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A
When most of us eat, we're relying on one of the most important and overlooked industries on earth. Agriculture. It's also the oldest industry on Earth and the backbone of our world. Globally, agriculture is a three and a half trillion dollar industry. In the United States alone, it contributes over a trillion dollars to the economy each year, supporting millions of workers who keep the system running. It feeds us, clothes us, and sustains rural economies that keep everything else running. It's also become a testing ground for technology. More and more farms and ranches are run on data, sensors and software as much as tractors and weather patterns. And yet, when you're standing in the middle of a pasture, it's not always clear how the digital world fits. In last episode, we met Cody Alexander, a cattle rancher based in rural Texas. Cody's been a cattleman his whole life. He knows each of his cows by sight and even by personality.
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B
It's really neat to be able to say you don't have any store bought cows. And what I mean by that is you've raised every cow that you have. I have cows that have never stepped foot off of this ground. Some have never been in a trailer. The only time you put them in a trailer is like, oh, I'm going to take them to the vet because something's wrong.
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C
Yeah.
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A
His ranch in northern Texas has been in his family for generations. His parents, siblings and children have all lived on the same stretch of land. But while his family's legacy on those Texas plains isn't new, the introduction of technology is. Cody was taught how to run the ranch with little to no tech. They rode horses and stadium of four wheelers, and to this day, they still manually monitor the herd's food and water rather than using cameras or machines. The Alexander ranch looks like something out of a western. But Cody's challenges are anything but old fashioned. Rising crossed shrinking margins and a wave of new technology promising to change everything. I'm Jennifer Strong. In our previous episode, we explored how this tech is shaping the future of the dairy industry. This time we're going to explore how everything from cloud based herd management apps to sensors that can monitor grain silos from miles away are increasingly digitizing the agriculture industry. Welcome to the next innovation. Agricultural tech is one of my favorite things to cover. It's easy to forget that farmers, they were the original innovators, before there were data scientists and before variables like weather, soil and animal behavior were considered programmable factors. But agriculture has been quietly digitizing for decades. The roots go back to precision ag, a promising movement in the 1990s that aimed to use sensors, satellites, and early data models to farm smarter, not harder.
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C
Precision agriculture, in essence, means that you are trying to operate precisely on a particular plant or a particular small zone within a field to give that plant or that small zone precisely what it needs to, you know, be economically and environmentally optimal.
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Dr. Alex Thomason is a professor at Mississippi State University and one of the leading voices on agricultural automation. He says those early experiments laid the groundwork for the digital revolution that we're seeing today.
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C
So that could be that you're. You have a machine that's going through the field and it's identifying individual plants and saying this. This plant needs this much fertilizer, and it will dispense exactly that precise amount of fertilizer to that plant. Now, that's a little bit pie in the sky. We're not quite there at that level of resolution or detail yet. But gps, when it became publicly available, made people aware that we have the ability to know where we are in the field using gps. And there's a lot that we can do with that. Historically, farm fields were dealt with uniformly. So if you were trying to be precise in your application, you would take soil samples of a field, and you would determine this field needs, on average, this much nitrogen and this much potassium and this much phosphorus, and you would dispense those fertilizers throughout the field in the uniform rate. But everybody knew that those fields were not uniform. There's a lot of variability in soil type. So GPS was sort of the beginning of that. It enabled us to know where we were in the field and be able to begin to make changes at precise locations in the field.
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And on Cody's ranch, you can already see that shift. Here's his brother, the ranch hand.
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D
So we had hydraulic. We had hydraulic working chutes and all kind of stuff. There's technology right there was probably the first technology ever hit this place with a set of hydraulic working shoes. And we thought that was. That was fancy. I mean, when you could stand there and move buttons, you know, and they come in and close the gates by just moving buttons, it was awesome. Originally, you'd run all the calves up into the alley, and we were all big, strong. We thought we was, you know, jocks and everything. And we'd catch them, throw them down. You'd brand them right there. You'd cut them right there on the ground. Now we work smarter, not harder, you know, and run them through on a calf table where it lays them over, and you can work on everything at a.
