The bill seeks to streamline ag data collection within USDA to make it more centralized and easily accessible to land grant universities and other organizations for research.

I have a drill press in my shed at home. It is a common tool that I use all of the time. It has a lot of functionality and works better than a handheld drill for most things. But for as valuable a tool as my drill-press is, it is worthless without drill bits.

John Deere built an enormous trade show booth with multiple video screens celebrating 100 years of building tractors. Of course, the latest green iron was displayed too, as were numerous monitors explaining Deere’s tools for collecting and using ag data.

I can assure you that in Agriculture, trends are every bit as present as they are in any other walk of life. Our challenge when it comes to being a technology group is that we are constantly looking at new gadgets, gizmos, and concepts. Some of them are obviously great new tools, some are sketchy, half-baked things doomed to failure, and some are questionable.

WIRED explains that the current generation of chips in cell phones were designed for the 4G or LTE network, which is slowly growing to include all sorts of devices that were not originally planned.

When it comes to new Precision Ag technology and hardware, there is often a bit of anxiety about being the first to try it. I think it goes back to the tongue in cheek adage, “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

One of my predictions for 2018 was that we would start hearing about blockchain implications for agriculture. But I did not expect it would be this quick.