Ask HN: Anyone here bringing "AI" to small-mid farmers?

[culopatin]

I have this strong desire to leave everything to help the small to mid farmer earn more. I can’t just accept that they make so little money working so hard while everyone in between eats their lunch. Even if I can’t fix the pipeline, I can at least try to make them more efficient, have fewer losses, or operate like a big Ag at a smaller scale.

Anyone here doing any use of LLMs, ML or just any software tech in general? How’s that going? Were you in ag? Getting any traction? Are farmers receptive? Anything you want to share would be great, would also pay a coffee to chat.

[joegibbs]

My uncle runs beef cattle, I can’t think of any LLM uses straight off the top of my head, but drones + image segmentation would be huge. Farmers have a very long busy day, if you could have a drone go and take video and then accurately segment out e.g. injured heifer, paddock low on feed, broken fence it would be a huge time saver.

[bigyabai]

Visit your local co-op or farmer's market, I've met lots of local farmers just by going to buy fresh produce. They'll usually be pretty honest about what their shortcomings are (most likely, needing extra hands during spring/fall).

And definitely consider volunteering if you've got the time for it.

[gus_massa]

> And definitely consider volunteering if you've got the time for it.

I agree, it's hard for some non-tech to understand which problems can be solved with tech. Also, from outside it's difficult to know all the tech they already use. A month in the field and talking to everyone while there may be very helpful to understand the real problems.