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A
Since Cody took over the ranch. His family's adopted a bit more technology compared to when he was a kid. Now they use a cattle data management app called CattleMax to document births, vaccination documents, and much more. Collecting animal data isn't a new concept, but having it at your fingertips kind of is. Applications like CattleMax or Herd Watch are quietly revolutionizing how farmers and ranchers run their operations.
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E
I like to tell people everything that you're currently writing down on your notebook or typing into your computer as these animals are going through the shoot. Herdwatch is giving you that platform where you can collect all that data, and then it's also giving you a platform where you can start pulling insights out of that data.
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Megan Bochansky is Herdwatch's US lead, and she's part of the company's push to modernize the cattle industry one tap and one herd at a time.
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E
Excel sheets are great, but what do we do with that data after we put it into an Excel sheet? Realistically, nothing. You know, it's going to sit there and it's going to take someone who's extremely motivated to go in there and start pulling out data, creating reports. Herdwatch does that for you. So after you run your animals through a shoot size session, Herdwatch will give you an overview of what we did during that session and any insights out of that session. We always tell our producers Herdwatch's mission is very simple. How do we make managing data extremely easy for producers? And you know, for our producers, especially in the US where we don't have a lot of these schemes, data is power, so it is cloud based. So a lot of our producers are actually using the system on their phone and their computer. And a lot of them will actually go out into the field on their phone and they'll record her data on their phone. So more of a data collection tool is what we like to talk about the phone or iPad as. And then they'll come back to their computer, whether it's in their office or on their kitchen table, and that's where they'll start analyzing their herd data, pulling out insights, looking at at performance reports.
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A
Herdwatch launched in Ireland in 2014, where farmers were required by law to log every calf and treatment. But when it came to the US the pitch shifted from compliance to control.
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E
In the US we do not have a lot of regulations. We don't have the compliance that these other countries have to adhere to. So we had to completely change the mission and goal of the app to be more specific to US Producers and helping Them solve their daily day to day tasks.
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The app collects data through cattle chutes, the same guided alleyways Cody mentioned earlier. What used to be guesswork is now data science. Herdwatch integrates with Bluetooth scales and electronic ID tags to log weights, treatments, breeding data, and even calving schedules in real time.
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E
So basically, when producers are running cattle through their chute, our system hooks up with their scale head if they have one. It also hooks up with an EID reader. If again they have that. If they don't, everything can be manually inputted. But basically, as cattle are running through the chute, producers are able to record all of the information, whether it be they're prey checking. So they're saying this animal is pregnant or she's open. If she is pregnant. Here are the vaccinations I'm giving. I'm also wor her and then a body condition score. So Hardwatch tracks everything from treatments. So if that animal is sick, you can track symptoms, any notes, what you're treating with the diagnosis, the outcome of those treatments. You can track the medicine you're using. So you have a medicine cabinet that's actually telling you amount of medicine you have left and then the usage. We also can track breeding data. So if you're AI ing or you're just putting a bull out on pasture with the cows, the system tracks all of that. And then there's also a calving book in there too. So it's a quick look of how many bulls versus heifer calves have we had this season. What's our average birth weights? Cows do we still have left to calve. It's a great planning tool for producers to know where they're sitting and what they still have to stand for.
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A
That shift from handwritten data to digital intelligence is what's finally pushing the industry into its next phase. But like any revolution, progress doesn't happen all at once. It's slow, uneven, and it's often generational.
