It’s been a while since posting, but thinking has indeed happened. Let’s get into it.
Towards the end of November, I did a dive into climate solutions related to farming and agriculture. Agriculture and land use accounts for up to 25% of greenhouse gasses annually (depending on how you count them). So moving the needle in agtech has potential for big emissions reductions at a fundamental level. There are lots of articles on this, so I’ll refrain from explaining.
A farm is an ecosystem that thrives on agronomic processes. By definition, agronomic systems live and die by the interconnected success or failure of both naturally occurring events and human interventions. At any given point, farmers have to consider all the events in this ecosystem, so while cost is a big risk factor, it’s not the whole picture. In order to successfully transition any farm to sustainable, carbon-negative practices, we need to consider both the financial AND operational risks and benefits to foster adoption. This operational behavior change challenge makes it a GREAT UX problem!
I’ve only just scratched the surface of agriculture. And it’s the surface of the tip of an iceberg. But I find it absolutely fascinating, and I think I’ve found a thread where agtech might be at the forefront of UX paradigms in the climate crisis. In Part 1, I’ll talk about some of the context and draw attention to the clear-eyed pragmatism that makes agtech adoption a wickedly challenging space to tackle. But I think it’s a worthy cause, because in Part 2, I think there’s a way to think about some of these agronomic climate solutions from a UX perspective.
So here’s what I’ve heard from voices in the farming climate solutions community
People are offering up some really innovative solutions! Companies like Climate Robotics are looking to bring millenia-old indigenous practices to 21st Century row-crop scale. Others like Lithos Carbon and Eion Carbon are talking about replacing staple soil amendments like lime that are widely used all over the world. And there are companies like CODA Farm Technologies that are laying the groundwork for farmers to easily adopt new systems to conserve water. All these companies are doing important work, and everyone in this industry is staring down the pipeline for how agriculture is going to change drastically, in the coming decades. Whether it’s navigating water scarcity, managing labor fluctuations, or combating top-soil degradation, there’s a multitude of concerns knocking at farmers’ doors, and LOUDLY. If you forgive my pun, it feels like an industry that’s ripe for innovation.
But even so, the challenge that many of these new ventures face is customer adoption. Convincing farmers to take the risk to adopt novel practices today, is an immediate, and persistent struggle. Reportedly, farmers want to see the technology “working first”, exacerbating the chicken-and-egg face-off that is early tech adoption. In an industry that is fairly traditional, pressed for labor, and only as predictable as the weather (read: somewhat unpredictable), these factors raise the bar for early adopters to step into the ring, let alone become promoters. As I heard these comments, I couldn’t help but think, this sounds a lot like another industry that I’ve seen up close: construction!
A quick detour for a construction parallel
Construction has long been held as one of the last industries to innovate. Profit margins in construction are staggeringly small, hovering around 6% (project dependent), and profits and losses can come from anywhere in the construction schedule. Every step of the construction process is tightly managed, risk intolerant, and highly volatile. After all, when have you seen a construction project finish under-budget and ahead-of-schedule? It’s not that people don’t want innovation - there just isn’t much time for it.
Naturally, being in construction robotics for five years, I can attest that for all the enthusiasm people have for the future, finding early adoption is a poorly-defined and moving target. For all the yes’s we got from executives, ultimately people don’t plan the bulk of their business operations around coming-soon technologies.
Big deals with flagship stakeholders, enterprise partnerships, and owners of companies are important, but they don’t necessarily mean adoption on immediate timelines. High-level stakeholders are rarely the direct users, and executive conversations don’t necessarily bring the trades’ voices into consideration. I’ve frequently seen that while suits are supportive, boots are abortive. And it’s not really because people don’t want to see change. Rather, the people who would put a new product into action are driven by an incisive pragmatism that obliterates overhead, excises confusion, and distills complexity into flow and execution. Unfortunately, new products tend to carry a little experimental baggage.
How does this perspective apply to climate change?
Ultimately, I notice the same thread of clear-eyed pragmatism in each agtech conversation I encountered. Bill Brady, CEO of Kula Bio, a microbial nitrogen fixing startup, says farmers likely won’t take incremental gain from carbon credits or crop yield and savings for environmental benefit. And to paraphrase Josh Svaty, the former Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Kansas, at the end of the day, farmers are pretty explicit that climate action is not the reason why they would adopt a piece of technology. David Wallace, CEO of CODA Farm Technologies shares that sometimes regional legislation around pumping water is so archaic and inane, that farmers are actually incentivized to pump MORE water, rather than conserve it. We’re left with a situation where a startup’s core mission is not inherently appealing to its primary consumer. As such, startups and agtech initiatives are scrambling to find ways that they can help farmers mitigate other immediate risks, obviate steps in their current process, or make existing activities seamless, reliable, and efficient.
In other words, founders have new technology and are desperately looking for ways to make it useful for people. This feels like the classic tech situation that makes me bristle - trying to sell new technology that we have created because we personally think it’s cool, regardless of what the users may think. The main difference is that this time we don’t have a choice. I’m okay if the robo-barber ultimately doesn’t succeed in giving haircuts to the masses, but in the case of climate tech, we need these initiatives to succeed.
So where do we go from here?
We need to understand the behavior change process when it comes to agronomics. We can paint the picture all we want, but unless we curate the experience of muddling through the messy middle, it will be hard for farmers to join us on the journey to employ new technologies quickly. Luckily, this is something that UX is particularly good at. This is why UX exists. And I think UX Research in particular can play a key role in helping all of us navigate these transitions. Part Two coming soon!