During the TEKNOFEST event in Şanlıurfa, the Turkish Agriculture Technologies Gathering Foundation (TÜME) brought together Minister of Agriculture and Forestry İbrahim Yumaklı, Council of Higher Education President Erol Özvar, Ziraat Bank General Manager Alpaslan Çakar, and TÜME Board of Trustees Chair Abdulkadir Karagöz for a discussion focused on transforming agriculture into a system more reliant on data and autonomous systems.
The session’s main message was that modernizing agriculture does not depend solely on introducing a device or robot to a farm. Rather, it requires coordination among government planning, education, financing, applied research, and producers. Yumaklı considered food security part of national security, pointing to the need to manage the chain from seed to final food without gaps between its stages.
From Production to Planning and Measurement
Yumaklı said that increasing the number of animals or the volume of production was no longer the only indicator, as the yield from each unit of production had become more important. He linked this to the need for integrated systems and analyzable information that would help improve production and turn its results into policies. He noted that over the past year farmers had begun to absorb the concept of production planning and provide feedback on its development, but that extending the results across all of Türkiye would require a gradual shift in practice and thinking.
The minister said that Türkiye has 61 organized agricultural zones, with production operations having begun in 16 of them. He also said that 96% of the seeds used domestically are produced in Türkiye, and that the area of land opened for irrigation had reached 7.3 million hectares. These figures remain an official presentation of policies and capacities, not independent evidence of the success of every project or the readiness of all farms for the smart transition.
Universities Redesign Training Pathways
Özvar said that the number of students enrolled in faculties of agriculture was approaching 45,000, while the number studying veterinary medicine and animal husbandry, including graduate studies, reached approximately 20,000. He added that new programs covering agricultural machinery technologies, autonomous agricultural systems, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles had been added to the curricula, and that occupancy rates in agriculture and animal husbandry programs opened during the past three years had reached 100%, according to his presentation.
He also noted that 10 universities had joined a cooperation protocol with TÜME, with the aim of increasing practical training and connecting students with actual production environments. In practice, this reflects a shift in the discussion from graduating traditional agricultural specialists to forming teams that combine agriculture, programming, mechatronics, and engineering. However, the material does not explain the details of the curricula or the criteria for measuring the results of these partnerships.
Financing Is a Condition for Turning Technology into Production
Çakar presented Ziraat Bank’s role in financing the sector, saying that the bank had extended more than one trillion liras in agricultural loans to approximately one million producers. He said that between September 1, 2025, and August 31, 2026, it had provided loans worth 219 billion liras to 150,000 young producers under the age of 41, and 74 billion liras to 71,000 women producers.
The bank links financing to the producer’s ability to achieve efficiency, profitability, and sound cash flow across the “field-to-table” chain. This is important because autonomous systems and artificial intelligence do not become operational solutions merely by being presented at an event; they require financing, an implementation infrastructure, reliable data, and users capable of operating and maintaining them.
An Applied Project and Expansion Goals
Karagöz said that an autonomous farm based on artificial intelligence had begun operating at Harran University, considering the project the result of steps initiated at the previous TEKNOFEST. At the same time, he criticized the continued conversion of some production or training facilities to other uses, considering the gap between research and application one of the sector’s challenges.
TÜME announced that it had supported 40 young people this year and aimed to contribute to the equity capital of approximately 400 young producers next year, in addition to providing training, certification, and assistance to participants in developing their projects. The significance of this step lies in testing whether coordination among the state, universities, the bank, and civil organizations will produce solutions that can be used beyond the scope of events, and whether producers will actually become sources of data rather than merely users of ready-made technologies.