> But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.
The machine, from tractor to combine and everything in between often feeds data together to produce a holistic understanding.
Things like
- How much fuel was used
- Where your tractors and sprayers drove
- Soil samples and content
- How and where every bit of chemical and fertilizer was applied
- What weather hit your field
- How much and and the moisture content of every bit of the field you harvested
But if you're observing a fleet of 100+ machines you kinda need some integration and a central location. Which in turn connects to multiple other services like weather, crop markets, fuel prices etc.
I think that is a different market than the market for dumb tractors. There might be some overlap, but I doubt the people who want to fix their own tractors are different than the corporations that are tracking 100 tractors across hundreds/thousands of fields.
The software is certainly easier to build, but there's a lot of hardware involved here beyond the tractor. Claude is not necessarily going to make it easier to do soil sampling or measuring field conditions or yield outputs.
Farmers would be foolish to rely on an LLM because farming margins are too low to makeup for even a small quick mistake. Many farms will profit 1% on investment over 1-2 decades, although year to year yield can vary 30%.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.