A survey of commercially available AgTech products for precision grain farming: technological trends and gaps

A survey of commercially available AgTech products for precision grain farming: technological trends and gaps

Australia is emerging as a hub for Agriculture 4.0; however, adoption of agricultural technologies (AgTech) remains limited due to economic constraints, infrastructure gaps, fragmentation, and interoperability challenges. This study aims to categorise the diverse range of commercially available AgTech products and map their distribution across data acquisition platforms, crop management practices, and the precision agriculture cycle, while also exploring potential adoption barriers based on their market availability. We classified data acquisition platforms utilised by the current commercial products. Then, we categorised the major crop management practices in grain farming. We also proposed a framework of the stages of precision agriculture that align with existing market products. We developed a novel taxonomy to categorise the technologies utilised by the AgTech industry for grain farming. We searched four Australian AgTech databases using a search strategy to capture all relevant commercial products related to the proposed crop management categories. In this survey, we categorised 80 AgTech products that provide tangible solutions to current farming practices based on the proposed taxonomy. We also analysed the current trends by mapping products across data acquisition platforms, crop management practices, and the precision agriculture cycle, as well as the types of technologies. Results show that commercial AgTech products mostly rely on ground-based stationary platforms for data acquisition, focus on crop protection, integrate proprietary hardware, and emphasise data visualisation rather than generating actionable insights. This finding also suggests that the high prevalence of proprietary hardware integration may indicate interoperability challenges, a significant barrier to AgTech adoption. Overall, this survey maps the breadth of commercially available AgTech in the grains industry and also discusses the opportunities for future research and innovation.