Mega Trends for Precision Ag in Specialty Crops
January 22, 2020 
The “Technology’s Pull Through Effect from Downstream” panel at 2020 Vision Conference featured (from left) The Mixing Bowl’s Seana Day, Produce Marketing Association’s Vonnie Estes, and Field To Market’s Rod Snyder.
The influential Vision Conference (sponsored by GrowingProduce.com’s sister site PrecisionAg.com) threw a spotlight on the innovations fruit and vegetable growers should watch for this coming decade. Normally this international forum focuses on forward-looking issues surrounding row crops. This year, it was specialty crops’ turn.
Grabbing the specialty crop baton at Vision was, among many, Produce Marketing Association (PMA) VP of Technology Vonnie Estes, who joined in the panel discussion, “Technology’s Pull-Through Effect from Downstream.”
Estes had some interesting tidbits to share in the Emerald City. For one, she notes a recent power shift in food in general, as consumers are having a direct effect on what growers grow, and how they grow it.
“They are deciding through their purchases what they want to buy, and how it’s grown, and how it’s moved though the chain, and how it actually gets to them,” Estes says. “That’s really having an impact (on specialty growers), and what they’re really looking is transparency, and really understanding what is happening through that whole food chain.”
The Pull Through Effect from Downstream
And there’s a sort of “pull through effect” on the back end that is just starting to hit food retailers now, too, argues Estes.
“The last five years have been about consumer choice around the types of food that they’re going to eat,” she says. “We think that the next five years will really be about where they’re going to get that food, and how it’s going to be delivered, especially in the fresh food area.”
Retailers are demanding transparency and data sharing from every link in the food chain, and growers are not being spared. But, with challenge typically comes opportunity, as a wise man (or woman?) once said.
“There’s a huge opportunity for us to capture that information (data) that’s going back in the other direction, which allows us as farmers do some predictions around what to grow, and what’s happening (at retail) with what we grow,” Estes says.
Today’s Grocery Stores are Tomorrow’s Drones?
The mega trend in specialty markets that Estes and PMA are witnessing of late? Estes says its the changing manner in which consumers are acquiring food.
Growers will need to follow this trend and decide how it effects what they grow, and how they grow it, according to Estes.
“Last year 40% of consumers in the U.S. purchased groceries online, and that is only going to keep going up – more and more people are going to be buying groceries online,” she says. “(Food) retailers are a little freaked out about that, especially the one’s with brick and mortar. How are they going to stay relevant?”
With the advent of home grocery delivery services like Instacart, as well as curbside grocery pickup services offered by brick and mortar retailers (all a calculated effort to meet today’s consumer wherever and whenever they prefer), the changing nature of home food delivery itself could be another potential hurdle for growers.
“Delivery will not be done by trucks,” she adds. “In the future, it will be done by drones and robots. So, how does that effect what we grow, and how we grow it?”
To follow our still-ongoing, post-event coverage of what insights came out of our 2020 Vision Conference, check in with PrecisionAg.com and GrowingProduce.com in the coming days and weeks ahead.
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