Helping Build Farm Success with Tech

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- My name's Katie Dotterer and I've been a third and first generation farmer, and an advocate for agriculture my entire life.

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- I'm Terry Harrison.

I'm a Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems here at Penn State University.

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- I'm Dan Turner, a Katahdin hair sheep farmer.

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We started with this rag tag group and had no idea about what it was like to raise sheep.

And I've become part of the continuous improvement of Katahdins.

It boils down to data.

If it comes to numbers, we can crunch those and figure out which animals are probably going to do the best for us and for other flocks.

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- [Katie] I can't tell you enough how narrow the margins are.

You can't just be a farmer anymore.

You have to be a business person.

Your pencil better be pretty darn sharp.

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- In a supply chain, speed is everything.

So how do you get speed?

Speed comes from typically, improving your business processes and also injecting technology.

- [Katie] Technology is constantly changing the landscape of agriculture.

I remember as young as 10 years old, our cows had pedometers.

It's very important to understand how many steps a cow is taking.

That's a diagnostic tool for us.

- We're on the cusp of another incremental increase in the use of technology, leading to solutions that help the farmer get as much out of their product as they possibly can.

- I'd be able to quickly see if I had a sick one.

If they weren't eating the amount that I expect, it would tell me that.

- Technology would make our farms a lot more efficient.

Efficiency equals profitability.

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My first experience with AR, augmented reality, I put the goggles on and I was being instructed of how to use it, what to look for.

- Putting on a headset makes you look like a weirdo, because everything's operated from your fingers.

- It's like having that computer screen in front of you, but you're the only one that can see it.

- So if I want, I can have multiple sheets open and they're clear as day to me, but yet I'm still seeing everything else in the room.

- It it's not as cumbersome as say, taking a laptop out to the barn.

Everything is right there.

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The farmer in me is thinking, oh my word, this could change agriculture.

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Can you imagine just walking through your barn and you're just looking over and making sure your girls, or whatever you're looking at, that they're doing good.

But instead of just looking at the cow herself, now you're also getting these hologram images that are popping up above each cow.

And maybe it's also set that, hey, there's a red flag on this one.

I wouldn't have seen that with my human eyes, but augmented reality could.

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- I'm not physically touching anything.

So I can be working with my hands and non-contact, be able to change what it is I'm looking at in my headset.

- I mean nobody will ever be able to take away a farmer's expertise with their own animals, that will never substitute that.

But what AR technology will do is improve how we do things.

And that's anything from our soil management, to the health of our livestock.

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- Even as a youngster growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I was always drawn to the outdoors, and started my forestry studies.

Coincident with that, I worked summers as a logger up in the Northwestern part of the state.

So what do I see as the future of natural and technology-based solutions coming together?

And I have to say it's extremely important to me cause I've lived my life sort of in a dual existence.

Technology, it has to be there going forward for us to be competitive.

A natural world, it has to be there for us to have an existence.

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I would love to be able to start over again right now.

It's such an exciting time.

- There's a lot of work to do yet, but I have no doubt that this technology can be a reality very soon, with the right tools, the right people, the right attitude, and the right connections.

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