Autonomous agriculture companies optimize at the machine level. Better agronomy, resource efficiency, labor reduction. The farmer listening to that pitch optimizes at the farm level. Cost per acre. Cost per bushel. Depreciation, switching cost, downtime risk, parallel systems. Those are not the same calculation. This article is about the gap between them. And why closing it is the real adoption curve.
"Right now, when a startup approaches a dealer group about representing its autonomous platform, the agronomic case is usually compelling and the economics question is usually left to the customer to work out. That's the wrong order," says Graham Gleed, principal advisor at abcg.
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