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E
We also run into producers who are extremely traditional in their ways and they are still recording their data on a calving book or on a piece of paper or some. They actually just have that herd data in their mind and they know, you know, eight years ago this cow had this calf, six years ago she was open, five years ago she had difficulty calving. So they're still carrying that herd data, you know, within their mind. So we have actually he's, I believe about 83 years old, very against technology. He wasn't sure it was something he wanted to do, but he actually had three or four of his neighbors using herd watch and kept saying, oh, I should look at this, I should look at this. And after a while, we said, hey, let's just jump on a demo. We'll, we'll set up your herd for you. We'll show you what you need to do. We went through that whole process with him, and now you'll see him carrying his iPad around that he got just for herd watch, but he carries it around now everywhere he goes. Is always talking about the software and, and it's really cool to see because not only is he now using digital record keeping, you know, his eyes have been open to so many other things out there that technology can open the door for.
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From GPS tracking in the Midwest to handheld herd apps in Wyoming, agriculture has quietly become one of the most data connected industries on earth. And while that's transforming what happens on the ground, on the other side of the Atlantic in Ireland, Donald Skelly saw another problem waiting to be solved 30ft in the air.
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F
At Lvlogix or Levellogix, we do level monitoring. So specifically, we do monitoring of levels in storage silos or in any medium in which the item or the product or the material has been stored in a vertical format.
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A
Every farm relies on silos to store grain, feed and fertilizer. And every few days, a farmer needs to check how much feed or grain is left inside. It's one of those invisible chores, the kind that never makes headlines, but quietly defines the rhythm of farm work. It means hauling yourself 30ft up a narrow steel ladder to peer into a dusty chamber to see what's left. But climbing up to check that isn't just inconvenient, it's dangerous.
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F
The challenge of monitoring solids, which is what we focus on, is much more complex for two reasons. One is that the material has a possibility and often is dusty. And also it may not necessarily flow like water. So the team that developed the solution in Levellogix had to address both of those problems. I suppose what we are talking about here is storage of bulk materials. So we're all familiar with storage of material at a domestic level. So a carton of milk, a bottle of soda, and generally speaking, on those containers, we can see through the material, right? We can see through and we can see how much material is left in our, in our carton of milk or a bottle, or even if it's a, even if it's, if it's a darkened container to protect the material from sunlight, we can simply open it and look in, right? And that's a convenience that we have. When you go to storage of bulk materials, two things happen. One is that you can't simply look in because we're talking about storage that tends to be tall. A lot of raw material, which is subject to any type of environmental contamination, whether it be from birds or from other vermin, or whether it be from rain or inclement weather or weather at all, it has to be stored in some sort of an enclosure. So it cannot. It cannot be stored in a bay. And this is particularly the case when it comes to material that can be food or can be converted into animal feed or into human feed. It has to be stored in a secure environment. When you start talking about bulk storage of material in an enclosed environment, there are very few applications where you can see through that enclosure. So unlike a bottle of soda, where you can see through because the wall is a half a millimeter thick, you've got 4 millimeter thick stainless steel or steel in the walls. So you cannot see through it. So there's two things then that happen. You can't see through the wall to see how much material is in the storage container, or let's call it a silo. And you can't just simply open the lid and look in. If you want to open the lid and look in, you have to climb up. Even in a farm environment, in an agricultural environment, the silo can be 20, 30ft, you know, 7, 10 meters off the ground. So you got to climb up. And anytime you step off the ground, the hazards associated with falling increase, right? So one step off the ground, you're going to fall, and everything. If you fall, everything is okay. If you're 2 meters off the ground and you fall, there's probably broken limbs. If you're 5 or 8 or 10 meters off the ground and you fall, the outcome is unlikely to be a good one. So the challenge around monitoring and the reason for level monitoring is because you need to be able to track in bulk storage material. You almost always need to be able to track how much of it you've got. And you have no easy way to see into that container other than climbing, which creates hazard.
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Donal works for levellogix, an Irish company that built a sensor that employs lasers to measure the contents of a silo and compressed air to clean itself. No ladders, no climbing, no guesswork.
