Editor’s note: This is the first of a series on questions growers should ask before investing in new ag tech. Because fresh produce is a high-value segment of agriculture, there are a lot of options out there to spend your money on. But asking the right questions before you purchase can save you time, money and headache.
New tech is shiny and exciting. Some have even called it “sexy.” And because fresh produce is a reliably high-value segment of agriculture, there are plenty of new ag tech toys and tools for specialty crop growers out there.
“It sells great in a boardroom,” notes Aaron Fields, CEO of Campo Caribe, a Caribbean-based CEA company, at the “Smart, Not Flashy: Building Profitable CEA with Low-Tech Solutions” summer webinar hosted by Indoor Ag Conversations of ag tech.
“It’s sexy, and it turns heads, but it will never supplant knowledge, and it will never guarantee results unless you know what to do with it,” he adds.
So, before you consider thinking about investing in new ag tech, there are some questions you should ask yourself.
No. 1: What is my business goal?
This is a fundamental question, possibly even existential, but knowing your specific business goal is a key starting point to any decision-making process, especially in the case of the potentially pricey investment that ag tech represents.
“What’s the goal?” asks Richard Vollebregt, CEO of Cravo Equipment Ltd., which makes automated retractable roofs for greenhouses and other industries, who also spoke at the webinar.
“To brag that you have the highest yield per square meter or that you are the most profitable pound on the supermarket shelf? Is the goal to produce 100 kilos per square meter or is the goal to make money?” Vollebregt asks.
He advises identifying your specific goal and build your decision-making process around pursuing it.
For fresh produce growers specifically, Chris Higgins, general manager of Hort Americas, a components and materials supplier for CEA growers, narrowed down the likeliest goal as growing a salable product at a profitable price point.
“So, we are looking for technology that helps us achieve [that],” he said at the summer webinar.
No. 2: What’s needed to achieve that goal (that I can control)?
Higgins tells The Packer that growers often lose focus when thinking about new tech. Growers forget “that the ability to [grow a salable product at a profitable price point] is dependent upon a wide variety of variables,” he says, adding, “I think they fall into traps of trying to control things they can’t control.”
The essential variables that affect a plant’s ability to grow are things like access to water, temperature, humidity, nutrients, airflow, the labor necessary to plant, tend and harvest them, and so on, according to Higgins.
“I’m going to isolate the ones that I can control holistically” he says. “Like I can control how much money I spend on labor by automating the way my labor does their task or their work. I can’t necessarily control airflow unless I’m in a greenhouse, right?”
“Once you identify what those are and where you feel you can make the biggest impact, that’s where your focus on tech should be,” he adds.
No. 3: What are my biggest pain points?
If starting from a large goal and whittling down to a smaller focus to direct your ag tech investigation doesn’t appeal, you can instead start from your problems.
“Try this exercise: What are the top two or three challenges keeping you up at night?” recommends Roy Levinson, commercial lead for digital farming and water meters at Netafim North America. Similarly, Higgins recommends looking at your largest production line item.
“For example, how much you spend on fertilizers, how much you spend on labor, how much you spend on pesticides,” Higgins says. “My opinion is you should go to the one that accounts for the largest percentage of those expenses and start to look at how you can use tech to lower those expenses.”
It’s also important to ask your team about their pain points because they will be the ones using whatever tech you eventually decide on.
“They’re the people that you need to talk to first,” says Mark Lukenbill, commercial leader at MileMaker, a trucking-focused software solutions arm of Rand McNally. He recommends growers or operation owners take an internal survey.
“It’s super simple: SurveyMonkey out to all your employees and ask: ‘Hey, if the company could invest money to make your job easier, what’re three things that you think that we should get?’” Lukenbill suggests.
No. 4: Could something I already have solve the issue?
So, you’ve identified a goal to pursue or a problem that needs fixing (probably) with new tech. But before you look at new tech, consider what you already have. If you can solve the challenge with something you already own, there’s no need to spend more money.
Steve Mantle, CEO and founder of Innov8.ag, a data-and-AI-focused tech consulting group that works with permanent crop produce growers, gives the example of a grower who was using a digital scale system with built-in GPS that records workers’ berry tote weights to their RFID badge. The grower was only using the system for payroll purposes, however.
“But this technology could be doing so much more for growers. They can use that data they are already collecting to proactively identify the underperformers and get them more training,” he says. “So the grower can take what was already a great tool for payroll and paying people and turn it around to a use to actually help workers be more productive.”
If it does seem like you will need something new to reach your goal or solve your problem, Lukenbill recommends growers first turn to vendors they already pay.
“Most vendors don’t like losing customers, and when they hear you raising your hand saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got another problem,…’ they’ll say, ‘Hey, we want to keep you as a customer, so we can solve that problem by doing this.’”
No. 5: What is the right scope?
This is effectively a Goldilocks question. If you focus on a potential piece of ag tech that doesn’t fully solve your problem or reach your goal (i.e. it’s “too small”), then you’ll just be looking for another solution soon. Wasted time and money. But the same is true if what you’re looking at is too big.
This is something Lukenbill says he sees frequently, especially when new ag tech decisions are being made in a top-down way. Executive staff at an operation often start with a too big whole-operation approach to new ag tech, he says. This often leads to a rigorous, but time-consuming, process of internal audits, ROI evaluations, product comparisons and budgeting investigations before a final decision is made.
“What happens if you’re about to make that decision, and then all of a sudden one of your biggest customers goes under, and priorities have to shift?” he asks. “Then that process starts all over again a year and a half down the road.”
Even worse, moving forward with a “too big” ag tech solution can have its own problems. As Fields put it: Tech often begets more tech.
“I have to have a system to control the system, and I have to have somebody here that does that; that’s the real cost,” he noted, speaking in the context of CEAs. “You end up seven systems deep, and lettuce doesn’t pay for that and that’s dangerous.”
Vollebregt summarizes the question of scope as the need to figure out what counts as “appropriate tech” for any given goal.
“The question is: What kind of technology do you need to do that and at what cost?”
Catch the rest of the Tech Questions series here:
