Since 1900, agriculture has been through huge transformations: mechanization, hybridization, chemization, genetic modification. The time has come for the "Digital Agriculture Era."
The Agriculture Forum invited John Power, President & Senior Advisor of LSC, to present Megatrends: The Digital Transformation of Row Crop Agriculture, exploring the opportunities presented by digital agriculture and its strategic implications.
After his presentation, Power sat down with AmCham China to record a podcast. Below is an excerpt from the interview. To listen to the full interview, click on the link at the bottom.
I think that the opportunities in China really break down in two clear-cut areas. You’ve got the large farming operations in the Northeast and the Northwest, and they’re certainly on a scale where they can take the current practices that are being used in Brazil, the US and other countries, and put these into operation. This will have a significant impact on their overall productivity for any major crop. The other section, obviously, is the smaller farmers, which are much more common and many more acres involved. There, it’s really a strategic opportunity for China to develop an approach which combines the mechanization of these small farms with the technologies around data. Just as an example, there’s a concept called “geo-fencing.” This means that you define a very specific field area, so in concept, one could define the areas that are basically controlled by individual farmers, put fences around them, and then, using digital agriculture, track everything that happens on a consolidated large scale but still give the results to the small-scale farmer.
