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Hello. Ex-Iowegian here with family that owns large farms.

>Farmers are already using computers to guide decisions.

For way longer than most people expect. I remember reading farming magazines in the 80's showing computer based control for all kinds of farming operations. These days it is exceptionally high tech. Combines measure yield on a GPS grid. This is fed back into a mapping system for fertilization and soil amendment in the spring to reduce costs where you don't need to put fertilizer. The tractors themselves do most of the driving themselves if you choose to get those packages added. You can get services that monitor storm damage and predict losses on your fields, and updated satellite feed information on growth patterns, soil moisture, vegetation loss, and more. Simply put super high automation is already available for farming. I tell my uncle his job is to make sure the tractor has diesel in it, and that nothing is jammed in the plow.

When it comes to animal farming in the mid-west, a huge portion of it is done by contracts with other companies. My uncle owns the land and provides the labor, but the buildings, birds, food, and any other supplies. A faceless company setting up the contract like now, or an AI sending the same paperwork really may not look too much different.

The farmers I know say you are throwing money away driving your tractor at planting time. If the autostreer is broken they will wait - risking rain and needing to switch to a lower yielding but faster growing seed - instead of drive themself. even in that worst case the autosteer is likely to make more money than driving their tractor now.

auto steer often can get another row in without over crowding. auto steer also shuts off ineividual rows as you cross where you planted already (saving thousands of dollars in seed)

What I got from this comment is that John Deere could be a competitor with Tesla for FSD. (/s, but only slightly)

I have to say I work for John Deere to discuss this more, even though I don't speak for the company.

A DOT (I'm not sure which DOT) just did a press release on how they used John Deere guidance on a snow plow which allowed them to clear the road in a blizzard so an ambulance could get to the hospital (I was surprised they can get enough of a GPS signal, but apparently they did). Auto steer allows someone to drive a plow when you can't see the pavement/lines without first having to memorize the road by the posts/trees on the side of the road.

However there is a big difference between Deere auto steer and Tesla FSD: safety. Tesla has sensors to see if someone/something is in the way and algorithms to go around - critics claim they don't work well, but they work infinity times better than the complete lack of any of those sensors/algorithms in Deere's system. If you are using the Deere system it can hold a lane to within a couple cm - but you have to look out the window constantly because it will just drive right into anything in the way. This is good enough for farming (nobody/nothing is going to be in front of the tractor anyway), or the DOT (they can't see the road at all, but they still have trained operators ready to hit the brake) - but Tesla is going after the "you can take a nap" market.

I wouldn't be surprised if Deere has more miles of self driving than Tesla and Waymo combined, and a better safety record. However this is only because Deere's system is used in situations where the odds are against there being anything to harm in the first place, while Tesla/Waymo are trying for the much harder open road with who knows what in the way.

Now Deere is working on the full autonomous solutions, I'm not sure what the status is (I think some are out there for use in very limited situations). I'm not allowed to say anything more about these plans (I know some is public but I'm not sure what)

If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!

You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal made over the internet, they are made in person with a handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case - worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate truck and needs to be attached). You need to clean the machine out after every field and put new seed in... It isn't worth planting 5 acres of corn. You need volume - and in turn a lot of land - to make corn work.

Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring farmer to take pity on him.

I love the variety of people that come to HN. There are real farmers weighing on on the plausibility of this.

If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!) from farmerfred@proofofcorn.com reading generally:

> I'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you} and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to work that land for me, are you interested?

I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm sure that being an out-of-state investor who doesn't have any physical hands to finalize the deal with a handshake is an impediment, but with enough tokens, Farmer Fred could make 100,000 phone calls and send out 100,000 emails to every landowner and work-for-hire equipment operator in Iowa, Texas, and Argentina by this afternoon. If there exists a human who would make that deal, Fred can eventually find them. Seth would be limited in his chance to succeed in these efforts because he can only make one 1-minute phone call per minute, Fred can become as many callers as Anthropic owns GPUs.

I do find it amusing that Fred currently shows the following dashboard:

    Iowa
    HOLD
    0°F
    Unknown (API error)
    Fred's Thinking: “Iowa is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

     Fred is here
    South Texas
    HOLD
    0°F
    Unknown (API error)
    Fred's Thinking: “South Texas is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

    Argentina
    HOLD
    0°F
    Unknown (API error)
    Fred's Thinking: “Argentina is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

Any human Fred might call in the Argentinian summer or 70F South Texas winter weather is not going to gain confidence when Fred tries to build rapport through some small talk about the unseasonably cold weather...

> Fred is here

Ah, they've created SCP-423

And I'm sure a farmer who's already busy is going to waste his time on a five acre lot. Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible. I'm sure there's a dollar amount that would motivate someone, but at a profitable rate, not a chance in hell.

> Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible.

