The digital agriculture revolution is constantly presenting growers with new technology offering improvements in efficiency, sustainability, or profit on the farm, but making sense of new technologies can be challenging. Producers need current and honest information about these technologies in order to best integrate them into resilient strategies. To meet this need, the Nebraska Extension Digital Agriculture group is launching a podcast titled "FarmBits" to discuss the new innovations, the trends, and the value in digital agriculture.

"FarmBits" will explore topics in digital agriculture through interviews with academic experts, farmers, and industry specialists. The podcast will seek to present information about digital agriculture in a way that is accessible to non-experts with a well-rounded perspective that takes the shine off of new technologies. The podcast will be hosted by Samantha Teten and Jackson Stansell, graduate students in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at UNL and members of the Nebraska Extension Digital Agriculture team.

"While our research is in the field of precision agriculture, we are far from experts in the vast majority of digital agriculture topics," said Teten. "Our goal is to learn alongside our listeners through interviews with the digital ag experts that we will have on the show."

In the first podcast episode, listeners will be introduced to the podcast and oriented to the importance of understanding digital agriculture through an interview with Laura Thompson and Joe Luck. Laura Thompson, co-coordinator of the Nebraska On-Farm Research Network, was the champion behind the "FarmBits" podcast and is a trailblazer in digital agriculture, particularly how it can be applied to on-farm research.

Dr. Joe Luck is an associate professor in the Biological Systems Engineering Department and the Extension precision agriculture specialist. Luck's research has touched topics ranging from multi-hybrid planting to sprayer optimization. "The future of the agriculture industry is digital agriculture," Thompson stated. "There is a benefit to getting involved and gaining some familiarity with which technologies are going to fit in your operation and how these might benefit you, which ones are going to be the right ones to adopt for your particular setting."

After the first episode, "FarmBits" will dive into the topic of harvest through episodes discussing yield mapping and harvest logistics, yield data quality and calibration, and managing yield data.

The "FarmBits" podcast will be released weekly each Thursday beginning on October 1st. It can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and many other podcast providers. If you're interested in learning more about digital agriculture and need some entertainment in the cab this fall, you can subscribe to the podcast on any of the major podcast services so that you don't miss any new content that gets released. The "FarmBits" team can be reached on Twitter @NEDigitalAg or by e-mail at NEDigitalAgTeam@365groups.unl.edu with any questions or new content suggestions.