How many people today have a PC with Windows on it? I guarantee you when Microsoft sees the farm and all these different sensors today, they see a connected farm. 

But why they did not enter the ag market 5 years ago vs. today, is because they are now getting the hardware and the connectivity devices to where they can get everything connected together. They’re going to do proof of concepts to show that their stuff works. 

After that, they feel other partners will fall in line. But at the end of the day, when you start up a Farm 1.0, you’ll see a little Windows sign on the front screen. They see a huge opportunity with this. 

So what’s the issue for us? Dependency, right? What would we do if we didn’t have Windows on our PC or your Mac OS on our Apple? We wouldn’t be able to use it. We’re basically concreted to that one platform. 

This makes them your foundation for your digital ag operation. It also makes it difficult to migrate onto a different system because you're so intertwined to it. It becomes painful to change. 

  A big goal of these systems is data acquisition. They want to know what’s going on, on the farm. There’s tons of different things companies can do with that kind of information. But this is not new. 

We get very concerned about data privacy on the farm without even thinking about a lot of these things listen to us anyway. What’s good about it? That IoT infrastructure that these other companies are bringing in waves or forcing change across the ag industry is it removes the silos, which is huge for us.

Hear more from Dr. Ray Asebedo in our Strip-Till Farmer podcast series, sponsored by Topcon Agriculture.