Abstract
Precision agriculture is sometimes assumed to diffuse steadily over time, and industry planning frequently extrapolates early adoption trends forward. This study evaluates the accuracy of such expectations by comparing agricultural input dealers' forecasts of future service offerings with the actual levels of offerings that dealerships eventually provided. Using 21 waves of the CropLife-Purdue Precision Agriculture Dealership Survey from 2000 to 2025, we examine expected and realized precision agriculture offerings across 26 technologies. We document systematic and persistent overestimation of adoption: for most technologies, expected diffusion exceeds realized outcomes, with forecast errors becoming especially pronounced as adoption flattened or declined in the early 2020s. These findings suggest that managers have a difficult time forecasting precision agriculture adoption, with implications for investment, staffing, and service provision decisions in agribusiness supply chains.
Date of this Version
3-25-2026
Recommended Citation
Malone, Trey; Fiechter, Chad; Meng, Zanliang; Lowenberg‐DeBoer, James; Erickson, Bruce; and Akridge, Jay, "Is Precision Agriculture Technology Adoption Persistently Overestimated?" (2026). Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications. Paper 41.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/agedocs/41
Comments
This is the publisher PDF of Malone, T., C. Fiechter, Z. Meng, J. Lowenberg-DeBoer, B. Erickson, and J. Akridge. 2026. “Is Precision Agriculture Technology Adoption Persistently Overestimated?.” Agribusiness0: e70085. Published CC-BY by Wiley, the version of record and ADA Title II compliant version is available in HTML at DOI: 10.1002/agr.70085.