LOUISVILLE, Ky. — One of the skey attractions of the annual National Farm Machinery Show is the free seminars offered each day of the three-day show. These seminars allow attendees to learn about the latest innovations in farming.

Likely to draw a standing-room-only gathering will be the talk by Willie Vogt, Editorial Director of Farm Progress. In his talk, “10 Technologies Changing Agriculture”, Vogt will outline where farmers are headed in terms of new technology. A topic Vogt expects will turn heads will be that of automation on the farm, particularly that of robots.

“Autonomy in agriculture is one huge topic now,” Vogt said, “and a simple example of that is robotic tractors.”

Autonomous agriculture allows farming equipment such as tractors to operate without a human driver. And while such equipment is normally associated with mega farms, it’s becoming more common on smaller farms as well.

“There’s an opportunity for the small guy too,” Vogt said. “A guy operating a hay operation will love these robotic machines because they’ll gather up the bales, allowing the farmer to go on and do something else. Are they expensive? Yes and no. One has to decide. If you’re doing it alone it might be considered expensive. Up-front costs will be intimidating, but when people account for all their time in this business I think they’ll be thinking about autonomy in a different way. On the other side of it, they do replace people.”

An example of such as machine, Vogt says, is the Bale Hawk made by Vermeer. The autonomous bale mover is designed to help producers reduce the need for labor by moving bales from where they are dropped in the field to the field’s edge or a storage area.

“Working with bales is the most mundane job there is, but Vermeer has automated all that,” Vogt said. “Trust me, there are a lot of hay producers in Kentucky, Ohio and elsewhere who are sick and tired of lining up bales.”

Vogt said, “The farmers today are even looking at small cultivation tools. Say you’re running vegetables and you need to run a cultivator through the field. There’s a French company that has an electric robot that can go through the field and do all the cultivating for the farmer. Just put it in the field and walk away. It’s that easy.”

Other topics in Vogt’s top 10 list of innovative technologies include equipment trends and how they’re changing, products that farmers are likely to purchase and biological farming.

Biological farming works with natural systems and processes to build optimum soil, plant and animal health, while incorporating the best of conventional farming methods to maintain production levels and quality. Vogt is likely to address organic farming, biodynamic farming and even sustainable agriculture.

He will discuss changes in agricultural biotechnology, referring to such things as genetic engineering, molecular markers, molecular diagnostics, vaccines, tissue culture and more.

Vogt will also talk about big data and what it means to farms. Big data in the agriculture industry relies on the utilization of information, technology and analytics in order to create useful data that can be utilized by farmers. Big data can be used to provide information for the agricultural industry as a whole, or it can help specific segments or locations with improving their efficiency.

Other seminars include:

• 2022 Global Commodity Market & Weather Outlook

• The State of GPS and Positioning for 2022

• Staying Disciplined in Volatile Markets

• Carbon Credits on the Horizon

• Building Better Grain Dryers

• Tractor Zoom 2022 Farm Equipment Outlook

•  Machinery Pete Updates

•  Soil Test Trends

•  PFR Insight Meeting

• Success Strategies in Corn and Soybeans

•  Tar Spot Management

•  The State of Autonomy

For a list of dates and times of individual seminars visit https://farmmachineryshow.s3.amazonaws.com/2022-NFMS-Seminar-Schedule.pdf