Precision farming technologies gather data from a variety of points, such as GPS coordinates from tractors, seeding rates from planters, pesticide volumes from sprayers, moisture readings from soil probes, and yield estimates from combines.

The services—from Bayer, Deere, Corteva, Trimble, and others in the ag-tech sector—increasingly use artificial intelligence to detect patterns, weaving together farmers’ data with other feeds, like satellite images and weather station readings. Farmers can open dashboards on their smartphones or computers to see overviews of conditions and trends, along with suggestions about practices to tweak.