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

[Nathan Owens <nathan@nathan.io>]

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I have about 2 years of ag experience…
- farming is expensive and highly variable margin year to year, which makes
it hard to justify investing in tech unless the payoff is very obvious /
quick.
- the tech that does exist isn’t standardized. Got a pivot from Zimmatic
and one from Valley? 2 separate apps and whatnot. And the price to get a
cell modem board for it is like $1500 + a subscription.
- much of the smart field monitoring stuff is subscription based; you can’t
own it, and it’s not open.
- integrating and using all this stuff requires some tech skills, the
average age of a farmer is in their 60s, and not all of them are tech savvy
(many are).

On Mon, Nov 13, 2023 at 4:45 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 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
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