The Farming Industry Has Embraced ‘Precision Agriculture’ and AI, but Critics Question Its Environmental Benefits

Picture an American farm in your mind.

You might envision a red barn. Some cows. A field of corn. You might even see a tractor in this idealized landscape. Maybe a classic John Deere, its kelly green cab atop giant yellow-hubbed tires.

Now think of that tractor another way, not as a vestige of American farm nostalgia, but instead a super-sophisticated, million-dollar computer on wheels that’s linked to satellite systems, cloud-based storage, machine learning and artificial intelligence. A harvester of data. Even a robot that can think and adapt.

In the 1990s, John Deere widely marketed the first tractor to use GPS, allowing farmers to steer across a gridded field based on coordinates. That innovation, arguably, kicked off the “precision agriculture” era in which data and digitization have become integrated in large-scale farming across much of the globe.