Precision Agriculture

Floor Speech

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Mrs. FISCHER. Madam President, I have heard so many inspiring stories about how small businesses across the country adapted to COVID-19 and refused to give up, even when the odds seemed overwhelming.

Mac's Creek Winery in Lexington, NE, is a great example. Owned by two generations of the McFarland family, this winery and brewery has been a Nebraska favorite since 1999. Like so many other small businesses, they were forced to shut their tasting rooms' doors when COVID hit.

But the McFarlands soon pioneered a new way to share their work with the world. They began hosting virtual tastings through Facebook Live, inviting their community to join them from home and enjoying these Nebraska-made wines.

Their first event in March of 2020 attracted just a few dozen viewers, but their livestreams soon grew to reach thousands of people across the country. HGTV featured them on their website, and they won best virtual event at the Nebraska Tourism Industry Awards last September.

When I visited Mac's Creek earlier this year, I had the chance to see firsthand how they have bounced back from the pandemic. Mac's Creek beat the odds, and they even turned last year's hardships to their advantage. But years before COVID, they overcame an even greater challenge, one that threatened to destroy their entire business.

In 2013, herbicide drift from neighboring farms wiped out nearly all of their 4,000 grapevines. This accident cost them well over $1 million in lost production and set their growth back by at least 5 years.

They couldn't just move their vineyard somewhere else, so just as they did last year, they looked at what they needed to do and they turned to innovation to find success. With help from a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Mac's Creek was able to buy purpose- built drones to keep an eye on their 25 acres from above. These drones can help them look for early signs of herbicide drift and stop it from happening before it even starts. And they haven't suffered another incident since.

This Nebraska business took on a risky investment to protect their crops. Their drones are an example of what is known as precision agriculture technology, and Nebraska leads the United States in its adoption.

Producers from wineries to cattle ranchers can use drones and other 21st-century equipment to look after their life's work. For example, if a corn farmer wants to use less water, precision ag technology can help them calculate exactly how much to use. They can produce the same amount of corn using as much as 35 percent less water.

If a rancher wants to equip their feed bunks with sensors that track feed intake, monitor animal health, and even measure emissions from their cattle, precision ag can help them do that.

And these technologies don't just measure inputs. Autosteer and mapping technologies can also make farms more efficient, allowing producers to use less fuel to get better results. All of these things are potential uses of precision agriculture technology, and all of them help producers become more efficient with their resources.

This equipment, it has been around since the 1990s. But like all technologies, it is constantly changing. As it grows more advanced, the market for it expands as well. And we have seen a huge rise in demand in recent years.

Precision agriculture is revolutionizing the way America's producers put food on our tables, but these technologies aren't cheap. Many farmers with small- or medium-sized operations would love to have these cutting-edge technologies, but their cost puts them just out of reach.

The adoption of precision ag equipment has been greatest on large farms, where the savings spread across many acres can generate enough to make this equipment cost effective. This equipment has the potential to transform the way producers of all sizes manage their farms, but if it only helps a small family farmer save maybe $5 an acre next season, a $150,000 investment starts to look a lot less attractive.

Madam President, the World Economic Forum estimates that if just a quarter of the world's farms adopted precision ag practices, farm yields globally could increase by 15 percent. They have also shown that greenhouse gas emissions and water use could decrease by at least the same amount. Adopting these technologies in Nebraska has already helped producers reduce soil erosion and carbon output while also increasing water quality in the area around their operations. And according to a recent report about the environmental benefits of precision ag, even at the current levels, this equipment already saves 30 million pounds of herbicide, 100 million gallons of fossil fuels, and 500 million gallons of water every single year. And that is just in the United States.

These technologies can help us feed a growing population while also caring for our environment. We should be encouraging more producers to turn to precision agriculture, and that is why I am joining with the senior Senator from Minnesota to introduce a bill to create a loan program that would help them do just that.

My bill would establish the Precision Agriculture Loan Program, which would offer low-cost and low-term loans to producers who want to adopt precision ag technologies but they may be unable to make these investments through traditional banks. This would be the first Federal loan program dedicated entirely to precision ag, and instead of upward of 5 percent in interest, producers could pay interest rates under 2 percent on loans 3 to 12 years in length. These loans would cover precision ag technology that improves efficiency or it reduces inputs. My bill would help the math start to make sense for our producers who would like to adopt these technologies, but they haven't been able to afford them.

It is rare to find an issue that is so clearly a win-win for everyone involved. From the University of Nebraska to the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, the Nebraska Farm Bureau, and the American Conservation Coalition, support is growing for making precision agriculture more accessible.

Another bill I introduced with Senator Klobuchar in April, which would help farmers connect precision ag technologies to each other through the internet of things, has been met with a similar outpouring of support. That is because precision agriculture--those technologies-- really have no drawbacks. It is better for ag producers, rural communities, consumers, and the environment, all at the same time.

The biggest obstacle is the cost, and that burden falls mostly on the smaller farms that can't afford to take the risks. Well, my bill will give smaller operations the backing that they need to manage those risks.

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