TechStuff Classic: High Tech Farming

to this classic episode. I was amazed at how technology is rapidly changing the face of agriculture because in my mind, it's one of those things that's been kind of set technologically speaking for decades, and it just shows how how ignorant I was of the whole thing. I had just a tiny bit of insight on this UM Our listener, our listening audience UM back in two thousand and ten. I think we did an episode about some of the

some of the stuff that was happening back then. But even since two thousand ten, there's been a lot of advances. But we have a few listeners in our audience that, UM, you know, where their their ranch hands or the work on the farm and they listen to the podcast as they you know, or killing the fields or whatever they're

doing tending to the herd. And um, they said, you know what would be really interesting I don't think a lot of people know about this is just how advanced tractors are becoming, Just how advanced, um, you know, barnes themselves are becoming. It's not just the machinery, it's also you know, everything that goes around around growing or or

umvest harvesting and like maximum potential yields. All that has to do with with modern technology more or less now, I guess, um, it's all becoming pushed far more into the future than you would ever think. Yeah, And and it's interesting because we're at a time where we're seeing a decreasingly small percentage of the population being dedicated to

the roles of ranching and farming. Right if you look at United States history, this is particularly true in the U S, but you can see it in other places as well. If you look at the beginning of the twentieth century, so around nineteen hundred or so, about half of the population of the United States were farmers. And then you get to and before that was even larger numbers. Um the percentage wise, you know, obviously the population itself was smaller, but percentage wise it was there were many

more farmers. And what happened was this little thing called the Industrial Revolution. You've probably heard that term, Scott, Yeah, I figured you might. So the Industrial Revolution actually meant the mechanization of lots of different industries, including agriculture. And so around nineteen hundred, your chief means of operating the various machines in agriculture were it was horsepower, literal horsepower,

actually using horses. Yeah, it wasn't until the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties the tractors really started to get traction in agriculture. And then, oh boy, I'm gonna have to leave. I know, I'm sorry, it's I've lost somebody co hosts this way. Actually, to be fair, Chris, Chris was way worse about puns

than I was. He was punk. Yeah, but at any rate. Yeah, So, so you get to the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, those numbers start increasing, but as the mechanization increases, the number or the percentage of population that needs to be farmers or ranchers decreased, because you didn't need that much labor, right, you were able to offload the labor to to mechanization

to some extent. Sure. Well, how many times have we heard in the past, I mean, in the past decade even that very soon the world population is going to outpace the capability that we have to produce food for that population. Sure, And it's always I mean, I've I've heard this for a long long time. It's not just ten years, maybe of years or even even longer than that.

Probably I just haven't been privy to that information. But it always seems like they say the world's population will exceed the world's capacity to produce food by the year X, and the year X is always about twenty years out, ten or twenty years out, and and it always seems like we always overcome then some way. So and this

is I found this interesting. I found an article um in the Guardian fromen that was talking about developing nations and uh some innovations, some revolutionary farming innovations, and they said that in the last fifty years agricultural production has actually tripled in the last fifty years. Azing. Well, the thing is you're saying that the number of farmers has gone down the number. The amount of production has tripled

in the last fifty years. So they're becoming more efficient and every year that's a challenge for them to become more and more efficient with less and less people, less and less property to do so, because you know, the the farmland is at a premium right now in a lot of countries, a lot of places that um, they're they're severe government restrictions on the amount of space that you're allowed to use for a farm. They're they're building structures,

you know, so that they're building up instead of out. Um. And that's a way to increase efficiency and and it really a productivity and yields from their crops no matter what it is, it's tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever happens to be. Uh, some of these things that they're even finding that building um, you know, here's the difference. Like instead of building a six ft roof or an eight foot roof on a greenhouse, if they put a twelve foot roof on a greenhouse,

they can double production. And I think it was tomatoes and cucumbers. That's pretty incredible. Yeah, So things like that, small things like that can make a big, big difference. And you know, you're talking about the increase in population. The number you're going to find if you do some searches on this on Google. I think the number that's most frequently cited is about by twenty fifty, we're looking

at nine point two billion people on Earth. I have today's number, by the way, Okay, I looked at it just this morning, so as of today, it's about seven point three billion people. And I watched the counter for a short amount of time. There's a pretty interesting site called um it's called world ometers dot info, and it's just a world population clock really, but you can watch all kinds of numbers as they go up and down depending on what you're looking at. But pretty fascinating. Seven

point three billion as of now. But it's steadily clicking up. That's pretty yeah, I mean, it's it's amazing. It's also a little sobering because once we hit nine point two billion people, the other estimations say that at that point by we will need to have increased food production from today's standards by another seventy okay question here though, all right,

here's here's now. They know the numbers are staggering, and if you look back at that way, you look at that site that I was just talking about today, and I didn't write down all these numbers because it was just way too much. There's a lot of information there, and it's it's all stats. It's a pretty fascinating site. But they said that in this is just to give you an idea of in the seventy there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are today.