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F
We use compressed air. So within the sensor itself and within the silo, there are no moving parts at all. And the reason that that was a primary focus when this product was to be developed is that these same contaminants this same dust that interferes with the ability of any sensor technology to take a measurement. It also has a tendency to get into really small nooks and crannies. So if you have a mechanism within your silo beside your sensor to clean the sensor, that involves moving parts, over time, dust will get into those moving parts and you're back to square one. You've got to climb the silo to clean the cleaning mechanism because it's become dusted up. So what the team did was they decided we have to have cleaning which happens either from the ground or automatically, but does not involve any moving parts. And the system that they designed is based upon that premise. Rather than simply blowing compressed air at the sensor, either on a continuous basis or on an occasional basis, they have come up with a really, really clever design. And it is based on aerodynamic principles. So if you imagine how an airplane flies, what it does is it moves through the air fast and there is a negative pressure created at the top of the wing, which kind of sucks the plane up into the sky, right? So, so that's what happens when you look at the aerodynamics of it. A plane stays in the sky because it's constantly been sucked upwards by virtue of the, the design of the aerofoil of the wing. So what they did was they designed a mechanism of dusting that did not blow air at the delicate optics and the delicate measurement component of the device. They blow the air over it and they create a suction. So rather than blowing the air off the sensor, they are blowing the dust off the sensor. They suck the dust off the sensor. And when you do that, you tend to get a much, much better cleaning. Because when you blow compressed air at a sensor that there's dust sitting on, oftentimes what you'll do is you'll force that dust adhere even more, more to the sensor, and we're back to square one. We live a life now that is becoming more and more wireless. And what we have done at levellogix is we've decided that we're not going to have any wires. We want to get away from that, mostly because, you know, in the US there are a million on farm silos. Almost none of them have any type of monitoring. If you want to start monitoring them, and your monitoring involves running cables, power cables and comm cables, and installing displays. Suddenly the burden of cost of deploying that falls on labor. Mostly you've got to get an electrician, you've got to get a mechanical guy to put the sensor in place, an electrician to Run the cables back another mechanical to install the display at ground level or bring it back to a control room and have, you know, the, the various interfaces there.
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A
On most farms, installation is half the battle. Running cables through a feed mill or across a muddy yard means hiring electricians, shutting down equipment, and waiting on weather. So the decision to go fully wireless wasn't just a tech choice. It was also one about safety. Levellogic sensors send live readings to a farmer's phone or computer, updating about every 20 minutes. It's the kind of quiet innovation that saves time, money, and potentially lives the same motivation, driving herd watch. Those are different tools, but they're both aiming to lighten the load. Technology like this often promises long term savings, but the upfront costs, especially for smaller farms, can be roadblocks. And that's where innovation runs into reality.
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B
Ron and I were raised, you know, we were grew up, we grew up on you do it the cowboy way. And yeah, you know, work hard, work smarter, not harder. But I just, I don't like the idea of some of the technology that they have I haven't looked at. But I've read enough to know that they're costly. You know, $40,000 a year for hay. And that's just hay. That's not counting the cake that we buy and the minerals you got cost in labor. Because every now and then, you know, when we gather and work all our calves in spring, we hire other people to help because, you know, you're looking at the help. And it goes back to that difference between a farmer and a cattleman. We don't want to own a lot of iron. And when I say iron, it means tractors, trailers and stuff. But it's necessary. Just like that truck.
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A
A few hundred miles away in Texas, Cody is feeding his herd something technology can't quite replace for him. There's no app for what he does best, knowing and reading his herds.
