I’ve talked to a few folks in the arduino for agriculture space over the past few days or so. There is a lot going in the arena, and after having looked at just some of what’s happening, it is absolutely the Wild West for in the Internet of ag-things. There’s a lot of potential applications, and there are a lot of creative and smart people going in different directions. This type of diversity is healthy for the future prospects of low-cost automated agricultural applications using microcontrollers.
Some conclusions:
- The hardware piece is the easier part, but there’s still a lot of code to be written to make this stuff work seamlessly with phones, existing database architecture, and desktop applications.
- Different people are approaching this differently, with the challenge being paying the bills and generating cash flow. Some are purely comitted to open source, others are using a hybrid model with software as a service for montetization, while others still are a completely closed system. Likely these serve large industrial producers.
- There is a general sense that the future of agriculture, in part at least, is small, microintensive production units, e.g. aquaponics in basements.
- The opportunities to integrate existing digital and analog electronics into the new Internet is mind-boggling, and just getting started.
- The groups working in this space are fragmented! We need to work on building a small but committed community of people who are regularly communicating online.
If you are interested in being a part of an emerging community of like-minded people comitted to arduino for ag, then please let me know. Contact me via email or twitter. Or tweet #agduino.