That means we've doubled since nineteen seventy that short amount of time. Now they say that due to growth rate decreases, it'll take about two hundred years that population to double again. But then I look at that number and I think, well, how many people were there in nineteen seventy There must have been um, roughly three and a half billion people. Ballpark. Well, they're talking about going from you know, seven and a

half billion up to fifteen billion people. That's why, because it's an additional seven and a half billion people instead of four billion people. So maybe that's the reason. But still, uh, the disparity between the number of you know, what is that forty five years and you know, um, two hundred years. That's that's an incredible amount of time. I mean, so how does all that factor into I mean, there's so many numbers here at play that had a hard time figuring out where we stand as far as when the

food's going to run out. Well, I think it's even more complicated than that, Scott, because also we're seeing more countries kind of emerge from developing to getting to developed status, as people become more affluent, as they as middle classes begin to emerge in various populations. One of the first markers of that is that people want access to a better diet that includes more variety of foods and a

higher quality of those foods. So not only are we going to need to increase production in order to meet the needs of a growing population, but we need to make sure that that is a varied approach, not like well we'll just we'll just grow more rice or more grains of some sort. It has to actually be a variety of foods, which means that we have to start

really looking at strategies um for multiple reasons. And so I'm wondering, when you were doing your research here we're going into ag tech, did you come across the term precision agriculture. This is exciting stuff. I think it is. I mean it really comes down to what you would call, I guess a smart farm. Yeah, And I don't know that's a term or if that's something I came up with her, I came across it somewhere, but but it does seem to me like it's smart farming. And exactly

that's exactly right. I mean, it's just in the same way that you would think of a smart home. This is very apt. But precision farming. I mean that that's it seems so odd because that's something that we never would have heard of maybe ten years ago, fifteen years ago. It just wasn't that way it was, and it wasn't haphazard by any means, right, It was just that it wasn't to the to the inch precise as it is today.

I mean, sure that the farmer would see until his road um in his road, his field in straight rows, and he would know that I can get roughly this amount of seeds in this row and etcetera. But now we're down to planning to the very inch to get that maximum yield and to the very second, like not just not just in in distance, but in time as well. So in ages past, you knew you planted in the spring and you would harvest in the fall. But with precision agriculture, it is not a joke to say you're

going to want to plant on Wednesday. Like you can end up getting data that is so precise and it's dependent upon multiple factors. Right, So we're talking about a lot of different technologies and processes that have to work for precision agriculture to work. So I'm just gonna run down some of them. You need sensors. Those sensors are going to detect things like humidity, the moisture level in the in the soil, the actual acidity of the soil,

the chemical composition. You want to have other sensors that can detect when plants need water. There's actually a sensor that is a leaf sensor. It attaches to a leaf and it measures the change in voltage that happens when the leaf contracts. Now, a contracting leaf is an indicator that the plant needs water. Yeah, so you get imagine you are a farmer and you get alert on your smartphone that says you need to water the fields today because this is an early indicator that the plants are

in are quote unquote thirsty, which is pretty incredible. I hate to work in a nursery and uh, like a tree nursery, not not a baby nursery, but a tree nursery. And uh, you know some of these hot summer days in July and August. I'll he how we knew when we had to water is what we looked at the field of trees, you know, the entire nursery and said, it looks like they're a little wilted with better throw some water on the plants. Right, That's what we did. I mean it was it was just kind of seat

of the pants stuff. And and there's less and less seat of the pants farming going on now. It's more precise, as you said. And those sensors I mean that you mentioned. It's not just that there's sensors and you have to go to a central location even to to read or monitor those. You don't have to can Some of them

will send mobile alerts to the farmer via smartphone. Yeah, they're all these these systems now that you can put in place at your farm that allows these sensors to interact with a network and alert you to minute changes so that you can make big decisions with the best technology, the best information available. Other tech that you will see.

