I worked on a project to create affordable, electric vegetable graters for rural farmers in Ghana [1]. For comparison, the price point of our grater was $150USD and was still seen as too expensive by a substantial portion of our customers, some of whom opted to purchase the graters on an installment basis (3 x $50 every 6 months as our group traveled to Ghana bi-annually).
The main problems our rural customers faced were much more basic in nature and cannot be solved by a $60k farming kit: uncontrollable and sometimes devastating wet/dry seasonal cycles that could decimate an entire crop, making financial planning very difficult. Subsequently many of our customers lived day-to-day off whatever they sold their produce for at the market, making securing loans/financing to invest in capital (more land, equipment, livestock) impossible.
At one of the farms we visited, I noticed a half-built brick house next to the main family house. The farm owner explained that they were building a second home, but that they had to do it literally "brick-by-brick", purchasing a few bricks with extra income when they could afford to buy them. He explained this investment in bricks was their form of saving for the future: the small amounts of extra money would get spent otherwise on food or other necessities rather than put into a bank account or stashed under a mattress.
Other basic problems included a relatively high marginal cost of transporting goods to market and little access to market price data. No agricultural education info. Communal access to heavy farming machinery (graters, plows, etc.) with no accountability for these devices (they end up breaking and nobody wants to pay to fix them). Unreliable electric grid, and no chance the cellular service would be reliable/affordable enough to get an IoT system up and running on a small farm, even if the farmers did have time left over after planting, harvesting, and processing their crops, and looking after their families. Everything is harder and more manual when you lack scale, and you can't order a replacement solar panel/battery/raspberry pi off amazon.
Since the goal of our project was to get the grater into the hands of as many cassava-grating women as possible, at marginally-above-cost, we decided to sell into restaurants and explore other cash-rich markets to cross-subsidize sales to small acreage farmers. We also wanted to sell direct, or close-to-direct (at least in the beginning) to build a relationship with our customers, get to know them, get feedback on the products, and spread news of the product thru word of mouth.
That said, maybe we should have looked to sell our graters to governments/NGOs so we could have scaled up faster.
[1] http://www.olin.edu/academics/experience/engineering-capston...