But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.
The bigger agcorps have tones of integration.
The machine, from tractor to combine and everything in between often feeds data together to produce a holistic understanding.
Things like - How much fuel was used - Where your tractors and sprayers drove - Soil samples and content - How and where every bit of chemical and fertilizer was applied - What weather hit your field - How much and and the moisture content of every bit of the field you harvested
It goes on an on.
Yes, but how useful is the integration?
The sprayers/spreaders can be connected cheap computer to achieve most of what you describe.
I used to do literally that but in aircraft. Must be easier and cheaper in tractors
But if you're observing a fleet of 100+ machines you kinda need some integration and a central location. Which in turn connects to multiple other services like weather, crop markets, fuel prices etc.
A tractor is a big thing to have rolling around unsupervised. I would want a lot of safeguards. Blindly going from one GPS point to another sounds like a nightmare.
I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems.
If you want to see a couple of guys learning how to farm from scratch, visit https://www.youtube.com/@spencerhilbert. Spencer and his brother made a bit of money off games and Youtube and have been starting out on corn, hay, as well as raising beef. It gives a pretty good insight into how pervasive tech is in farming, and how despite that, how much of farming still relies on hard, physical work.
> raising beef
Is that cows? English isn't my first language, so I thought beef was the word just for the meat, with all Normans eating while Saxons raising thing.
However, I'm not as interested in being a farmer at that level. I'm much more interested in the homesteading aspect of farming. I'm not trying to feed the world as much as me and mine and maybe some extra. So not just farming, but also some ranching with sheep/goats/chickens/pigs. I have friends doing this that I'm keeping an eye on. They had a head start as their kids grew up in FFA and are already familiar with raising live stock, and then having them processed to make that part much less daunting.
So a DIY solution is aiming for somewhere in the center of the market -- enough scale that it makes sense to bother, but not enough enough money to avoid the headache of DIY. It might make sense for some mid-sized farms in developing economies, but it seems to be a narrow window to me.