In precision agriculture include satellites or drones, and these are specifically to monitor the status of crops throughout the year so that you can determine what the maturity level of the crops happens to be at any given point. You know, you want to harvest the crops at the right maturity level so that you minimize crop loss because obviously if you if you go too early, then stuff isn't right yet. You're not gonna be able to sell all the crops

that you harvest if you go too late. Same sort of problem, except of course on the other side of it, so you want to be able to get the crops. You want to harvest them when it's absolutely at their peak, and that way you maximize the yield, you minimize the loss. These are all different factors that go into the idea

of precision agriculture. Meanwhile, on the on the software side, you have to have computer algorithms that are incredibly sophisticated so that they can crunch these numbers and make it meaningful information that farmers can act on. In other words, they provide information that can can build maps visual visual representations of what your field looks like what what the terrain you're talking about looks like, Um, you know, where their hot spots are, where the plants are growing and

their best where they're not growing quite so well? What the reasons could be behind that? They may analyze, Uh, you know, why this this one sector of the field isn't maybe producing as much as it possibly could versus this sector that's just one yards away yet is is overproducing. It's producing more than they expected. And why is that? Maybe they can you know, learn something from that section or sector and uh and incorporate that into the next

year's crop. We'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this quick break. If you're looking at farms, the overwhelming majority of farms in the US are family owned and operated, right ninety Like in the nine upper ninety percentile. Only less than five percent of farms in the United States are owned by non

family operated corporations. So even though they're they're huge, we're talking about like craft would own a giant farm or something like, right, you know that they would they would grow their own products, yes, or monsanto or you know there's tons of them, right, but at any rate, Uh, that only that only accounts for less than five percent of all the farms in the United States. However, the midsized farms are slowly getting edged out. In the US.

You've got a lot of small farms that are doing all right, particularly in markets where there's a high value placed on organic farming that kind of thing, and local is localized farming, um, but it's mostly turning into really big farms and small farms in the midsize farms are starting to get weeded out. But with those big farms, you can have such a huge farm that it is completely possible that one part of your land is getting adequate moisture from a weather system moving through and another

part isn't. And this is the kind of technology. These sensors, the the drones, and the satellite imagery are the kind of things that tell you, oh, the southern part of my farm is fine, that's the weather system came through provide enough water, but the northern part is in need of irrigating, So then you can irrigate just the parts of your farm that needed saving water. It also means that one of the important technologies with precision agriculture is

incredibly accurate weather forecasting. It's incredibly important. And you can extrapolate this to ranching as well livestock and herds, because you know, they're they're enormous ranches in Texas and California, Montana, Montana that are are the exact same thing you're talking about, where weather systems moved through and only affect maybe the southern era southeast eatern corner of that of that ranch.

And it's very possible that you know, the ranchers might decide I'm gonna move my my flock, my herd out of that region in time to avoid that blizzard or that that that horrific thunderstorm that's going to come through on Wednesday, or you know, whatever it happened to be. So ranchers deal with a lot of the same things. And of course we're talking about food production still, so all kind of ties in. Can I say one more

thing about drones before we move on? In fact, maybe a little bit more than one thing, But of course there's the obvious uses for them monitoring crops um you know, looking at you know, distant or remote locations that um or are difficult to get to for a farmer, so that you know, you can daily fly a drone up the hillside and look at your your coffee crop or

whatever it happens to be. UM. You know people that use terraced farms, you know for space and and UM you know, just irrigation capabilities I guess, or you know whatever, so that it's the most optimal way to grow crops. It might be the most difficult to also reach by foot so or by vehicle. UH, drones kind of eliminate all that. And the other thing that is really really important is that UM drones are capable of delivering fertilizer and insecticide at precise locations. So you know, the maps

that we just talked about. With the software programs that create maps and and show you exactly how crops are growing in certain regions or sectors, you can precisely accurately deliver the right amount of insecticides or or pesticides or whatever happens to be that you need in that area to that just that one sector via a drone you know, as a sprayer underneath. And whether we're talking about you know,

small helicopters or UM. You know the quad copters that we see often kind of eight eight one of the octicopters. UM they replace. Uh, you know the guys that would fly in those crop dusters. Have you ever seen a crop duster in action? Okay, they're they are fascinating, aren't they. I mean you see there, those guys are like daredevils. I mean it's like the best um um air show stunt you've ever seen when you see them going really

