This model will fail. I think bringing in SaaS type products to Ag will only work as long as there are subsidies. They are trying to extract a slice of the subsidy pie by turning farmers into customers instead of providing them a service.

We have to stop this data and AI fetish in Ag. Someone has to call out that the Emperor has no clothes but no one will because everyone is in on it.

What we have is an incestuous circle jerk. Investors are the funding bank. The poor are the voting bank. The middle class are the tax paying bank. And we pay our taxes and vote in policies like subsidies to benefit the investor class. Hello?

Lest we forget: JD wanted to acquire Monsanto. And couldn’t because DoJ blocked it.

[..]"The more technology we can develop to allow farmers to get productivity out of their land without having to spend so much money on fertilizer and inputs, the better off everybody is," Julian Sanchez, Deere's director of emerging technology, told Reuters.[…]

If anyone believes the above, I have a beautiful bridge for sale. If JD and the collective American farmers were each summarized as individuals, what Deere is doing would be classified as gaslighting and abuse.

Commodity Ag is already over optimized. And a large section provides useless products like ethanol and feed. A lot of which is also exported. This model will rely upon an increase of subsidies to American farmers. In other words, tax dollars will be funding/subsiding Deere and their ilk who are trying to bring ‘tech’ to Ag.

Indirectly we are subsidizing Deere. This by itself is nothing new. All subsidies are tied to keeping unemployment down. After educating millions of Americans in STEM fields, we have to keep them gainfully employed. That’s the only reason for an economy to exist and is the distillation of what GDP is really about..

When framed that way..it’s fine. Everything else about tech helping the farmer is just eye wash. Just stating it for what it really is about..

At the end of the day, we are probably better off installing a UBI instead of subsidies that poisons our water table, releases carbon and wastes fossil fuels through this wasteful activity called ‘ag jobs’..that in America actually ends up being exported for animal agriculture and meat consumption in the rest of the world..which begs the question..is it worth burning all this fossil fuel for exports to support unsustainable economies in our over populated world and deceiving ourselves with the fallacy that we are living in a century of ‘abundance’ where in fact, we are really plummeting towards global warming and mass extinction.

Suddenly Meta seems like a brilliant idea. Our planet will become more sustainable and support exponentially raising population is we take all wasteful activities to the metaverse. Simulations are ecologically sound. Just have to crack the ‘free and abundant energy’ part. Maybe we should work on nuclear energy instead.

This part of the article needs highlighting:

[..] Autonomous machinery is where Deere is placing its bet as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated in farming. Its self-driving 8R tillage tractor will be the latest addition to the company's algorithm-enabled offerings when the green machines go on sale in the fall.

The new tractor will be priced at $500,000. However, the autonomy feature will be sold separately. Deere executives told analysts at a conference that the company will largely maintain its "point-of-sale" model for equipment, but will integrate a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for its autonomous solutions. That will likely include their self-driving tractor.[..]

Shark, Meet Deere. Deere, please jump The Shark.