When people start talking about crazy sci-fi scenarios about "the machines taking over", and I try to ponder realistic ways something like that could actually happen, my speculative journey currently leads me to the future of farming automation.<p>Maybe in 20 years Farmlogs 2035 will be powering fully automated farming that will be beyond our current imagination in efficiency. Application of machine learning and evolutionary programming will lead to it doing things with seeds and crop planting patterns and watering frequency that will be outside of our ability to comprehend.<p>Because of this amazing improvement in efficiency, we will need much less land to support the population. Fields would lie fallow and be turned into condos. It is at this point that we will be past the point of no return. Further into the future, if Farmlogs AI 2075 just decides that it has other plans than feeding humans... or even if there was some weird "bug" that caused a severe downturn in crop yields for a year. We would have to scramble to grow enough food without the incomprehensible techniques used by the machines.<p>Ok... getting back to work now.
I don't get what is so impressive about what is essentially an accounting app. it's a well done technology but some people get so carried away by this farm tech stuff... a CRUD app is not going to make farms more productive... I've
seen that farmlogs is using satellite NDVI data now to predict yields etc.... I've done a data science project and found the the NDVI has minimal correlation to yield. part of we thinks that this is a group of CS people pretending to be ag engineers. ..
Australian startup AgWorld has been building such software for a while now.<p><a href="http://www.agworld.co/" rel="nofollow">http://www.agworld.co/</a>