[NNagain] the real state of "smart agriculture"?

[Dave Taht]

(I am hoping others on this list with real-world AG experience can
chime in? I enjoy realworld stories about present solutions and pain
points[2])

I have often been dubious of the 5g hope to dominate any major
component of a smart ag architecture except perhaps FWA, (where
starlink is poised and people also want to run fiber) to give it a
good run for the money- 5g chips are too big, too hard to power, and
too complex, and come with a monthly billing model and other
centralized requirements that make organic evolution and solid support
in remote environments dicy and expensive.

I freely concede that I may be wrong, that with sufficient subsidies,
we will end up hanging the equivalent of a cellphone off of every
suitably large piece of gear and ship all the data up to the cloud,
rather than pre-process locally. Certainly the benefits of gps and
drones are being shown every day, along with satellite weather and
other forms of satellite analysis. [1]

But the 5g sensor market? No. Nowadays smart sensors are easily
constructed out of wifi devices such as these which cost 5 dollars or
less:

https://www.amazon.com/DORHEA-Development-Microcontroller-NodeMCU-32S-ESP-WROOM-32/dp/B086MJGFVV/ref=asc_df_B086MJGFVV/

And the more meshy LoRA stuff now has much better range (4 miles), at
low complexity and power also.

then there are things like amazon sidewalk:
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?ie=UTF8&node=21328123011

And airtags.

[1] On the other hand rigorous analysis of the food we produce has
recently discovered a marked decline in the percentage of nutritious
minerals over the past 100 years. Please see:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09637486.2021.1981831

How smart is that?

[2] Massive subsidy and diversion of river resources to the water
hungry california almond industry during the last 7 years of drought
led to the cancellation of the salmon fishing season last year.

You should hear some of the invective that I used to hear aimed at
"the f-ing vegetarians" along the docks I frequent in half moon bay.
That I used to hear, anyway, The docks are eerily silent, the workers
at other jobs, the boats not going out for anything except crab and
squid.

How smart is that? The California water table is a disaster, too. I
vastly prefer salmon to almonds personally....

I guess a meta point is easily gathering tactical data is one thing,
sharing it sanely another, deciding on how to use it strategically,
another.

-- 
:( My old R&D campus is up for sale: https://tinyurl.com/yurtlab
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos