Five Lessons in (Effective) Agtech Adoption

It’s common to assume that the problem limiting agtech adoption is awareness. The argument goes: if farmers just knew more about these helpful tools, they would obviously want to purchase and implement them.

But when the team at Wine Australia embarked on the mission to get more technology adopted by their growers, the first thing they did was question this assumption.

And what they learned was that awareness wasn’t at all the barrier growers were facing. The growers wanted to know if the tools they’d heard about were cost-effective and would work in Australia’s unique conditions. 

In terms of adoption theory, the barriers to be addressed were interest, evaluation, and trial, not awareness. We were fortunate enough to help them identify these more nuanced barriers, which we summarized as follows in our 2019 report:

Fast forward five years of implementing a custom agtech adoption program, and Wine Australia has plenty of insights to share about effective strategies and lessons about what doesn’t work. Here are five key lessons from our conversation with Paul Smith and Dave Gerner on the podcast last week. 

The smartest farms are commercial.

Growers want to know the benefits and the drawbacks of technologies, not from the company selling them or the researcher studying them, but from a grower actually using them. This insight allowed Wine Australia to bypass the common idea of setting up a “smart farm,” which are often created so companies can try out and show off their tools, or so researchers can tinker and test. 

“Our job was to take that technology and demonstrate it in a commercial setting where growers can engage with it, test it, trial it, ask it all the questions, and realize what that return on investment looks like.” 

Instead, Wine Australia's approach turned real, operating vineyards into commercial demo farms, where the tech was tested in operational conditions and nearby curious farmers could see how another operator used the tools. A key role for Wine Australia’s was to help overcome the cost barrier on these demos for the first year, but after that, growers - and their neighbors - began paying for the tech themselves.

Set expectations and define personas.

Early on, Wine Australia set expectations that their adoption work was not going to be for everyone, and that their initial audience would be largely early adopters. They further defined user personas, ensuring they worked with growers from a wide cross-section of the sector, to effectively match technologies with problems.

“ Sometimes we’d do the same piece of tech on two or three different sites and the value proposition could be quite different, depending if the business is small, large, premium, commercial, and so on. So the technology itself can be proved, but the value proposition might be very different.” 

For industry bodies especially, there’s often a fear that a program won’t reach every grower. Rather than see this as a limitation, Wine Australia’s approach was to intentionally work with growers that were known for being innovative and forward thinking across a range of operational conditions, and leverage the trust and credibility of these partners to increase the program’s chances of success. 

Assess more than just the technology. 

Introducing growers to a refined and curated list of agtech tools well-suited to Australian wine growing was a key value the team wanted to deliver. But they also recognized that assessing the tool itself wasn’t enough. Dave explains:

“ A slogan that we've had for the whole time we've been running this program is the technology is not the problem. It's the business models that surround it.” 

Rather than just evaluating the tech itself– the usability of software, the ruggedness of the sensors, etc.-- they evaluated the companies behind the technologies, assessing everything from business model viability to the integrity of their teams. These less tangible factors can be just as important to growers– after all, it’s not enough to have a good piece of tech, it also needs to be serviced and supported, and therefore the company behind it has to be reliable, now and far into the future. 

Because Wine Australia took these additional factors into account (and in some cases, even helped support companies with particularly viable tools to build more robustness into their models), they built additional confidence among their members that the tech they were seeing was worth investing in. 

Tell the whole story, warts and all. 

Agtech-curious farmers could visit the demo farms, but they could also watch videos or read stories about other growers' experiences with technology online. And this was not promotional content. These were real stories, curated by Wine Australia, where well-respected growers spoke candidly about what did and didn’t work. 

What better way to build conviction in a tool or technology than by offering up in-situ evaluations of their benefits and drawbacks, paired with the brass tax endorsement (or lack thereof) implicit in, “I will purchase this or myself.” Both the diversity of distribution methods for these stories, and the genuineness of the sentiments they express, really helped to cut through for other growers.

A DIY program builds internal capability that no third party support can match. 

When organizations are tasked with work like increasing agtech adoption, many, if not most, will turn to a third party to complete this work. However, as Paul Smith put it on the pod, “the depth of the relationships we built with people as a consequence of this program was probably worth as much as the program itself.” 

Though there are pros and cons to building and operating a bespoke program as Wine Australia has, one of the huge benefits is simply the way it builds confidence and trust, as well as internal capabilities. And given the increasing complexity inherent in both agriculture and rapidly changing technologies, this foundation is likely to open doors and create possibilities for additional progress.

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