The USDA is launching a national program to evaluate farm technology in “real world” conditions and hired a North Dakota on-farm research center to manage the program.
The USDA National Proving Grounds Network for AgTech will, according to the agency, “thoroughly test and validate both existing and emerging tools under real-world production conditions,” to provide farmers and ranchers with reliabl...
The establishment of the National Proving Grounds Network positions technology validation as a central mechanism for driving agricultural innovation, simultaneously formalizing a public-private partnership. This framework shifts the validation of novel technologies from theoretical assessment to demonstrable, real-world performance, which inherently centralizes the authority around empirical data. The focus on digital and AI-driven technologies suggests a systemic push to integrate complex compu...