Re: [Starlink] the real state of "smart agriculture"?

[Dotzero <dotzero@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Nov 13, 2023 at 7:45 AM Dave Taht via Starlink <
starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> (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'm a security techie who happens to own a farm. We run a small grass
fed/finished Angus freezer beef operation in Central East Ohio. I
intentionally keep the operation fairly low tech.  Security is a huge pain
point in the AG sector even if most farmers don't recognize the problem. I
first became interested in AG sector security in 2011 when a friend at
defcon introduced me to someone who hacked a 3pt corn planter remotely.

If you are interested in the use of sensors and tech in AG  then you should
go to something like Farm Science Review (https://fsr.osu.edu/). Ass my
wife puts it, just the vendor area is 100+ acres of agricultural porn. A
lot of the sensing is being done using satellites, aircraft and drones
rather than sensors on the ground. You'll more likely see sensors "on the
ground" in greenhouse operations, milkining operations, etc. I'm attaching
a photo of a combine with multiple antennas. Not sure if it will make it
through the listserv.

>
> 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.
>

The other issue with 5g is the range.

>
> 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.
>

I haven't seen muh LoRA stuff in the field (yet).

>
> 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
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>

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