Precision Farming Dealer recently caught up with John Fulton, a professor in the food, agriculture and biological engineering department at the Ohio State Univ., to talk about precision ag education and workforce development. Here are some highlights from the conversation. 

What's important to know about precision ag education?

John Fulton: We spend a lot of time asking ourselves how we can expand our educational experiences here at Ohio State for what we call precision ag or digital ag. We've been working to develop 5 courses that deal with precision ag or digital ag. These include anything from fairly introductory type courses, bringing awareness and exposure to the technologies and data science and analytical pieces that we're starting to see, to the actual hardware and field application type implementation of all those. These 5 courses are quite comprehensive and give students a solid background within a 4-year degree. 

Then we encourage students to do internships, which would typically be during 3 months of summer term. We see that this has really grown in the past 5-6 years. Students going out — whether that be with a large corporation or a local dealership or service provider — and taking on these internships that often have a precision ag focus.

Additionally, we're working to grow continuing education opportunities both for students or those already in industry. It's a pretty hot topic and it's growing. We try to also offer the precision ag CCA content, whether that's a 1-hour webinar or a multi-hour/half-day, full-day experience in education for those already involved but needing to keep up with new technology and data applications in their working environment.

How do you characterize the growing focus on digital agriculture and emerging technology?

Fulton: Traditionally, over the last 30 years, we've tended to focus on precision agriculture. The way I differentiate precision vs. digital is that precision is really the hardware and the basic services that you see offered — like precision soil sampling, some basic mapping, creating crop production reports or prescriptions, those kinds of things. That's precision.

What we got into was trying to differentiate some of the newer analytical aspects to it. We now have both faculty and then research that's going into the analytics, which includes artificial intelligence (AI), but really doing the data analysis and bringing new learnings as we collect this large volume of data coming off of farms and fields today. Thinking about the data being more in the digital arena, that is how we see precision ag under the digital ag umbrella. That all falls under the umbrella, including the analytical aspects of having predictability within these systems or modeling. As part of the new coursework, we added an introductory digital ag course in 2025.

How are organizations helping meet the needs of precision ag focused students?

Fulton: The International Society of Precision Ag (ISPA) for several years has been getting a lot of inquiries because more and more universities, colleges and even industry organizations have asked us about teaching precision ag and digital ag topics. To try and help facilitate people, give them resources to be able to create content or a course, we've been trying to put all of that information together. We just built a database that our members can access. We basically had asked all the members, and non-members as well, to fill out a form detailing the course. We also asked whether instructors or lecturers were willing to submit the syllabus.

That way, we have this database available so that if someone was looking to start a new course or wanted to see what others are teaching, you could go to that database and use that as a tool in that development work. That has been very positively received. We see a lot of universities and young or new faculty using that as a tool to help them develop new coursework at their particular institution.

We, as a society, look at not only trying to promote precision ag and digital ag, but we want to make sure that education in this is very important. Obviously, that could be at the ground level to student level to even professional level.

We're getting a lot of questions because even folks working in the industry who may come over and work in the technology division may not have a background in precision ag. They want a quick course where they can ask, "What is precision ag? Tell me about some of the technologies, how they're being used, what value they bring to farmers." We're trying to promote and encourage that amongst our membership and continually trying to be that facilitator through the society for that education.

Considering emerging technologies and expanding collaboration on curriculum — for both new students and those already in the industry — what’s the outlook for precision ag careers?

Fulton: For Ohio State, the outlook is positive. We've had students graduate and be plugged right into a precision ag dealer or service providers at different levels. Those levels could mean someone going directly into an equipment dealership or an input supplier, retailer, co-op or a large company. The prospects are very positive.

A lot of the jobs that are available out there, our students are able to obtain. We're getting very good placement today out of our program. The job opportunities have still remained fairly strong, even through this challenging farm economy, we're still seeing students get hired, especially in these technology positions.

The technology front is changing very rapidly. We're seeing a lot of new technologies come, and it's exciting to see what's still coming. We've got to be ready for it, too, and support those efforts to bring it both to current students and those putting it into practice who need to continue to learn how to best leverage the technology.