Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

I've had tech people occasionally propose ideas, or ask if something sounds feasible, and one of the first things I often remind them is that the ocean is brutal to most forms of human engineering; something like Murphys Law incarnate. Weird physical stresses, bad wireless comms, corrosion of all sorts, biofouling of all the things, large temperature swings, etc. Sometimes a good day in ocean tech isn't "it worked", it's "it didn't work, but we got our equipment back out of the water." The domain knowledge involved in building or operating even moderately-reliable systems like that is hard to get without first-hand experience. There are lots of important, interesting problems offered by the ocean, but they always come hand-in-hand with these not-so-fun ones, which in my experience tends to dampen tech people's enthusiasm a bit.

My plan was to work on software for permaculture, but there were a number of confounding factors that limited that and I ended up abandoning the work. Portable devices were still not great in full light settings. Although that has improved in the interim, the bigger problem was that at least half of the permaculture people I knew were anti technology. More than a few were borderline pastoralists, and I found a group of them having an antivax conversation (pre-Covid, pre-Trump). I can’t recall the last time I was that disappointed.

Connectivity is a big issue as you say, but also the ergonomics are just bad for many settings. Glare is bad, especially when combined with dust. Farming and landscaping is dirty work. Touch screens do not like dirt, especially abrasive dirt. Work gloves prevent blisters and some dirt, but some gets through the gloves. But also getting gloves on and off repeatedly is a huge pain in the butt, which is something I only came to discover more recently when my partner or work would try to message me when I was working in the yard. It takes you out of your flow.

I think we will get there, but it will take OLED or better displays, and many more iterations on scratch resistant coatings (I gouged the shit out of my Apple Watch 5 by wearing it gardening), and I think then the path will still be voice recording, note taking and location tracking as the primary tools to split data collection in the field from copy editing accomplished while sitting at the kitchen table or office desk.

People blame these guys for making their money off of speaking engagements and consulting, but it’s going to take a lot to get to the point where your neighbors are on board. If you want to teach someone you have to seek them out, not just work locally.

This is a shame really because it really sounds like a pretty good use case that would be easy to adopt if you could just go down to some farm supply company and pickup a drone and be flying it over your farm the same day. Instead you end up having to figure out licensing requirements and worrying about the restrictions when you don't really want to deal with interpreting and understanding FAA regulations and you shouldn't really have to if you're using the tech over your own land in a rural setting.

Would be cool if one day you could buy a Matterport or Leica Disto equipped LIDAR photo scanner (like Fixar or Wingtra) to survey the entire property based on GIS tax parcel data and then in the software you could select things to photograph on a regular schedule and all you'd have to do is look through the photos each day. Eventually machine learning could be used on the photos and you'd be able to have something like pagerduty for agtech as someone mentioned elsewhere to tell you where to focus your time.

Not sure how well this would work with some livestock since I can't imagine they would like drones buzzing about.

That said, I've got no ag experience so not really sure how much labor this really saves. Just cool to think about.