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B
Ideally, you should lay eyes on your cows every day. Simple fact, you never know if a cow is walking around out here and they get a piece of wire wrapped around their leg. We've got oil fields and, and we fight those, the oil company, because the people that come in, in these oil fields, they don't care. All they're thinking about is yeah, doing their stuff. So they'll leave stuff laying around and, and it'll, it might be a rubber ring or metal ring. And if the calf steps in that and you don't catch it for a few days, well then that hoof is swollen up around it. So you end up Having to go in and trying to cut that, getting a die grinder and cutting that stuff off. There's a lot of value in looking at your cows every day. And then you learn your cows, you learn their temperament. So when you start calving, you know that because you need to tag your calves. So you keep track of, you know, that cow had that calf. But learning that cow's behavior, because there's some cows where she has calf, you're not gonna touch her. She will put you to the ground. But if, you know, you're, you know, okay, I can calf, I can catch her calf. And that's hard to do. So any of that technology, they're not gonna know that there's a piece of wire wrapped around that cow's leg or it has a snake bite and it has an abscess. Here's how you look at it. Is, and this is something my dad taught me, is they are your factory, okay? And I work for them. And as long as I take care of the factory, they're going to take care of me.
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A
There's also the cultural factor, the pride in doing things the cowboy way. Still, he recognizes that the industry is changing. Younger farmers are turning to drones, sensors and automated feeders, tools that can make ranching more efficient. But for Cody, nothing replaces instinct.
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C
Costly.
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B
And again, and what you were kind of pointing to is that's taking away from you actually coming out and looking at your animals.
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A
Stories like that capture the crossroads that agriculture, half paper and half pixels. And the divide isn't just about age. It's also about economics and infrastructure. Here's PJ Hufstadter, an agricultural reporter for Reuters.
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G
So I think that what you're going to end up seeing is you're going to see kind of a generational, maybe not even by age, but economic also split happening where either small farms may be able to pool their resources or maybe they won't. I mean, it's really a period of. It's very much a period of change and uncertainty that's happening right now.
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That's what makes this moment so complicated. While the image of the rugged farmer persists, today's reality looks quite different.
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G
If anything, these modern farmers are absolutely 100% all about data. They are grain farmers use equipment that is all GPS based, whether it's their planter, planter and seeder, whether it's their sprayer for their chems and fertilizer, whether it's their harvest maps. A lot of those maps are required by crop insurance. When they have to put in a Claim in fact, the loan is paying for equipment that in fact is being used like some sort of evidence of, you know, the seeds got planted on the actual field and they have evidence of that. And all of that is, you know, GPS and has, you know, GPS globes on the back and, and is connected to the Internet.
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A
And farmers like Cody aren't alone. PJ pointed out a common thread across rural America that cost remains the biggest barrier to adoption.
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G
One of the biggest hurdles for young people coming into agriculture as a career is sheer economics, right? And I don't care if that's dairy or you're raising chickens for a Tyson or hogs for a Smithfield. Economics. The cost of entry for a farmer, a young farmer, is very, very high. The equipment is expensive. Land is incredibly expensive and difficult to find. To ren just that, that initial getting through the door, how much it costs them to do that, especially if they do not come from a farming family that has assets to be able to hand down, such as land or machinery or equipment, it can be incredibly daunting because oftentimes, you know, young farmers will end up taking on an enormous amount of debt and work a. A regular job in town with the hope of being able to try to just break even right, in a good year.
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A
So it's not necessarily that farmers don't want technology. It's that they can't gamble on tools that might not pay off fast enough to cover their costs. And even when they can afford it, in many cases, connectivity remains a giant hurdle.
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G
If you're in the middle of a farm and your farm is in the middle of the nowhere and you don't have great Internet access, how are you, as a farmer supposed to. Even if you make the initial investment, how are you supposed to keep that updated?
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A
Meanwhile, the farm workforce is shrinking in aging. The average US farmer is 58 years old, and each year fewer young people take their place.
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B
And then that's where we're getting in trouble, is these small operators are leaving out due to they're getting too old. They don't have family members that want to take over. You know, they're not interested in it. And the cost of just operating and then again, the young people getting into it, the cost of land, you can't, unless you're born into it and have something, it's almost impossible. What are the main concerns? Is this the next generation? That's. That's where we're going to be in trouble. Who's going to want to keep doing this? You know, I'm a. We are a prime example of the generational thing. I have a daughter up here. When I'm dead and gone, you know, she'll, you know, she'll lease it out or she'll sell the, the land. You know, there won't be any more Alexander cattle. And I'm not the only person in that boat.
