Blog · Agriculture

Farmers want proof before autonomy. Start on their own field.

· 2 min read

Autonomous farm equipment has not arrived on farms as fast as many expected. That was the message from a panel at the Big Iron show in West Fargo on 15 September, reported by Agweek. The reasons were practical: the cost does not yet add up for many farms, farmers worry about repairs and support, and they want to know who owns the data the machines collect. None of those is solved by a better demo on someone else's field.

What the panel said

Jennifer Edney, president and CEO of Edney Distributing, put the cost plainly. If an autonomous solution costs $140 an hour to run, "just replacing a driver doesn't really pencil out." She also warned that equipment could become a "very expensive boat anchor" if the company behind it fails.

Michael Frank of the NSF Ag Tech Engine in North Dakota said farmers want clarity "about how data gathered by the autonomous tools is used and who owns it." Noel Anderson of Grand Farm raised security: "There are bad actors that would love to do that in a malicious way."

Two days later, Grand Farm hosted its Autonomous Nation conference near Casselton, built around the same questions: workforce, deployment barriers and making automation safe and reliable in real field conditions.

What proof would actually help

Read together, the concerns point to three things a farmer needs before trusting a machine to work alone:

  1. Evidence on their own ground. Not a showcase field, but their field: its shape, its slopes, its tree lines and approaches, its rows.
  2. Numbers that match their operation. How many rows, how many turns, how much of the field a machine would cover, before anyone quotes a price per hour.
  3. Their data staying theirs. Records from their fields kept under their control, with nothing collected that they did not agree to.

These can be worked out in software, long before any hardware is bought.

What Prism Labs is doing

Prism X is our hardware division, and its first product, Prism Rover, is a field robot designed to drive between crop rows, scouting plant by plant. Prism Rover is not yet available. What exists today is the software around it.

  • A simulation on real fields. Our Prism Rover simulator can load any field boundary in North Dakota from Prism Microclimate and drive a simulated rover row by row inside that real outline.
  • A real place, not a stage set. We are now building full scenes of real fields from public measurements of the ground, trees, buildings, roads and power lines around them, checked against street-level photos of the same spot.
  • Your data stays yours. The same principle as the rest of Prism: data stays inside your organisation. See what is data custody in AI.

We think the right order is proof first, then hardware. If you farm in North Dakota and want to see this on your own field, join the waitlist with your field, and we will build the simulation from your own ground.

Sources

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