I honestly only want to be a co founder to someone who is creating the tech we need to guide and highlight and test their products. I am not going to pretend to be a technical person or a engineer or the one who makes the whole thing profitable, but I can take the farm’s side and speak from the POV of plants and soil...I understand my domain. I can tell them if their vision system with AI is worth thousands and thousands of dollars is really needed. Just because something awesome is possible doesn’t mean that we need it.

Sometimes all you need is a blind garden gnome as a helper. If I can tell the gnome to walk 3 steps, stop, use a two inch circle hoe once up and once down, it doesn’t matter if he is blind IF I set up planting and spacing before hand that is suitable for the blind garden gnome. Yes, it’s awesome to have a rover with lidar and sensors and vision system and AI for phenotyping and uploading the ID of every weed in the field to the cloud. But do we need it?

And I thought about it long and hard as to why all this is even there in the design. It became apparent very quickly. Data. They are collecting data with all the IoT devices piggy backing on the machine.

They tell us that we need this data. They tell us that this data will bring us more profits. They tell us that we have to pay for this data collection.

But my field data that is 2-3 times more valuable than the kale I sell(and that I pay for because most of these are subscription services) belongs to me. But the IoT devices and the farm bots that collect it are not even ours. The farmers don’t own it, they don’t have right to repair and they can’t extarct data. And trust me, there is A LOT of data that can be collected from our fields that we don’t even need. But we own it. And I want to commoditise it for the farmer. Why should we buy retail and sell wholesale and take all the risk, but not reap the benefits?

That’s why John Deere wants to deny farmers right to repair citing DMCA. That’s why hardware tech is going to commodity crops that are traded in the exchange. That’s where the real ROI is for VCs. I am not an idiot. I get it, but why should part of profits from my activity not come back to me?

With produce and non commodity crops, the value is trying to capture the ROI through blockchain and data from that. But again farmers are at the bottom of the supply chain and value is spread to all the people in between and we get none of it because we are the first ring in the supply chain. It never flows back. If I sell Romain wholesale, I can get 39cents from buyer. It sells for 1.59-2.50 a head as it adds up on the supply chain, but that 0.5-one cent I pay per romaine for technology to extract data is included as costs for the 39c I receive, but it becomes 5-10 cents up the value chain and it plumps up everytime it goes up.

But people who work in supply chain tech and robotics and drones have access to SV and VCs. Farmers don’t. Large commercial farms that operate with offices and lobbying muscle and are members of organizations that represent them have access to SV and VCs, but small farmers who work the farms they own can..in no way..access these people who are investors.

The small acreage farmer is basically nuts. They farm because they have a passion for it. Soil health is more important than pesticides and fertilizer to boost productivity. Many aren’t buoyed by higher profits but its their very nature that gets them out of the game after 4-5 years average because you can’t suppirt yourself with this kind of variable, broke today-chicken dinner tomorrow income. But we have value and we can create value. We need to make money to continue doing what we do...when they say that the average farmer is 58 and young people don’t want to farm..well..why would they if they are not seen and valued?

I didn’t know how this became such a long reply. Thanks for reading.

My website is a placeholder for my farm. Its not a place for tech or farm bot topics there as it’s a place for my customers and farm friends. It’s my username dot com.