Comment by kube-system
2 months ago
Cheap ones too -- aliexpress has them.
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. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.
35 years in the tech industry has taught me one thing: incumbents that have been around for a long time are almost always more clueless and more full of shit than you think, what they do isn't as hard as they claim and you can probably do better given a fraction of the time they spent just because you don't have legacy systems to worry about and because technology and tooling has moved on.
Incumbents thrive on the myths about what they do being hard and impossible to replicate.
Yes, it is a lot of work to replace what you can get off the shelf today. But it isn't like the basic tech itself is all that hard to replicate step by step if you accept that it takes time and the first N development stages will give you something that isn't as feature rich and polished. And if one makes it open source, interoperability will be easier to do something about.
Perhaps some of the analysis tools/services you can buy today will be hard to replicate, but I doubt they are that hard to replicate. And it is worth having slightly suboptimal results for a couple of seasons than being on the receiving end of a hostage-situation.
But yes, it is certainly a huge effort to get what you actually need.
The Pareto principle applies. For highly complex systems it’s easy to build most of what the incumbents have. It’s the last 20% where it is hard to catch up just because the incumbents have decades of a head start and have the momentum. And even more so here because it’s not just software. It’s very science and hardware heavy.
For farming, it’s even more tough because the market has a really uneven distribution. Usually the best place to tackle huge incumbents is in the midmarket. They’re big enough to need your automation, but they’re small enough to take a risk to save some money, and the features you haven’t built yet aren’t blockers for them.
But there’s basically no midmarket farming, all farms are pretty much either really big or really small.
Another clue into this is how hard they litigate. Can't innovate, litigate is a phrase for a reason
> 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.
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.
> 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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I think this has all suddenly shifted with high-quality programming AIs available. How difficult is this to implement with Claude?
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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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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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