What I really started to notice in the latter half of 2019 is that various larger farms, with a very progressive agronomy program and also independent agronomic consultants or regional size agronomy firms taking technology matters into their own hands. 

It was a grass roots approach for getting data to where they are, where they want it to be and making decisions on their own without having to go to outside sources. If we were looking for like an automated prescription tool or something like that, people started to actually go, what I would call, go back to the basics.

Farmers did a lot of their own homework and put technology packages together in order to basically enable themselves to make better and easier management decisions.

We look on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and even Instagram, all these different social media sites. I started noticing a lot of people in this space, that I would not have been figuring would have been going after the technology.

We always had figured it was going to be the larger companies that put together a tech package. We buy it, we install it, and then, you know, we go about our way on the farm. But in this case, I think there were a lot of farms that were getting frustrated. Agronomists getting frustrated with the fact that we have all this technology out there, but nothing's very consolidated.

It's difficult to understand or how it should integrate together. So I just started noticing a lot more people take it upon themselves to become the integrators, figuring it out. What works, what doesn't, and then they started promoting those items within their own ag community. The coffee shop talk, if you will. That kind of thing is encouraging and what we need.

Hear more from Dr. Ray Asebedo in our Strip-Till Farmer podcast series, sponsored by Topcon Agriculture and check out past Tech Tips.