i mean remarkably low elt street. What's it's startling if you're in let's say that you're driving through the Midwest. You're in Indiana, Ohio, somewhere in there, and uh, you know, maybe two yards ahead of you you see an airplane buzz through that's low enough that it would strike a semi if there was a semi on the road. It's that low. It's going underwires. It's it's amazing. Uh. It's

a it's a very dangerous profession. In fact, it often falls in the top ten Dangerous professions list every year. Usually it's it's two or you know, number two, three, four somewhere in there behind. Uh. Fishers, you know, anybody who's fishing Alaskan fishermen or whatever. Yeah, that's why they call it deadlyest catch yea, and loggers. Loggers I think are usually like number one and two between fishers and laggers,

and then uh, aircraft pilots. I think they kind of lumped them in with airline pilots, you know, like um passenger airlines and uh like bush pilots. Bush pilots and crop dusters likely account for most of the deaths in that field because of the terrain that they fly in, how low they fly, the conditions are inherently more risk

exactly right. And wind farms, now we haven't even talked about from it, but wind farming, uh, that is a huge danger for crop dusters, for human crop dusters, because they often strike those poles or strike the the rotors of course, you know, because they're flying in these extremely fast low vehicles, and their their focused, to be honest, is on the crops. It's not necessarily on that new wind turbine post that's just putting put up by within the last month or so, or the fifty others that

are in that field. So it can be very dangerous. And and I'm glad that you know some of these some of these drones are able to cancel out the need for crop dusting pilots in some cases, although it would be a pretty good adrenaline rush to do that. Yeah, I don't know that I would need that much adrenaline rushed in me, but yes, I agree that it certainly would be I think it'd be fun. It could be. I imagine, Uh, you know the other things to consider

with this precision act your culture. I mean, there's tons more we could talk about. For example, Uh, they often will even explain what sort of crops would grow best in different types of soil, and keep in mind these

crops all. You know, if there's one particular crop you're you're planning on growing in part of your land, the timing might be totally different to plant, Like for for the ideal setting, it might be totally different to plant those seeds than the next one, which means that you have to start taking other complicated planning into account, like how do you plant crops for one crop, then let's say three more weeks would go by before you have to plant the next section that would be a totally

different crop. How do you do that in a way that's not going to damage the crops you first plant it. I have also seen where farmers have planted soybeans in between other crops. Now I don't remember if it was if it was cotton and soybeans or what it happened to be, but it's like mixed crops in the same field. Yeah, that was unusual. So so that's one way around it. And there's also, um I know from Indiana again, I know that there's a there's winter wheat you can grow

in the downtime. So like, let's see, you've got a summer crop of corn or whatever it happens to be, you can also plant a crop of winter wheat that that takes up the time the rest of the year when you can't grow corn. Yeah, And so this will tell you exactly when to plant each one of those crops and when to when to bring it in right fertilizer levels that I mean, I guess soil levels that

you need to to watch for each crop. You know, whether it would let you know when you would need to add fertilizer to those those fields as well, including telling you, hey, don't do it next week, when when it would be ideal because there's going to be a storm the following day which would just wash the fertilizer away. You're going to want to wait until that weather front moves through and then do it like this is really valuable.

So it even goes to the transportation of food. I mean we when we're talking about making sure you maximize your yield, that includes the time of after hard a sting, but before you get it to wherever it's going to be sold. Obviously, the transportation can result in crop loss as well, especially in areas that might not have a lot of developed roads, like in Brazil. Brazil has a lot of roads that are dirt roads. So knowing that it's going to rain in a certain region, you might say, well,

we're going to route all of our traffic. We're gonna be proactive about this and take these other routes because otherwise trucks might get stuck in the mud and we might lose our crops because it may take a day or two longer, and it may cost a little bit more, but you're going to have a higher yield from that field and if it works that way, Yeah, I think

that's why I'm I'm piecing this all together. I think that's right that every dollar that the farmer spends getting the crop or getting the crop to the market to be sold, is just a dollar out of his pocket. Essentially at that point. I mean he's trying to maximize profits as well as maximize the the yield of that product. Yes, yeah, so there's I mean, it's a really interesting and complicated picture. Like the more you look at the more you realize, Wow,

