OPINION:
The farm is an American institution. It represents a connection to land passed down through generations and the fortitude required to maintain it. Farming is more than just another industry; it’s a way of life that forms the backbone of rural communities across the country.
As a child, I spent time on my great aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in Archie, Missouri. What stands out in my memory isn’t just the joy of farming and the beauty of the land, it’s also the grit and determination required to keep a farm going year after year.
Farming is hard work. It’s early mornings, long days and a constant battle to keep a legacy alive. The modern reality for farmers is tough and getting worse. Once a hero of our heritage, the American farmer is being squeezed by two growing challenges: financial strains and the need to develop new markets for their crops. Financially, farmers today face various challenges, including rising loan interest rates and shrinking profit margins.
Although Congress has just passed a one-year extension of the farm bill, the shutdown and other budgetary debates showed that short-term fixes alone won’t secure the future of American agriculture. The American farm is under threat, and the policies designed to support it must look beyond the immediate budget cycle.
What America’s farmers need now is a forward-looking strategy that matches the scale of their challenges. Precision agriculture offers one important pillar of such a strategy. State-of-the-art tools that use GPS and other innovations to save farmers time, effort and resources, are the future of farming. These tools are the key to helping today’s farms thrive and keeping farms viable for generations to come.
Although precision agriculture technologies are already in use by larger farms and enterprise agriculture, small and medium-size family farms are at risk of being left behind. Much of rural America remains disconnected from the broadband infrastructure and cloud-based tools that enable GPS-guided farming in the first place, with nearly 1 in 4 rural Americans lacking reliable high-speed internet.
To solve this problem and give farmers a major technological boost, we need a coordinated national effort to bring cutting-edge precision agriculture and modern technological tools into the hands of the farmers who need them.
The opportunities for immediate payoffs are vast: As of 2023, 70% of large-scale crop-producing farms reported using precision agriculture technologies such as GPS-guided autosteering systems on tractors and other equipment. That number drops to 52% and 9% for midsize and small family farms, respectively.
To bridge this gap, the Trump administration can create a national action plan to modernize America’s farms. This effort should involve all federal agencies and take a holistic view to address the challenges affecting farmers. The Action Plan should include resources and financing to incorporate America’s leading-edge precision agriculture technology into farms.
The nation also needs to urgently expand rural broadband access, provide training and expertise to support farmers adopting new technologies, and encourage America’s youths to apply their technological skills to farming. These and other projects can be accomplished only through strategic thinking and broad cross-agency collaboration.
President Trump recently modeled this approach with America’s AI Action Plan, a whole-of-government strategy that mandates collaboration and charges every agency with doing its part to help the U.S. win the global artificial intelligence race. The president chose this holistic approach to AI technology to “reshape the global balance of power” and “revolutionize the way we live and work.” With coordinated federal backing, AI investments have transcended partisan divides to prioritize a common goal.
Modernizing America’s farms should be similarly prioritized. The nation’s farms represent America’s core infrastructure — a cornerstone of our national and economic security — and should be prioritized for improvement like any other critical assets. If AI is a strategic imperative for our nation’s future, so too is the technology we use to grow our food supply and support the farmers who produce it. Our national security depends on it.
Beyond the technological boost a precision agriculture action plan will bring to farmers, there is a cultural imperative to ensure the survival of the American farm. A united, national effort will empower the next generation to carry on the proud tradition of farming and tending the land. By expanding access to the best and latest American technologies, we can secure the legacy of farming for tomorrow.
• Lisa Dyer is executive director of the GPS Innovation Alliance, a trade organization representing leading organizations that deliver positioning, navigation and timing technologies.
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