Audio-Based Condition Monitoring for Agricultural Machinery: Stakeholder Needs, Adoption Barriers, and MVP Requirements
Failures of agricultural machinery are costly when breakdowns occur during narrow work windows and are discovered too late for planned service. Audio-based condition monitoring offers a low-cost retrofit sensing path because operators already treat abnormal sound as an informal diagnostic cue. Whether such systems are adopted, however, depends on how well they fit farm workflows, repair constraints, and stakeholder decision-making. This paper reports a stakeholder discovery study of audio-based condition monitoring for agricultural machinery. We synthesize semi-structured interviews with farm operators, dairy operators, dealership and service personnel, manufacturers, integrators, and domain experts, together with a short survey. Across sources, downtime avoidance emerged as the dominant value driver, and failures were most commonly recognized through unusual noise and loss of functionality. Survey responses further indicate a gap in maintenance visibility and low penetration of predictive tools. These findings narrow the opportunity from generic ``AI diagnosis'' to low-friction early warning and evidence generation for maintenance planning. Modern tractors appear to be a weaker initial wedge because many are already instrumented and supported by mature service programs. Implements, attachments, hidden rotating components, small-to-medium operations, and continuous-use settings such as dairy present clearer need because failures in these contexts are harder to perceive, sensing coverage is lower, and downtime consequences are higher. We translate these findings into requirements for a minimum viable product (MVP) that prioritizes maintenance actionability over full automation: commodity audio capture, contextual annotation, asset-specific baselines, persistent-deviation detection, temporally stable alerts, and evidence artifacts that support operator inspection and dealer triage.