[GreyZephyr]

This is already true and has been for years. Cereal farmers were some of the earliest adopters of GPS and autonomous vehicles. I remember being at a rural show in the early 90's and CASE had a combine harvester for sale that recorded the grain yield per 10 square meters of the field via GPS, and if you bought radio beacons for the corners of the field, it was capable of resolution of about a square meter and semi-autonomous operation (though I wouldn't have wanted to stand in front of it). By this point the software if a major part of what differentiates the various models [0]. These days farming, especially crops is incredible technologically focussed. If you are not tracking crop yield and soil nutrients, you have no way of knowing how much fertiliser, pesticide or seed to spread at each point, which equates to massive waste. Given the margins for farming are incredible slim, and you are often over 5 million in debt, just to finance that years crop, the relative cost of investing in the latest technology is small. By comparison to the integrated systems that tie in everything from soil quality, to transport, to current grain spot prices, this is a toy.

It's not that Watson is not impressive, it's more that I get irritated when journalists talk about farming as if it is merely getting up each morning and riding around on a tractor idea before heading home to the wireless as they haven't yet got anything as new fangled as television. My apologies.

[0] http://www.deere.com/wps/dcom/en_INT/products/equipment/comb...