Deanna Kovar, President, Worldwide Agriculture & Turf Division, John Deere, opened the fourth session by describing her company’s focus as “making our farmers the most profitable, the most productive and the most sustainable farmers on the planet”. She gave two examples of how technology helps profitability and sustainability go hand in hand.

The company has developed ‘See and Spray’ technology. Equipped with cameras, computer vision and machine learning, a spraying machine can target weeds, rather than all the plants, as in the past, in a field of corn, soybean or cotton, reducing herbicide use by 60% last year. The three-year old technology has already been rolled out in the US and “it is our intention to take it all round the world in every job step and in every crop possible”.

The data created is stored in the John Deere Operations Center, an online management system providing access to free information anytime, anywhere. The center collects, analyses and shares data farmers around the world have submitted. It is connected to software companies, industry participants and the entire ag ecosystem. “It is truly becoming the operating system for the farm,” she explained, supplying farmers with insights and advice to help their decision making. Looking to the future, she said: “Computer vision and machine learning are just beginning to be a huge opportunity for us.”

Roman Tarnovsky, Vice President, Global Head of Carbon and Strategic Partnership, Indigo Ag, said his company’s role is “to bring sustainable agriculture to scale”, helping farmers to make, sustain and generate revenue from the changes they make. Innovation agriculture must combine highly localised solutions applicable to a particular plot of land, while having the capacity to be scaled up. Financial incentives are crucial to ease the transition. The company helps farmers access new revenue streams. Those in its carbon programme earn 75% of the prices paid for carbon credits and have already received “tens of millions of dollars”. The payments are not just a transition incentive. Farmers are looking for predictable and sustainable incomes and “deserve to continue monetising what they do on an ongoing basis”.

That longer-term perspective requires a critical mass of farmers to scale up the innovation programme. As more farmers become involved, their data is analysed by the company’s software, data management and science technology covering millions of hectares. “Farmers benefit from the fact that quantifying at big scale generates much less statistical uncertainty, so there are embedded benefits.”

The third ingredient is trust: farmers must have faith in the company’s science and use of their agricultural data. Indigo Ag submits its science to external peer reviews and reassures farmers it uses their data responsibly. That data provides them and agronomists with insights to improve their practices. “I think it creates that virtuous circle that we need to continue encouraging.”

Ranveer Chandra, General Manager in M365 Copilot and Chief Technology Officer of Agri-Food, Microsoft, began working in the company on data-driven agriculture in 2014. At the time, many farmers, despite their experience, often made agricultural decisions on guesswork. The project examined whether it was possible to “use data-driven agriculture to augment a farmer’s knowledge with data and AI”. The research, in collaboration with others, initially created a platform containing all of a farm’s data. “This is important for artificial intelligence. You have to run these algorithms. You need the data in one place,” he explained.

The second stage led to creation of multi-modal artificial intelligence to convert data into insights to help farmers in their decisions. The latest addition is a generative AI capability with co-pilots to see how this could transform the lives of all players in the system from farmers and food processors to equipment companies and bankers and give farmers and agronomists a powerful second opinion.

These developments are being used to remove guesswork and democratise the entire agri-food system. “We want any farmer in the world to be able to access these technologies.” Microsoft is developing the concept of a co-pilot. “It is about helping the farmer see this as their assistant,” he explained, particularly as agriculture has been reluctant to adopt technology. It is designed to help create trust in the AI generated information that “can tell you the pros and cons of what it means to take certain actions”.