[gpanders]

My graduate school advisor is a big name in satellite-based navigation (e.g. GPS), and I spent a lot of time learning about state-of-the-art advances in GPS techniques such as precise positioning. I was surprised to learn that many of the former students in our lab went to work for John Deere of all places. At the time, I also had an image of outdoor farming being fairly primitive, but this was an eye-opening revelation to me.

[Loughla]

We have auto-steer on all large equipment, full stop. Planting is a science down to the square foot to optimize yields. Spraying is optimized to 2 square inch across every field. Soil checks for nutrients, compaction, and other factors are weekly in the fall and spring, and monthly in the summer. Moisture checks are twice weekly in the summer.

For livestock - they have routine blood screenings for disease and nutrient deficiencies. Rotation through pasture is decided via nutrient content and growth rate of pasture plants. Breeding and genetic lines are strictly controlled via artificial insemination. Animal growth rates, health, and any number of other factors are tracked long-term to decide lineages to keep, modify, or eliminate. All feed supplements are planned to absolutely optimize feed/meat conversion ratios.

The problem with farming isn't that the data doesn't exist, or that the technology isn't being used. It's that the data lives in 18 different places, some in my head, and that the technology is ungodly expensive.

The only way I can see to make SV and ag work well would be to focus on what would otherwise be mid-sized businesses. Large scale operations already have the tech and data. The farmers who run operations of <2000 acres can't afford the large scale purchases, and do much of what I talked about via 'inherent' and 'inherited' knowledge (i.e. they know the north pasture needs to be emptied for two months early spring, but don't know how to improve the plant growth there without messing everything up).

[hef19898]

I met a startup where I live during an event. The develop a solution for famers to integrate all their data in one system instead of spreadsheets, think of a farming ERP.

One of the founders worked since his early teens driving large machines during harvest season. He said that agriculture is already now able to be fully automated, from GPS controlled tractors and such to milking and feeding robots. I had the same revelation, modern farming is way more tech heavy automated than I thought.