Thirty years ago I was walking farmers soybeans fields, making weed maps and then writing prescriptions of what to spray. One feverish afternoon with the temperature hovering in the nineties I had an idea. What if we had a plane flyover, grab images and have a software program identify the weeds and spit out a prescription?

I talked to some professors at Michigan State and other software developers I knew. The consensus was it was a great idea but the technology simply was not there or even remotely close.

Little did I know several years later Monsanto would come out with genetically engineered soybeans that you could simply spray Roundup over. Walking fields, weed maps and prescriptions of chemicals became a thing of the past.

To me it was an excellent example of how technology can blind side you at times. Now of course weeds are becoming resistant to Roundup and prescriptions might make a comeback!