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| ▲ | MisterTea 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | tempest_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It really depends. The bigger agcorps have tones of integration. 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 It goes on an on. | | |
| ▲ | worik 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The bigger agcorps have tones of integration. Yes, but how useful is the integration? The sprayers/spreaders can be connected cheap computer to achieve most of what you describe. I used to do literally that but in aircraft. Must be easier and cheaper in tractors |
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| ▲ | lallysingh 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think this has all suddenly shifted with high-quality programming AIs available. How difficult is this to implement with Claude? | | |
| ▲ | AngryData 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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%. | |
| ▲ | kube-system 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | jfengel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What kind of sensors do those cheap kits come with? A tractor is a big thing to have rolling around unsupervised. I would want a lot of safeguards. Blindly going from one GPS point to another sounds like a nightmare. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The cheapie aliexpress specials simply drive the line they're programmed to drive. They have GPS and a gyro to account for the slope of the land. You're supposed to stay in the tractor while they're operating as a safety... but this doesn't always happen in some parts of the world. | | |
| ▲ | krater23 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 30 years ago you had a hand-gas and clamped the wheel to drive the tractor in a line. Using GPS is a litle bit more safe than that. And I talk about Germany! |
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| ▲ | defrost 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Here you go, local grain farmer (4,500 hectares, barley, grains) reviews a fully automated driverless swarm bot in boom spray configuration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM |
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| ▲ | dylan604 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Right, but that has nothing to do with a vendor making a dumb tractor. Why do we need to dismissively move the conversation from TFA. The data driven approach is made up of several parts, and we're looking at a specific part | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Making a dumb tractor for the use-case of dumb tractor is obviously a winning idea. I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway173738 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why not? They sell telematics systems separately from cars. It’s possible to do this and it might not be too difficult depending on how the system is composed. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Precision ag is orders of magnitude more complicated of a system than vehicle telematics. Again, driving the tractor is the easy part, and you can already get cheap systems to do this. |
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| ▲ | dylan604 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | admittedly, i'm not a farmer nor an expert in data driving farming. but getting a farmer the ability to precisely drive a tractor in a field so that planting seeds, applying fertilizer, and any of the other steps would be a huge win. The settings used when doing that can easily come from bigFarmData gained from other sources. Can it be used even more precisely when everything is gathered/integrated by one company? That's a question that I'm not by default saying yes to, but it seems like you do think that is true. Even if it is true, does that mean the difference from a farmer going broke because his DIY tractor behaved slightly differently than your solution? I'd posit that a farmer only being allowed to play the bigFarmData game by only being allowed to buy from one vendor that is expensive while also forcing any repairs to be expensive will cause farmers to financially unnecessarily struggle. | | |
| ▲ | greedo 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The economics of farming (at least in the US) are brutal. Scaling up is really the only way to make a living long term. Some of this is due to equipment cost (look up how much a combine costs), and some is due to competition. It's not unusual for a farmer to be land rich and cash poor. If you want to see a couple of guys learning how to farm from scratch, visit https://www.youtube.com/@spencerhilbert. Spencer and his brother made a bit of money off games and Youtube and have been starting out on corn, hay, as well as raising beef. It gives a pretty good insight into how pervasive tech is in farming, and how despite that, how much of farming still relies on hard, physical work. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'll check out Spencer's channel. For a comedy perspective, there's Clarkson's Farm or Growing Belushi. Even though they are for entertainment, there's a still a lot of info in those shows to not be written off. However, I'm not as interested in being a farmer at that level. I'm much more interested in the homesteading aspect of farming. I'm not trying to feed the world as much as me and mine and maybe some extra. So not just farming, but also some ranching with sheep/goats/chickens/pigs. I have friends doing this that I'm keeping an eye on. They had a head start as their kids grew up in FFA and are already familiar with raising live stock, and then having them processed to make that part much less daunting. | | |
| ▲ | rgmerk 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Good luck, but there’s a reason why subsistence farmers move to city slums as soon as they can. | |
| ▲ | greedo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I get that. Crop farming is so different than raising animals. |
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| ▲ | kube-system 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Scale is a huge factor. It makes the most sense to invest in precision ag tech when you have enough acres that the investment pays off. At 5000+ acres, farms are using integrated systems that combine satellite data, on-tractor sensors, soil sensors, drone sensors, in-field weather sensors, with a lot of science to squeeze the most out of the land. At that scale, there's a lot of money invested in a season and you aren't looking for a DIY project, you need production quality product with proven scientific rigor. You probably don't have the manpower to do a DIY project anyway, you are relying heavily on automation and outsourcing. And at the low end, it it more effort to implement any of this than you'll get out of it. So a DIY solution is aiming for somewhere in the center of the market -- enough scale that it makes sense to bother, but not enough enough money to avoid the headache of DIY. It might make sense for some mid-sized farms in developing economies, but it seems to be a narrow window to me. |
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| ▲ | andrew_lettuce 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is suspect most farmers would prefer the diy add-on version of these than the single manufacturer integrated one. A modern smartphone and stay of I/o sensors send like it could do pretty much the entire job |
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