas or parts of the Midwest or even Australia. 

They all said the same thing to me. They’re kind of getting tired of having to mess around with all this data thing and all this technology. What they want to do is do what they love, which is just focus on farming. As soon as we start addressing those needs, we’re going to have a lot of success. 

Why is this important to you as a strip-till farmer or any type of farmer? These silos and manual processing limit how much this technology can really benefit you. Then your ROI or return on investment is much lower or it’s not even realized. 

I have so many farmers that have variable-rate technology on their seeder and on their sprayer and have never used it. I think you pay enough money already as it is, that technology should just work. 

But things are changing What really limited clouds and all that connectivity was we didn’t have devices in the field. We had cellular issues. But now we’re going to be seeing a lot of new hardware released where it aims to solve these connectivity issues to where you’re always integrated with the cloud, but also enable machine-to-machine communication. 

Now, if you’ve got 5 combines in the field, they’re now talking to each other and coordinating their efforts, enabled by these connectivity devices. 
Hear more from Dr. Ray Asebedo in our Strip-Till Farmer podcast series, sponsored by Topcon Agriculture and check out his other Tech Tips.