Farmers are increasingly weighing quality of life alongside profitability when adopting new technologies, says Dr. Terry Griffin, ag economist at Kansas State University.
Speaking with RealAgriculture’s Shaun Haney at the AdFarm Farm Voice event held this week in Kansas City, Griffin explains that technologies like cab-equipped tractors and automated guidance systems may not immediately raise net farm income, but they bring measurable improvements to comfort and efficiency on the farm.
“Quality of life is difficult to measure,” Griffin says, “but it’s still very important to consider.”
While automated technologies continue to see broad adoption — 70 per cent of U.S. planted acres use auto-guidance, according to the USDA — Griffin says more data-intensive tools are lagging. He pointed to GPS-equipped yield monitors as an example, noting they are used on less than half of U.S. harvested acres.
“It is the future,” Griffin says. “It’s just that it wasn’t the future in five years or ten years.”
Griffin attributes this gap to the level of human capital required. While automation can be plug-and-play, analyzing and acting on yield data requires greater skills and effort. As a result, Griffin says farmers are more likely to adopt tools that simplify operations than those that demand additional time and training.
He also highlights the growing role of subscription-based models in farm equipment, noting they reduce upfront costs and allow manufacturers to streamline production while charging users based on feature activation.
Looking ahead, Griffin’s research focuses on the economics of autonomous farming systems, including robotic harvesters for crops like cotton. He says the rise of artificial intelligence will continue to shift farm labor demands toward more technical roles and sees AI as a powerful support tool already being used by researchers and producers alike.
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