Editor’s notice: The CropLife/Purdue Precision Survey is the longest-running steady research of precision farming adoption, performed no less than each different 12 months since 1996. The 93 agricultural retailer enter provider respondents principally from the Midwest included cooperatives, impartial retailers, and people a part of a regional or nationwide chain. The outcomes reported are for sellers that recognized as primarily working with area crops reminiscent of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton, milo, sugar beets, and forages. Sellers that work with specialty crops reminiscent of tree fruits and nuts, greens, berries, and grapes are analyzed individually. A full report detailing the entire 2025 outcomes will probably be posted on-line later this 12 months. The total report from the 2024 survey, and in addition earlier years, might be accessed right here.
The 12 months 2025 finds precision agriculture at a crossroads of a number of maturing applied sciences with some newer ones within the combine, all searching for their match with farmers and their crop enter sellers, report Bruce Erickson and James Lowenberg-DeBoer at CropLife, a sister model to the International Ag Tech Initiative.
In final 12 months’s survey and the ensuing 2024 article, we targeted on the promise of what this newer class might deliver to crop manufacturing and ag retail’s function. In distinction the “traditional precision agriculture” set — which for probably the most half originated within the Nineteen Nineties and included precision soil testing, VRT fertilizer, and lime functions, variable seeding charges, imagery, and yield displays — had for 20 years principally ridden an upward (however typically bumpy) wave of know-how adoption. Autoguidance and part controllers got here alongside within the early 2000s and caught on comparatively shortly. Whereas some in that traditional set are nonetheless discovering their place, sellers are optimistic about machine imaginative and prescient for weed management and different precision pest administration, crop inputs utilized with UAV/drones, and robotics for soil sampling, scouting, and mechanical weeding.
Vendor Use, Choices of Precision Ag
Sellers are utilizing autoguidance on 85% of their customized acres, and sprayer increase or nozzle management on 76% of their customized acres. Fifty-three % of sellers are utilizing telemetry to trade data, and 48% utilizing GPS fleet administration for automobile monitoring and logistics, each up from years previous (not proven).
Sellers have been requested what precision/digital merchandise they’re at present providing to their farmer prospects, and if not now, will they offer in three years? The best numbers planning so as to add are for machine imaginative and prescient weed detection on sprayer (now at simply 4% however 19% will add, Determine 1), VRT for customized pesticide functions (40% now and 17% will add), and revenue/value mapping (24% now and 15% will add). Different areas anticipated for development by sellers are in VRT irrigation prescriptions and crop inputs utilized with a UAV/drone.
In 2025, fewer sellers indicated they have been providing a number of the long-time staples of precision agriculture, together with precision soil sampling, yield displays, and different information evaluation, VRT for his or her customized fertilizer functions, VRT seeding prescriptions, and imagery (Figures 2 and three). We have now noticed this downward development in these choices in the previous couple of years, as famous in our 2024 article.
Respondents are totally different yearly, so just a few factors up or down in anybody 12 months doesn’t at all times sign a development. With uncertainty within the ag retail enterprise and farmer prospects frightened about tight crop margins, sellers could also be specializing in what has been their dependable earnings streams — fertilizer, seed, and pesticide gross sales, and customized functions. A decrease proportion of sellers providing these dovetails with comparable, however principally much less dramatic decreases reported with these applied sciences on farms of their commerce areas (Figures 4 and 5).
Farmer Use of Precision Ag
Sellers report on the share of acres of their commerce space of farmers utilizing sure digital ag applied sciences. Most acres use steering, a mix yield monitor, part controllers, precision soil testing, and planter controllers, as has been the case for the previous couple of years (Determine 4).
