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.

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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.

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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 14 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.