Speaker: Chris Harbourt, Agrible, Inc.
Abstract: With only 30 or 40 chances to get it right in a lifetime and maybe one chance to get it wrong, agriculture is a high risk business. Growers are conditioned to handle the risks by hedging performance with resilience and balancing stability with responsiveness. To convince a grower to adopt technology immediately, the product needs to clearly differentiate and the advantages need to be strong: like a tractor vs a horse. Even in this example, buying fuel and a complicated machine was a risk compared to growing feed and caring for a horse like the generation before. On any given day, a grower making the decision to use a tractor began to see the advantages – they did not have 30 or 40 opportunities, but thousands of opportunities to see the value in that tractor. Big Data and modern advancements are challenged in the same way. With “secret sauce” data technologies, growers simply can’t wait for proof, nor can the businesses building the technology survive three or more years of “tire kicking” while a grower is making a decision to use the technology. Only the data technologies that show a grower thousands of benefits per year, or are so clearly differentiating that they are instantly adopted, will survive to help feed the world.