"The world's oldest profession became its most advanced. Tomorrow's farm runs on robots, sensors, and code." — Futurist Jim Carroll
This is part of my Trends Scorecard series, where I go back into my own archive, dig up the predictions I actually made about an industry, and grade them honestly against the world as it really turned out. This time the industry is Agriculture & Food. I have been telling farmers, ranchers, and food companies for two decades that their world was about to be reinvented from the soil up. So how did I do? Here's the scorecard.
The setup: I have been calling this one for a very long time
I started speaking to agricultural audiences back when "the future of farming" still sounded like science fiction to a lot of the people in the room. The thesis never really changed. A new generation would take over the family farm, they would bring the technology habits of the gaming and smartphone era with them, and the entire industry would move from intuition to data, from daylight to round-the-clock, from mass production to mass customization. I said it on a lot of stages, and I wrote it down so it could be checked later. Here is one of the moments where I planted the flag, looking back from 2021 at where this all began:
"Get ready for a world of real-time, autonomous, spatial intelligence farming!"
And this is a sector I know from the inside of a few hundred ballrooms. I had Claude dig through my blog and pull together the agriculture and food groups I've keynoted for over the years. It's a big harvest:
- Agriculture, Crops, Inputs & Equipment — Nutrien, Wilbur Ellis, Simplot, FMC Agriculture, CropLife / GrowCanada, United Suppliers Technology Exchange, Mosaic AgCollege, Reinke Manufacturing, Hunter Industries, American Cotton Shippers Association
- Cooperatives, Producer Boards & Farm Credit — CHS Inc, Land O' Lakes, Purina, United Soybean Board, Western Growers Association, AgFirst Farm Credit Bank, Northwest Farm Credit Cooperative
- Livestock, Cattle & Dairy — CattleCon, Texas Cattle Feeders Association, Micro Beef 4C Summit, National Dairy Convention, International Dairy-Deli-Bakery Association
- Agricultural Media & Data — DTN Agriculture / The Progressive Farmer, Farm Journal Publications
- Food Brands, Manufacturing & Produce — Maple Leaf Foods, Rich Foods, Godiva Chocolates, Pladis (McVitie's, Ulker), Wegner Group, Stellar Group, Flavor & Extract Manufacturers Association, Produce Marketing Association Fresh Summit, Potato Expo
- Restaurant, Beverage & Consumer Food — Subway Canada, Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference, Admiral Beverage, Coffee, Tea & Water Association, Benefiq
And those are only the ones I've blogged about — there have been plenty more, particularly throughout Canada in the 90s.
So how did the calls hold up? Let's look.
Prediction #1 — "More change in ten years than the last fifty" (2011) — Hit
Speaking to an agricultural audience in 2011, I tied the coming wave of innovation directly to a generational handover. The baby boomers were leaving the farm and a much younger, far more technology-native group was taking the reins. My claim was blunt about the pace:
"Quite simply, we are going to witness more change on the farm and ranch in the next ten years than we have seen in the last 50!"
The grade: Hit. The decade that followed brought GPS-guided and self-steering equipment into the mainstream, put sensors on animals and in soil, and made data the central nervous system of the modern operation. The generational point landed too. By the late 2010s the "iPod generation" really was returning to the family farm and pulling new tools in with them. The speed of change in agriculture between 2011 and 2021 dwarfed the previous fifty years, exactly as called.
Prediction #2 — "Virtual understanding of your entire herd" (2014) — Hit
In 2014 I told a room of cattle feeders they would soon be ranching like the Jetsons. The specific claim was that herd management would move far beyond simple location tracking into continuous, individualized health insight on every animal:
"Virtual understanding of every single aspect of your herd is coming sooner than you think"
The grade: Hit. Individual-animal monitoring went from novelty to commodity. Wearable sensors, rumination collars, ear-tag biometrics, and image-based health monitoring are now ordinary tools across modern livestock operations. The idea that you would have a real-time, animal-by-animal view of health and behavior, well beyond a GPS dot on a map, is no longer a futurist's slide. It is a product category.
Prediction #3 — "Fitbits for cows" (2018) — Hit
By 2018 I had a shorthand for the same trend, and it stuck. Animal and crop health sensors were not a someday story anymore. They were here, and the only question was how far they would spread:
"Fitbits for cows, chickens, pigs — we see it happening now, but it will expand"
The grade: Hit. It expanded. Wearable and connected-sensor systems for livestock are a real and growing market, and the same year I was pairing this with drones flying over herds to check on animal health. Aerial and ground sensing, greenness imaging, and connectivity-as-a-management-practice all moved from the edge to the everyday. The label was a joke. The trend was not.