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A
That shortage isn't just changing family legacies, it's reshaping the entire industry. So how do you move forward when both labor and land are running short and the tools meant to help are still out of reach? It creates a perfect catch 22. You need labor to make money, you need money to afford technology, and you need technology to make up for the lack of labor. But innovation keeps pushing forward and every new tool nudges the industry closer to a more data driven future.
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C
There is a lot of excitement right now about spray drones. This is very new. Early on we were essentially using drones for remote sensing, putting cameras or other sensing devices on them and just trying to get a look and make some estimations about what was going on in the crop. We might be able to estimate the height of the plants or something about the health of the plants in the field. Now we're able to do more active things like spraying and that, you know, fairly common is fungicide. We, we might find that we've got a fungal infection in a crop that's going to destroy our crop if we don't do something about it very quickly. And it's fairly common for a farmer to say, wow, I've just found this disease in my field, I need somebody to spray it. You know, it's Wednesday, I need somebody to spray it by Friday. Well, you might have two aerial applicator, two crop duster companies in your county and you call them up and both of them say, hey, I'm booked for the next 10 days. I can't get there till two weeks from now. And so what do you do? Well, there are now service companies that have sort of cropped up all over the country who say, we will fly your field with the drone. It costs a little more. You know, probably you might go up from say $10 an acre to $15 an acre is somewhere in that ballpark. But if you have to have it done or you're going to lose your crop, you take it and you go with it.
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A
And that's crucial for the future of autonomous agriculture in the US because drones are becoming one of agriculture's most promising tools.
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C
AI is sort of the centerpiece of that. You know, you can have great information you can have great electromechanical machines, but if you don't have the smarts in the middle of that, then none of it's really useful.
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A
That's the promise of agtech. When it works, it amplifies experience instead of erasing it.
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E
Basically, we're going to be able to give the ability to these large operations or partners, ability for them to share data across the entire supply chain. So we're really opening the doors to a new world here and a world that will hopefully increase premiums for the actual producers. It'll create a world where there's more traceability. But through these open traceability and open supply chains, we'll be able to actually start showing more of that story with data.
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F
I do think that we are at a tipping point. In fact, we've already tipped over for increasingly everything needs to be wireless, the things that we see today and that we do today. I think in five years time it'll be inconceivable almost that that's the way that we used to do it. Because AI will derive and drive so much more capability out of those same systems, as long as you can build intelligence into them.
- [30:48]
A
Each of these innovations adds up to a smarter, safer, more sustainable food system. Though we all know technology alone can't feed the world, it needs the people whose hands and instincts keep the system alive. And maybe that's the balance. The future depends on honoring the old way while building the new one. Across these stories, one message stands out. Agriculture's future depends on connection between people, between machines, and between old and new ways of thinking.
- [31:17]
C
I would say autonomy. Or if you will, autonomous systems in agriculture are critical as we still have a worldwide growing population and we need to maintain food security. And we've got fewer and fewer people who are going into the agricultural workplace. We have to have autonomous machines that fill that gap.
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A
And that ultimately is what innovation is supposed to be about. Not replacing people, in this case farmers, but equipping them to keep the world fed. Because the next great innovation might not come from Silicon Valley. It might come from a place it always has, right here in the dirt. Thanks for listening to the next Innovation. This series was produced by Situation Room Studios and Powered by Enterprise Ireland. Investing in the next wave of innovation. Our executive producer is Christine Barata and our senior producer is Sharon Barreiro. Emily Beeman and Leila Sharowi are the associate producers. Additional production assistance by Global Situation Room and a Special thanks to PJ Hufstadter and Dr. Alex Thomason. I'm your host, Jennifer strong. Until next time.