By Andrew Joseph, Farms.com
The Farmers Panel consisted of a buncha regular guys talking about their day jobs involving the high-tech world of procession agriculture equipment.
That was the closing scene of the well-attended 2021 Farms.com-sponsored virtual Precision Agriculture Conference & Ag Technology Showcase held November 16-18.
Moderated by Mike Ulik, the Precision Farming Manager for AGCO, the Farmers Panel featured:
- Jeff Bennet owner of Bone Trail Land Company Ltd. in Dodsland, Saskatchewan;
- Matt Ververs of Ververs Farms in Wasaga Beach, Ontario;
- Taylor Phillips of Producers Edge near Regina, Saskatchewan.
The panel members discussed their individual trials, tribulations and successes while experimenting with precision ag technologies on their own farms. Separate, but together.
It’s all well and good for precision ag equipment and technology manufacturers to state that their product or service is the future of farming, but how does it stack up now in the present?
It has become quite the norm in our industry for precision ag technology companies to seek out curious farmers to perform trials with their latest equipment to better help determine if: 1) it performs as well as they believe it should perform in a real-world scenario; 2) it is not performing up to snuff; 3) modifications or wholly new mechanical additions are needed to perform as expected.
For farmers, the arrival of relatively expensive hardware and software on the farm had better provide an ROI (return on investment) quickly, meaning that new advents of precision ag technologies need to work faster and more efficiently than the way farm work has been performed in the past.
As such, farmers are reluctant to have new technologies come out and have everyone tell them how great it is, and how bad they are for not jumping on the latest product as soon as it becomes available.
To be fair, precision ag technology manufacturers don’t want to have a product sold to a farmer that doesn’t work as advertised, either.
It can be an expensive gambit for both parties—how do we know if any given technology will work as described on my farm? It’s a lot of money to spend on a gamble.
Our Farmer Panel volunteers tried different tech on a small portion of their acreage to see what would happen.
These three gentlemen presented their opinions and findings on the precision ag technologies they each utilized this past season—some to growing, glowing results, and one exhibiting growing pains.
Watch the video below to see if PAg (precision agriculture) tech worked or did not work for them and which equipment performed well… er, after modifications were made: