Automated Farming Equipment

Upvote for the fellow techno-optimist. I am pretty excited with some of the startups I have seen in the electric farm equipment space.https://www.monarchtractor.com/I don't own a farm so I don't have industry insight but it's exciting because I think this is a problem at least appears solvable. I realize large combines are probably an issue but if you can automate the proces

There is probably a sizable market for building out software and technology for 'upgrading' older farm equipment to modern principals, such as self driving, variable rate fertilization, variable rate planting, etc. When I was more involved in ag research I met several farmers who DIY built themselves variable rate fertilization drills. While its not ubiquitous, the farming community has a very long culture of DIY out of pure necessity. I think this is the source of the pushback against

Background grew up on the country side.I think robotic farming with less pesticide spray will be the future! There seem to be an ever increasing size increase of tractors. Many of these tractors runs proprietary software John Deere which makes them hard to self service. Robots can run from solar/bio energy generated locally at the farm.I think there will be a movement of build your own open source robots at farms. Farmers are very inventive and good at making things!

if its large scale mechanized farming yes. since tractor companies are removing your right to repair. but that doesnt stop farmers from being ingenious.

Any kind of wired setup would interfere with other tractors they use in the field. Fertilization, and eventually harvesting.I’m not sure why people are inventing more complicated solutions when this robot seems to handle the job quite well without them. It covers 20 acres in a day, you can likely keep 100+ acres weed free continuously without any other special gimmicks.

Take a look at the comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20910845 (36 points, 44 days ago, 19 comments) , perhaps the farmers use more technology than you think.

Yeah you can start farming! But oh wait tractors can do the job better than humans there too

I'm picturing self-driving tractors as a labour-saver during the busiest time of year (haying). It would be a relatively simple technical problem to solve, and I could see manufacturers going for the market (and locking down the system at the same time - same as Tesla and Deere).

Farm equipment != smartphone. No one is throwing away high dollar farm equipment.

Why is fully automated agriculture impossible?