Prediction #4 — "Real time spatial intelligence farming" (2019) — Hit
In a long 2019 piece looking ahead to 2030, I wrote the future of agriculture as if I were already living in it. Continuous farming, autonomous machines, and a tech-native generation running the whole thing under one umbrella concept:
"Rather than farming when the sun is up, we've moved to a world of continuous 24 hour farming, aided by robotics, autonomous self-driving technology, and virtualized farming platforms based on Farmville concepts. The entire process goes by the name 'real time spatial intelligence farming.' A continuous flood of new technologies has come into the industry, supported by the arrival of the tech-generation who has taken over the family and industrial farm: things such as weed zapping laserbots, virtual tractors, drone seeding copters and more."
The grade: Hit, and more precisely than I expected. Weed-zapping laserbots are real, commercial products now. Autonomous and self-driving tractors are shipping. Drones seed, spray, and scout fields. Precision agriculture built on real-time spatial data is the operating model of the leading operations. The only thing I got wrong was assuming everyone would already be using all of it. The technologies arrived on schedule. The adoption curve is still climbing.
Prediction #5 — "Farming 24 hours a day, run by a kid who grew up playing Farmville" (2021) — Hit
In 2021 I connected two threads I had been pulling on for years, autonomous machinery and the generational handover, into a single image:
"We're rapidly moving to a world in which we'll farm 24 hours a day, rather than just when the sun is up - and it's pretty likely that the process will be managed by a young farmer who grew up playing Farmville"
The grade: Hit. Autonomous equipment that runs through the night, with a human supervising from a screen rather than a seat, is no longer hypothetical. And the people running these operations really are the generation that grew up managing virtual resources on a glowing display. The instinct for dashboards, telemetry, and continuous optimization came pre-installed. By 2026 the round-the-clock, screen-managed farm is a reality on the leading edge, with the rest of the industry following.
Prediction #6 — "Skyscrapers full of plants" (2023) — Live / too early
In 2023 I went big on vertical farming, the idea that we would stop being restricted to growing outdoors and move serious production indoors and upward, into controlled environments and even into the heart of the city:
"Imagine skyscrapers full of plants. That's what begins to happen when the marriage of radical concepts, technology, and a pressing need for innovative thinking collide together to provide for a very BIG trend."
The grade: Live, but early, and I want to be honest about it. The technology works. The science works. But the economics have been brutal. Between 2023 and 2026 a string of high-profile vertical farming companies stumbled, scaled back, or went under, crushed by energy costs and the hard math of growing under artificial light. The vision is not wrong. It just collided with a power bill. This one is real, it is coming, and it will matter most where food security and land scarcity force the issue, but my timeline was more optimistic than the balance sheets allowed.
The one I got wrong.
If I am grading myself with a straight face, the prediction I have to flag is the one where I let the future run ahead of the kitchen. In that same 2019 look at 2030, I described food itself as fully personalized, grown and matched to your individual biology:
"We used to eat the same food that everyone else ate. Now, we eat food that is grown specifically for our particular DNA, and matched to our particular metabolic profile, based upon real time insight from monitoring technology built into our smart phone and clothing."
The grade: Too optimistic on the calendar. The pieces exist. Continuous glucose monitors are mainstream, DNA and microbiome testing are cheap, and personalized-nutrition apps will happily tell you that your apple is not your neighbor's apple. But "food grown specifically for your DNA" as an everyday reality? Not yet. We have personalized advice far more than we have personalized food. Like the 3D-printed dinner in every kitchen, this is a case where the direction is right and the destination is real, but I planted the flag a good decade or two ahead of where the world actually is. I would rather own that than pretend the score is perfect.
What the scorecard tells us about what's next
Here is the method behind all of it, and it is not magic. I look for the places where a powerful technology, an economic pressure, and a generational shift all point in the same direction at the same time. When all three line up, the trend is not a maybe. It is a matter of when. That is why the precision, autonomy, sensing, and continuous-farming calls landed, and why the early ones, vertical farming and DNA-matched food, ran ahead of the economics. The technology was ready, but the cost curve was not, and economics always sets the clock.
So where does agriculture go from here? That's a separate conversation, and a longer one than a scorecard can hold. I've mapped it out sector by sector in my current series, The Way Forward — the trends, the barriers, and the playbook for acting on them. If these receipts convinced you the method works, that's where you'll find where it's pointing next.
Next up in the Trends Scorecard series: Retail & Consumer. I have made some big calls about how, where, and how fast we buy our stuff, and it's time to grade those honestly too.