Challenges facing the agriculture industry

1. Farm financing

With the fragility of financial markets and growing hardships, many farms are trending towards higher debt, lower worker capital, and less income. Some countries, such as New Zealand, have implemented government bills and policies designed to reduce the financial pressure for farms, but the agriculture industry as a whole has faced challenging times, being uniquely vulnerable to a variety of factors such as weather changes, market price volatility, pests, and diseases.

2. Dry conditions

Global warming spells out an expansion of dry areas globally, with a decline in water resources and increased drought in dry areas. These dry conditions have a negative impact on farms, reducing agricultural output and typically even economic growth for an entire region. With these dryer conditions affecting our agricultural yields, many in the agriculture sector are looking for long term solutions.

In some areas such as Australia, farmers are experimenting with new techniques, such as “dry seeding”, which indicate better yields during dry seasons.

3. Labor shortages

Rising wages, financial strain, and other factors has led to a shortage of labor in the agriculture sector for many countries. Some farmers are increasingly moving towards different forms of mechanization to get around the shortage of labor, as well as a strong interest in automation in the form of advanced robots and sensor technologies.

4. Adopting technology

A lot of farms are still using paper forms and checklists on a regular basis for managing jobs, logging time, health and safety compliance, and more. These papers are easily lost, time consuming to scan or transcribe onto the computer, and a hassle to fill out. Instead, some farms are going paperless to address this challenge to the agriculture industry.

By going paperless, all your paper forms and checklists are managed with a mobile data collection app, such as Locale Central. Locale Central lets you create your own custom forms to meet your business needs, which are then all securely available via your mobile phone or the web for you to review, manage or export.

The advantage of going paperless is not only saving time and money, but also improving the accuracy of your data collection. Data validation can be added to form fields, and automatically syncing your form submission with the cloud prevents mistakes in transcribing or data-loss.