When you think of agriculture, do you think of a lone farmer toiling away with his hands on a small plot of land? Or vast fields of crops harvested by corporate behemoths like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta?

“Big ag” is where you’ll find the most advanced agricultural technology. Farm robots, drones and driverless tractors, and yes, genetically modified crops. When your sales are measured in billions, you’re going to be able to invest millions in high-tech tools and precision agriculture.

Agriculture is a trillion-­dollar industry in the U.S. In Hawaii it generates about $583 million annually. And yes, several “big ag” companies have operations in the Aloha State. But both nationally and locally, small and medium-size farms produce a disproportionately large percentage of the food that we eat — as much as 80%.

With Hawaii’s renewed focus on food security, smaller farms are critically important. We wouldn’t be able to live off pineapples, even if we still grew them by the ton.

Yet small and medium­-size farms do not typically have access to robots, drones and driverless tractors. In fact, many don’t have access to more basic technologies.

Many of the global challenges that farmers face are tied to the climate and exacerbated by climate change. Fortunately, Hawaii has a lot of company in our crowded latitude.

Around 40% of the world’s population lives in the tropics, and by 2050 the tropics will be home to most of the humans on Earth. Despite the wet weather, however, the tropics are also home to the highest concentration of the world’s hungry.

These statistics drove the planning of the first International Tropical AgTech Conference, which is being held June 22-23 at the University of Hawaii Hilo. Hawaii farmers and researchers have a lot to share, but we also can learn a lot from other regions.

The conference is built upon many longtime collaborations between public and private agencies and entities in Hawaii. Planning is being led by “scientist entrepreneur” Jim Wyban and Jason Ueki, who led the Hawaii Island Business Plan Competition before pivoting to agriculture last summer.

“When we look at the tropics, ag in the tropics is more similar to Hawaii than Hawaii is to the mainland,” Wyban explains. “It’s a very different scale — pretty much everyone is individual farms working with shovels in the dirt.

“It’s really ripe for transformation,” he says.

“Increasing Hawaii’s food security requires increasing productivity, efficiency and profitability at the farm and throughout the food system,” Ueki says. “Innovation and technology are essential to profitable small farm production that is competitively priced to imports.”

In fact, he says, profitability isn’t enough if we want to scale production — including value-added food manufacturing — and reduce our reliance on imported food.

“Our farms need to be prosperous,” he says. “We simply cannot scale an industry unless it is economically viable.”

Still, bringing driverless tractors to Hawaii isn’t the answer.

“There’s not a lot of agtech that we can take off the shelf and put in Hawaii because of scale and cost,” Ueki explains. “Most of our farms are smaller than five acres.”

“The core issue of the conference is becoming aware of all the current bells and whistles of agtech, and then integrating what’s relevant to Hawaii, and things that could be applied or applied with some tweaking,” Wyban adds. “We know pricing has to be addressed, some of these solutions are too expensive, but maybe there are some new business models we can explore.”

These topics are incredibly important to Hawaii’s future, they say, and should be getting more attention.

“In Hawaii, it seems that we focus on environment and culture, but not so much on the ability to produce enough food, the economic viability of our farms or the quality of life of our farmers,” Ueki says.

And Wyban says the conference is bringing in many impressive experts.

Visiting speakers include Arama Kukutai, new CEO of Plenty, a global leader in the indoor vertical farming space; and Shu Watanabe, head of CropScope at NEC Corp. in Japan, which is deploying an AI-based analytics platform in nine countries to optimize the value chain for coffee, sugar cane, tomato and other crops.

Also presenting: David Slaughter, director of the Smart Farm Initiative at the University of California, Davis; Robbert Blonk of Hendrix Genetics Aquaculture in the Netherlands; genomics and CRISPR expert Megan Hochstrasser; and Academy and Emmy award winner Richard Chuang, founder of CloudPics and now d1n0.

Attendance is limited to 250 people. Registration is $200, with discounts for kamaaina and students. For more information, visit TropAgTech.com.

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Ryan Kawailani Ozawa is CEO of Smart Yields, an award-winning precision agriculture startup founded in 2015. He will moderate a panel at the conference.