One of my fields has a creek in the corner that divides just two acres from the rest of the field. I've never noticed any meaningful yield drag in that part.

Perhaps your soil is more fertile in that area? It's not uncommon to see a 25% drop in acreage on the border of fields due to trees, end rows etc.

25% would be quite extreme. There is some evidence of that much loss on individual rows being possible, but not the entire headland. 10% is considered to be more typical, which works out to be around a 4% loss across the entire piece. Which is well within the normal range of field variability, so it is ultimately not noticeable.

Of course, if it were a 5 acre field, with some assumptions about its shape, we'd only be talking more like a 2% loss across the entire field. Not nothing, but terrible...?

Year-to-year variability will see much larger swings than that. If that's the margin you're trying to operate on, I dare say you're cooked, even if your fields are large.

Well the smaller a field, the larger proportion of end rows. And I was referring to end rows, not the entire field. A 5 acre field is pretty small, and my rough guess is that between end rows, rows shaded by trees and close to water sources, the loss could be pretty significant. Now if you're talking 500-1000 acres, end rows are nothing in the scheme of things.

> And I was referring to end rows, not the entire field.

As was I. 10% loss is considered typical, but that amortizes to only ~4% and ~2% for two and five acre fields respectively. So you suggest that 2% is "terrible" and "pretty significant", but I say it is essentially imperceptible from normal field variability. If you pick a random five acre plot out in the middle of a 100 acre field, there is a decent chance that it will 2% or more below the field average too.

Are you seeing this with corn or other crops? I don't have any experience with anything but corn and beans.

Came here to mention this. Nobody farming 5 acres of land has a "farm manager" LOL. Hell, nobody farming 50 acres of land needs a farm manager. The gaping chasm between what this guy is purporting to do, and what is actually being demonstrated, is laughable.

It reminds me of when I worked at an ag tech startup for a few years. We visited farms up and down the central valley of California, and the general tone toward Silicon Valley is an intense dislike of overconfident 20-somethings with a prototype who think they're going to revolutionize agriculture in some way, but are far, far away from having enough context to see the constraints they're operating under and the tradeoffs being made.

Replacing the farm manager with an AI multiplies that problem by a hundred. A thousand? A million? A lot. AI may get some sensor data but it's not going to stick its hand in the dirt and say "this feels too dry". It won't hear the weird pinging noise that the tractor's been making and describe it to the mechanic. It may try to hire underlings but, how will it know which employees are working hard and which ones are stealing from it? (Compare Anthropic's experiments with having AI run a little retail store, and get tricked into selling tungsten cubes at a steep discount.)

I got excited when I opened the website and at first had the impression that they'd actually gotten AI to grow something. Instead it's built a website and sent some emails. Not worth our attention, yet.

what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?

Collect rent.

That's all rich people do. The premise of capitalism is that the people best at collecting rent should also be in total control of resource allocation.

i would guess it's less about rent seeking and more about him making a bet on safe places to store billions of dollars. there's a lot of economic collapse that can happen where farm land remains valuable in a way that housing stock, office buildings, or MSFT stock wouldn't

The qustion does that collapse look like a warzone where a digitial piece of paper saying you own something means very little.

my point is that if you were to look at the spectrum of collapse that can happen, maintaining ownership of valuable farm land is basically the last stop before your billions being worth nothing. if we're to the point of legal land ownership dissolving then there's really nothing more he could have done to preserve capital

Same as any other big real estate investor: speculate.

Bill gates is one of the largest farmland owners in the world (or at least was - I last checked about 10 years ago...) He hires people to work on his farm, and managers to manage it. Food is the most important thing for modern society and the reports I have suggest he is trying to raise food in the most sustainable fashion possible (organic is often not sustainable)

Why is organic not suatsinable? Not affordable I get. But does organic damage the environment making it hard to farm again? or use inputs that are not sustainable?

Genuine question. I am alway curious when a statement goes against conventional wisdom.

Organic allows some really nasty chemicals that build up in the soil because they were used 200 years ago. Organic often substitutes plowing for weed killer - this is both bad for the air - more CO2 - and plowing destroys the soil.

if organic finds something good conventional farming adopts it.

conventional farming is developed at research universities. Organic is developed in cities by people who know nothing about farming, and often have an agenda.

not that conventional farming is all good. And even where it is better not all farmers do what is best. However organic is not a step better.

Thanks. Are there good links for this topic?

I'm not aware of anything. I have to read between the lines when experts (some of them university professors in agriculture) talk to figure out the above.

Organic is literally throwing out a ton of modern technology that makes farming scalable and able to sustain the population at its current numbers.

Organic was never about sustainability, so I’m not sure why you think that’s against conventional wisdom. Organic has always been “chemicals bad so we do things the old fashioned way”

It's just a normal part of his portfolio - only because he's so rich does his 'normal' percentage get to the level of being the largest private land owner. Basically it's a good place to stash wealth.