That’s what I do now. I have a once monthly techie meet farmer roundtable. So far it has been very tough to get farmers interested. Some like the romanticized notion of ‘farm life’ without realizing that it still runs on fossil fuels and cutting edge mechanical tech. I have been able to get a few of them interested no doubt. Few, but it was worth searching for them.

There has to be a ‘farm stack’...because it’s a lot of things. When I see a weed thinning machine start up bought for 300 something million, I am awed that just one simple function that isn’t even that essential with proper management is so expensive. This was Blue River Tech bought by John Deere. And what did John Deere do? They shut down lettuce thinning and took it to cotton which is a commodity crop and is one of the crops that uses pesticide sprays a lot. A good notion but it’s not food.

Which brings everyone back to square one and more $$$ going into something that has already been invented but retired.

And even if companies like John Deere own these tech, they control it tightly. I wonder how many lawyers are in their payroll. Farmers in California just lost the right to repair tractors with software in them. DMCA (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/04/30/john-... )

Can you imagine if one of those giant autonomous machines breaks down? Having smaller bots that swarm and take care of small acreages is less risky. Mitigated crop loss. It serves both small farmers and large farmers. Most ‘large farms’ are really corporate farms that outsource growing instructions and protocols to smaller farms and buys their produce. They contract farmers to grow what goes under their label after packing. Packers are not often growers. Distributors are not always packers. And then there are brokers, wholesalers and retailers. The supply chain is long!! The lettuce is at least a week old before you can buy it! Small local farm operators can get food via a smaller supply chain. I also want farming to be climate change proof and ‘future proof’. It’s easier to pivot smaller systems than larger massive ones.

I am making quick points but there is a lot of nuance depending on location, geography and kind of crops grown. This is why Agtech needs farmers and growers as partners. We know all the gory details and gnarly bits about our specialities.

Take pests like bugs. It differs not just from crop to crop but also differs with soil type, geography, season and sometimes we don’t even know why or how. It’s not possible to standardize this intelligence. So a weeding machine meant for the lettuce fields of Salinas, CA may not work elsewhere. It will become unbearably expensive to work out a system for a common farm marketplace. But it’s easy when we have a general purpose platform and process with minor changes depending on circumstance that can be cloud based and open source based on local farmers input. For this it has to be small and cheap.

And most importantly farmers need to trust tech. VCs have chosen to create for a few massive consolidated large scale farms(not selling to them,btw but leasing) instead of making it possible for everyone to farm.

It’s like the smart phone. If Apple made a $30000 gold plated phone, few might buy it but when they make cheaper ones with plastic cases, everyone can have one. And Apple makes $ from services and apps and what not. Plus they will be repeat buyers.

I struggle to explain this to finance folk and tech folk who now think they are bosom buddies with the VC folk now that they got a couple rounds of funding. There are real pain points that are not being addressed. In the field, I can already see future pain points. 30 years from now..if there is no fossil fuel..if climate change occurs..if soil changes..if water disappears..whatever. But no one who can make it happen is listening.