How emerging technology and grant funding are reshaping agriculture
At one time, the plow, the tractor, the till and irrigation were radical advances in the science of agriculture. Today, farmers across Butler County are investing in the next generation of advances in agrotechnology that can make farming more efficient.
One location embracing new technology is Four Seasons Dairy Farm in Penn Township, run by the Kennedy family.
Last year, the farm was the recipient of $100,000 from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture in the form of an Agriculture Innovation Grant, which the state touts as the only one in the nation of its kind.
The grant, which was introduced in 2024, offers $5,000 to $2 million to reimburse a farm’s expenses for purchasing or acquiring technology that improves efficiency in an novel way or makes use of alternative or renewable energy.
The money was used to purchase a robotic milker, which — as the name implies — is a system which automatically milks cows without the need for manual labor. According to Jeffrey Kennedy, robotic milkers are not cheap and even the $100,000 grant only went a portion of the way toward paying for the one they have now.
“It was right around $400,000,” Kennedy said. “And that was just the machine. That doesn’t include building it.”
However, Kennedy said it allows the farm to focus on the other necessary tasks that come with raising dairy cows.
“Our job has become more of a manager role,” Kennedy said. “We still feed the cows. We still have to clean the barn and whatnot, but milking is now done by this machine.”
“The cows get trained on it and it makes cow comfort better because they know when to milk themselves by going to the robot; and it makes it safer for the user that would have been doing the milking,” Stephen Campbell, agronomy educator for Penn State Extension’s Butler County office, said. “Some systems allow you to track how many times the cow has come in to milk.”
In addition to the robotic milker, Four Seasons Farm also makes use of annual chlorophyll tests on its yearly corn crop. The tests are performed by the Butler County Conservation District with a chlorophyll meter. According to Kennedy, the tests allow the farm to accurately and efficiently determine how much fertilizer to apply to the field and when.
“It’s testing the color of the green in the plant, so it tells us what kind of fertilizer we need,” Kennedy said. “Instead of just randomly putting on an amount early in the year, we can add to the corn midsummer.”
Although the Thiele Farm in Jefferson Township doesn’t have a robotic milker, William Thiele — a member of the Board of Directors for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau — has made extensive use of his drone for nearly a decade.
“I continually use it as a scouting tool,” Thiele said. “I can take pictures of certain fields to see why a row of crops aren’t growing as good in a certain area or scout certain areas to see if there’s deer damage … that sort of thing.”
According to Thiele, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Although his drone isn’t big enough, other farmers commonly use larger drones to plant seeds for cover crops — also known as “interseeding.”
“In order to do bigger and better things, like interseeding, you have to have a drone that’s much bigger,” Thiele said. “It has to be about the size of a pickup bed, that’s how big they are.”
“Other drones are being used with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) sensors to detect plant health,” Campbell said.
Drone pilots, even those just using them for agriculture, still need to be licensed with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Penn State University and its various extension offices, including the Butler County office, offer and promote several tools to assist farmers in increasing crop efficiency and disease management. One of these tools is Open Crop Manager, developed by a team led by professor Paul D. Esker and designed to collect data for monitoring soybean fields.
Another is PAOneStop, a mapping tool to help farmers meet regulatory requirements for nutrient management.
