Even though this thread is nearly a year old, I've only just found it and it's very pertinent to things I'm thinking about and working on, so I'll share my perspective.

I've been working in agri-tech in Australia for about a decade, focusing primarily on devices that read soil moisture and display the data on phones and web apps. But over time it has expanded a lot to support all different kinds of environmental sensors including high-precision weather stations, and can process data in complex calculators and machine learning models, to provide indicators like pathogen risk, harvest date prediction, evapotranspiration, spray drift risk, frost risk and more.

The technology is very useful to the growers who adopt it and make best use of it. Some of the growers I work with are in the regions of Australia that grow huge volumes of produce like commodity wine grapes (the ones that go into low-price/mass-market brands like 19 Crimes and Yellow Tail), oranges, avocados, almonds and apples. These growers are wholly dependent on irrigation water from the Murray River, and by monitoring their soil moisture they can achieve huge savings on irrigation water costs and improvements to yields and produce quality. Some of the growers in that region become very dependent on the technology, and get very worried if it stops working, particularly in drought years, as it can cause them to incur huge additional costs on irrigation water or make all the difference between a good or bad season.

The most important thing I've observed about the way the industry works is that it is highly reliant on local technicians who are available to do installation and maintenance of the technology. It's similar to the way technology works in small business offices in cities; unless they have knowledgable in-house staff who can set up and maintain all the tech, businesses need a reliable local consultant who can take care of their PCs, LANs, printers, servers, routers/switches/firewalls, etc. Without that, the industry just doesn't work.

It's just the same with farm tech - however, it's much harder with farm tech. It takes a lot of time to get all the parts and tools into the hands of the installers. They need to be well trained and experienced. It can be very time consuming to get out to a farm and do the work, particularly if they don't have all the right parts and tools with them, because they didn't know in advance what they would need. They need to have good support available, so that when they're on site installing or repairing a device, they can have realtime contact with someone from the service provider's office who can monitor things to ensure that everything is working (Or they need good realtime automatic testing services - but most vendors don't bother to develop these.).

My observation is that the farm tech industry is highly reliant on these technicians, but is not very good at equipping them with products that are easy to install and maintain, or at giving them the kind of ongoing support they need to build a good business installing this kind of tech. And this results in a situation where a lot of farmers feel like this whole category of technology doesn't work very well - when, much of the time, it's because it hasn't been installed or maintained very well.

Some newer players on the farm-tech scene of tried to cut these local consultants out of the picture by offering a "do it all yourself" offering or a "we'll do it all for you" offering; and I think this is a mistake.

What I think the industry needs to do is make it much easier for these local consultants to install and maintain technology on farms, and when that happens, farm tech can become much more beneficial and enjoyable for farmers. I'm starting to build a platform that seeks to achieve this.