Precision Agriculture Has Its Cassandra. His Name Is Kevin.
The push to embrace precision agriculture is transforming food production in the U.S. It’s also turning farmers into software-bound tenants of OEMs, warns Kevin Kenney. But is anyone listening?
Farming in the United States is in the midst of a major transformation - the biggest since the arrival of the Fordson tractor (yes, “that Ford”) and mechanized agriculture more than a century ago.
The transformative technology back then was the internal combustion engine, which allowed farmers to power a wide range of new machines and mechanize previously manual implements from tractors and reapers to combine harvesters.
The transformative technology now? Precision agriculture, which is a catch-all term that describes a constellation of technologies that are transforming how farming is done and how farmers and ranchers tend both crops and livestock. Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, “big data” analytics and cloud computing.
Technology fueling automation
The new capabilities that these technologies enable are prodigious - and would seem other worldly to farmers even two decades ago. There are, already, autonomous tractors controllable via a mobile app and capable of tilling fields without any driver in the cab (e.g. Sabanto). Then there are “smart spraying” systems that use arrays of cameras and artificial intelligence to identify weeds, crops and soil to place fertilizer (or weed killer) with surgical accuracy, thereby reducing the amount of chemicals used (and the environmental damage caused by their use).
Such technologies have been a focus of major ag equipment makers for years, and you can trace the evolution of the space simply by looking at the string of acquisitions and business partnerships penned by giants like John Deere, AGCO, CNH Industrial and others. Those include recently signed deals like the one Deere struck last month with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to tap that company’s Starlink satellite-based broadband network to provide precision agriculture features to farmers in remote, rural communities that lack broadband access. It also includes the agricultural equipment giant AGCO’s announcement in September, 2023 that it was taking an 85% stake in Trimble, a heretofore OEM-agnostic provider of software and services that support farmers that are applying precision agriculture technologies. That deal was valued at $2 billion.
The (hidden) cost of progress
As with any technological revolution, however, there are both “winners” and “losers” in the emerging age of precision agriculture. After all: the embrace of mechanized agriculture a century ago sharply drove down the need for farm workers from nearly 14 million in the United States in 1910 to half that in the mid 1960s and around 3 million by the turn of the millennium. The number of independent farms dropped also: from more than 6 million to just over 2 million during the same period.
Precision agriculture, once broadly adopted, promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) However, the risks it poses go well beyond a reduction in the agricultural work force.
First, as the USDA notes on its website: the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms.
Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms. That includes the risk of disruption due to cyber attacks on precision farming hardware, software and services - an issue that agricultural equipment makers are scrambling to address, but reluctant to discuss. (Listen to my podcast interview with the hacker Sick Codes, who reverse engineered a John Deere display to run the Doom video game for insights into the company’s internal struggles with cybersecurity.)
Finally, there are the reams of valuable and proprietary environmental and operational data that farmers collect, store and leverage to squeeze the maximum productivity out of their land. For centuries, such information resided in farmers’ heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners.
Precision agriculture technology greatly expands the scope, and granularity, of that data. But in doing so, it also wrests it from the farmer’s control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers - often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data itself. In fact, the Federal Government is so concerned about farm data they included a section (1619) on “information gathering” into the latest farm bill.
Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.
Precision Ag’s Cassandra
That’s a dark view of the future - and one that its hard to hear over the “rah rah rah!” of precision agriculture’s (corporate funded) boosters. But its not like nobody sees the writing on the wall, or is sounding the alarm bell.
Kevin Kenney grew up on a dairy farm in Plainview, Nebraska. After getting his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska’s College of Agricultural Engineering, Kevin went to work developing alternative fuel systems for farms, and helped to develop the first 'Rural CNG Fill Station' in Nebraska serving the Frontier COOP's David City, Nebraska site. He works full time as an Alternative Fuel Systems Engineer at Grassroots Energy LLC.
He has been a vocal advocate for a “right to repair” agricultural equipment, even appearing as a guest on Louis Rossman’s YouTube show to talk about farming and the right to repair. Kevin is also one of the loudest voices warning about the dangers posed by the increasing consolidation in the agricultural equipment industry and its wholesale export of proprietary farm data. Left unchecked, such trends could spell the end of small and independent farm and farmers, while leaving our agriculture sector in the hands of onerous, exploitive and unaccountable monopolies.
Those warnings, thus far, have gone unheeded. In fact, Kenney has mostly received hostile responses, or silence from the individuals and agencies he has approached with his concerns. That makes Kevin something akin to a modern day “Cassandra,” the Greek mythological character who was granted the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo, but whose punishment for refusing his advances was that nobody would believe her warnings. Cassandra’s curse was to see future events, but be unable to use that knowledge to alter those events or prevent them from happening.
The concept of “Cassandras” isn’t a new one. Heck, the noted cybersecurity expert and former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clark even wrote a book about the phenomenon, Warnings, that profiled a number of individuals who warned (loudly) about looming disasters - only to be ignored. They include Yukinobu Okamura, the Japanese seismologist who tried in vain to warn the government about the risk of tsunamis destroying reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, or Harry Markopolos, the certified financial advisor that tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that storied New York investor Bernie Madoff was actually running a Ponzi scheme - years before the $65 billion scheme finally fell apart.
In the following interview, conducted via e-mail, Fight to Repair News dug deep into the questions and doubts that loom around precision agriculture. We asked Kevin to describe his background and expand on his concerns about the risks that precision agriculture exposes. His responses to our questions are below, with some minor editing for clarity.
Interview: Kevin Kenney
F2R: Start with a brief history of you and farming (growing up, professionally) including what you do now (day job) and how you've seen the ag equipment market change over time.
Kevin: I grew up on a Dairy Farm in Plainview, Nebraska. Among milking cows and feeding the yearling steers, we had all sorts of poultry, some hogs and sad to say…the ‘Milk Goat’ we had to hand milk each morning because Dad liked the milk…not the most fun job!
