This year I was honored to be asked back to cover the events of the
Alltech Sympoium as a guest blogger. I absolutely love this event because it is full of information and actually keeps your attention. Which is normally a pretty hard task for me......you know the classic hold your head up by resting it in on your hand in attempts to make it look like you aren't napping through the session. Yeah that has yet to happen here! This year's symposium was all about the What if......
Founder and Owner of Alltech: Pearse Lyons
I love technology and I love hearing about what is coming
down the pipeline when it comes to awesome gadgets and technology that will
help the Agriculture industry be more responsible and efficient. During this year’s Alltech symposium I got to
hear about just that and the future is looking quite exciting!!
My favorite session was: A Farming Revolution, which
discussed drones and GPS and what the possibilities look like. Majority of the drones that are available
today to the average buyer are a small drone with 4 propellers that has the
ability to take a photo over your field or location. That is cool and all and has come a long way
from where we were before which pretty much consisted of climbing the nearest
silo or antenna tower to look out across the field and farm.
Some of the ideas of what the future of drones looks like
was mind boggling to me and makes my inner tech geek excited! Some of the ideas and even projects being
tested include the idea of having drones keep real time over long periods of
time by hovering over the field or farm (kind of like a blimp). How great would it be to be able
to see exactly when your crop started to mature or when a certain disease was
really spreading throughout your field?
That is valuable information to be able to capture.
One of my favorite ideas was multiple small drones in large
numbers flying over your fields at all times and even going so far as being
able to suck up harmful insects and recycle them into fertilizer to help
eliminate the use of insecticides and even recycle weeds into fertilizer to
replace herbicides. How amazing is
that? The best part is that it’s a
serious possibility for the future of farming.
One of the key statements that was said multiple times
throughout the session is that farmers really need to be open minded to
technology innovations and try to look beyond the practices that have been in
place for multiple centuries. While
these practices have been successful we still need to be more efficient to be
able to feed the 9 billion by 2050. Also
stated was the fact that farmers need to work together to share ideas and
advancements and I couldn’t agree with that statement more! The more we work together as an industry the
better we are as a whole!
This year’s symposium did such an amazing job of really
making you think “what if”. The
possibilities for the future of Agriculture really are endless. I leave you with this question that was asked
to us….. “Do you want to be the disruptor, or do you want to be disrupted?”
Cheers!
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