Comment by bluGill
1 day ago
Polk County Iowa is where Des Moines is - the largest city in Iowa. (I live the next county over, but I bike to Polk county all the time) This is not a good location to run this because the farm land is owned by farmer/investors or farmer/developers - either way everybody knows the farm will become a suburb in the next 20 years and has priced accordingly (and if the timeline is is less than 5 years they have switched to mining mode - strip out the last fertility before the development destroys the land anyway). Which is to say you can get much better land deals elsewhere (and by making your search wider) - sometimes the price might be higher but that is because the land/soil is better.
Overall I don't think this is useful. They might or might not get good results. However it is really hard to beat the farmer/laborer who lives close to the farm and thus sees things happen and can react quickly. There is also great value in knowing your land, though they should get records of what has happened in the past (this is all in a computer, but you won't always get access to it when you buy/lease land). Farmers are already using computers to guide decisions.
My prediction: they lose money. Not because the AI does stupid things (though that might happen), but because last year harvests were really good and so supply and demand means many farms will lose money no matter what you do. But if the weather is just right he could make a lot of money when other farmers have a really bad harvest (that is he has a large harvest but everyone else has a terrible harvest).
Iowa has strong farm ownership laws. There is real risk he will get shutdown somehow because what he is doing is somehow illegal. I'm not sure what the laws are, check with a real lawyer. (This is why Bill Gates doesn't own Iowa farm land - he legally can't do what he wants with Iowa farm land)
Hello. Ex-Iowegian here with family that owns large farms.
>Farmers are already using computers to guide decisions.
For way longer than most people expect. I remember reading farming magazines in the 80's showing computer based control for all kinds of farming operations. These days it is exceptionally high tech. Combines measure yield on a GPS grid. This is fed back into a mapping system for fertilization and soil amendment in the spring to reduce costs where you don't need to put fertilizer. The tractors themselves do most of the driving themselves if you choose to get those packages added. You can get services that monitor storm damage and predict losses on your fields, and updated satellite feed information on growth patterns, soil moisture, vegetation loss, and more. Simply put super high automation is already available for farming. I tell my uncle his job is to make sure the tractor has diesel in it, and that nothing is jammed in the plow.
When it comes to animal farming in the mid-west, a huge portion of it is done by contracts with other companies. My uncle owns the land and provides the labor, but the buildings, birds, food, and any other supplies. A faceless company setting up the contract like now, or an AI sending the same paperwork really may not look too much different.
The farmers I know say you are throwing money away driving your tractor at planting time. If the autostreer is broken they will wait - risking rain and needing to switch to a lower yielding but faster growing seed - instead of drive themself. even in that worst case the autosteer is likely to make more money than driving their tractor now.
auto steer often can get another row in without over crowding. auto steer also shuts off ineividual rows as you cross where you planted already (saving thousands of dollars in seed)
What I got from this comment is that John Deere could be a competitor with Tesla for FSD. (/s, but only slightly)
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If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!
You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal made over the internet, they are made in person with a handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case - worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate truck and needs to be attached). You need to clean the machine out after every field and put new seed in... It isn't worth planting 5 acres of corn. You need volume - and in turn a lot of land - to make corn work.
Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring farmer to take pity on him.
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Came here to mention this. Nobody farming 5 acres of land has a "farm manager" LOL. Hell, nobody farming 50 acres of land needs a farm manager. The gaping chasm between what this guy is purporting to do, and what is actually being demonstrated, is laughable.
It reminds me of when I worked at an ag tech startup for a few years. We visited farms up and down the central valley of California, and the general tone toward Silicon Valley is an intense dislike of overconfident 20-somethings with a prototype who think they're going to revolutionize agriculture in some way, but are far, far away from having enough context to see the constraints they're operating under and the tradeoffs being made.
Replacing the farm manager with an AI multiplies that problem by a hundred. A thousand? A million? A lot. AI may get some sensor data but it's not going to stick its hand in the dirt and say "this feels too dry". It won't hear the weird pinging noise that the tractor's been making and describe it to the mechanic. It may try to hire underlings but, how will it know which employees are working hard and which ones are stealing from it? (Compare Anthropic's experiments with having AI run a little retail store, and get tricked into selling tungsten cubes at a steep discount.)
I got excited when I opened the website and at first had the impression that they'd actually gotten AI to grow something. Instead it's built a website and sent some emails. Not worth our attention, yet.
what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?
Bill gates is one of the largest farmland owners in the world (or at least was - I last checked about 10 years ago...) He hires people to work on his farm, and managers to manage it. Food is the most important thing for modern society and the reports I have suggest he is trying to raise food in the most sustainable fashion possible (organic is often not sustainable)
Why is organic not suatsinable? Not affordable I get. But does organic damage the environment making it hard to farm again? or use inputs that are not sustainable?
Genuine question. I am alway curious when a statement goes against conventional wisdom.
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It's just a normal part of his portfolio - only because he's so rich does his 'normal' percentage get to the level of being the largest private land owner. Basically it's a good place to stash wealth.
Same as any other big real estate investor: speculate.
Collect rent.
That's all rich people do. The premise of capitalism is that the people best at collecting rent should also be in total control of resource allocation.
i would guess it's less about rent seeking and more about him making a bet on safe places to store billions of dollars. there's a lot of economic collapse that can happen where farm land remains valuable in a way that housing stock, office buildings, or MSFT stock wouldn't
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