Is smart farming really smart business?

The writer is a contributing columnist

AI-powered glasses may help farmers spot crop diseases in the field. Precision farm machines can zero in on weeds, plant seeds the right way up every time and even drive themselves at harvest time. American farming is getting ever smarter — but is it smart business? The technology must prove it’s worth the cost, not just in cash but in what it means to be a farmer.

US agriculture left the Little House on the Prairie era decades ago: auto-steer and guidance systems have been common in field crops for years, robotics is changing the dairy industry, and drones fly in the sky above farms. Precision agriculture didn’t just arrive with the likes of ChatGPT. But agriculture experts say AI technologies mean impressive gains in farm efficiency.

One day this month, I perched high in the cab of a harvester slicing through corn stalks on Bob Stewart’s 10,000-acre farm in Illinois. Driving alongside was the eerie spectacle of a driverless tractor pulling a grain cart — the autonomous future of American agriculture, according to Agco, the farm machinery and technology group behind the Outrun autonomy platform. When full, the grain cart scuttled off by itself to a waiting truck, trundling right back afterwards to get back to work. Retrofitting an existing tractor with the autonomy kit costs $60,000, plus a $9,000 annual fee, says Agco.

Stewart, whose family has farmed in the area since the 1850s, explained: “Labour is our biggest concern.” He has only six full-time staff, including family, and says “that’s a lot of acres, a lot of equipment to take care of, with very few people”. The US farm labour shortage isn’t new: “In the last 20 years, you don’t have as many kids coming back to farm after college,” he tells me, but adds that immigration crackdowns have made things worse.

But does the tech make economic sense? Chad Fiechter of Purdue University’s Centre for Commercial Agriculture co-authored a study of autonomy for Midwest corn and soyabean farmers, which found that “under today’s performance assumptions, labour wages would need to rise above $140 per hour before autonomous machinery generates higher returns than conventional equipment”.

Fiechter, who farmed corn and soyabeans for a decade himself, predicts some farmers may choose autonomy even if it doesn’t pay: “There will be [grain farmers] who adopt this technology not because of profits but because of lifestyle,” he told me, adding that watching a child’s soccer game or eating supper at home “can be much stronger drivers than profitability”.

Fiechter told me he loves new technology, and used it for farming, “but in a lot of cases it was a distraction”. “I was able to solve small problems leading to a little better outcome . . . without addressing what was really holding me back,” he says.

Agco CEO Eric Hansotia concedes that “different farmers are in very different places on this topic”. He told the media after Agco’s recent technology day: “In a sugarcane operation, it’s 10 months a year, 24 hours a day, the amount of labour required is enormous”. So they want autonomy “right now, as much as we can do, full speed ahead”. Meanwhile, a Midwestern farmer with 2,000 acres “who kind of enjoys driving” might be much less eager to go autonomous.

Brady Holst, vice-chair of the Illinois Soybean Association, is another tech lover who is not wholly convinced. I caught up with him in the middle of harvest. He admits to being tempted by a driverless grain cart: “That would be one person not in a tractor who could be doing something else during harvest.”

But when it comes to some agricultural uses of AI — such as AI-generated geo-data “prescription” maps — he says they aren’t yet ready for primetime: “You run the model twice and you get different results.” Not to mention the fact that weather, tariffs and the cost of diesel can erase any of those small gains you might get from a new technology, he told me.

There’s room in American agriculture for both, says Stewart. “Some will adopt it, and some won’t. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be farming in 10 years.”