I didn't appreciate how complex this is. And of course, you know, keeping in mind things like you want to be able to rotate crops through your various fields in order to keep the soil healthy. If you just continuously grow the same crops on the same land, uh, that can start depleting nutrients in the soil and so rotating that is really important. So this is the kind of stuff that gives the people who are cultivating the land way more information like that so that they can they

can do the best to have uh gray yields. They are minimizing the environmental impact of what they're doing, which is in their best interest in the long run as well. So it's it's one of those things where the big data, the sensors, the automation, all of this stuff is coming together to really uh maximum mise their effectiveness while minimizing their impact and it benefits all of us. What if you take soil out of the mix, though, what if you do uh, what if hydroponics? Hydroponics, I mean that's

been around since sixteen twenty seven I found out. Wow, I didn't know. You know, it's funny. The first time I encountered hydroponics was at um Epcots. Yeah. I was just about to say it had to be Epcot Center at the land. Yeah, that's right. The land is that you were driving through on a riding through I guess on the on the boat, um, and it's all you know, hanging plants and they're watering them with a mist every that's very particularly or specifically timed for that specific plant.

You're just seeing the roots of the plants, no soil at all. Um. There's also another kind of twist on this whole thing, and that's aquaponics. Ponics is where they grow UM. Well, I guess it's not just one thing. They grow a number of different things, but it's plants and animals that grow in an ecosystem that is balanced, so there's no waste like um I read where they're growing plants and fish in the same place, and there is elt is that there's no wastewater, there's no um insecticides,

used anything like that. Um, it's it's all um one system that works together symbiotically nice. And the thing is that at the the end result is that you get organic produce and fresh toxin free fish from the same from the same the same sorce, same building. You know, it's an interior thing that happen indoor thing. Um, but it's it's it's pretty smart in the way they put it together. But I'm sure that takes years of planning. Oh sure, Yeah. None of the solutions we're talking about

are particularly simple to implement, right. They require a huge investment of both time and money. But you know, everyone's gonna eat so so ultimately it's one of those things where you say, well, we have to do this. I mean, it's not like we have the option, so we just have to find the best way to do it in a smart way. And what about the the idea of shared knowledge now, because that is something that this is

so important. I mean that the high tech angle. I guess it's so important for farmers now because as they can use they can use forms, they can use just simple text messages to other farmers down the road. I mean, it could be that easy. It's usually a little bit more complex than it's groups or forums as I mentioned, but um shared knowledge, you know, they can share best practices. They can they can say you know what, I've never heard of that before. But you know, we've got five

people on this site. We can together, we can come up with a solution prior to what ten years ago that was unheard of. Yeah. I mean you might have a local gathering occasionally, but even that would be of mostly small farm operators. And can I just say this that I have never ever met a farmer or rancher that I haven't found to be incredibly intelligent. Oh yeah, I mean they all seem just so smart and it's

and it's it's it's like real world smart. You know, they just know so much about what they do, and it seems like they're just so in touch with with everything that they have to uh have to deal with I mean, the whether it's the animals to plants, um, just dealing with people. Um, it just seems like I've never ever met any farmer or rancher that isn't just top match intelligence. Well, and to put them all together in one place, that's a that's a great place to

solve problems. Yeah, I think of them very much like engineers. They they act as engineers, it's just they their training is through a different, you know, branch than traditional engineering happens to be. But they are all about looking at problems and solving them, and the tools we've talked about are all about giving them even more agency to do that sort of thing. We've got more to say in this classic episode of tech Stuff after these quick messages.

One other thing I wanted to to mention is that, you know, I talked about how mechanization really started to cut down on the number as far as the percentage of population of farmers. We're going to see that continue, obviously a specially now that we are in an age of automation. We have gone beyond mechanization to automation, to the point where sometimes we're talking about autonomous automation. It's not just that it's an automated system, it's one that

is working without direct human guidance. We're starting to see that being introduced in various parts of agriculture. So one of the things I was looking at I looked at some robot harvesters, which are pretty awesome. There was one in particular that was designed to automatically trim lettuce. It's a lettuce trimming robots. Yeah. It used digital imaging to measure exactly where to trim, and it could trim one

hundred times faster than a human. Yeah, so you wouldn't think it's fascinating, but when you really think about what that is doing, what that what that is, what that machine is is capable of and from what I understand, they were able with that kind of technology to increase yield by as much as ten percent. Now you're going a hundred times faster, and you think, how can you only do tem percent yield increase, Well, you still have

to wave for the plants to grow. So yeah, I guess the the awaiting time would just be longer than it would be done with the job, and you're just waiting waiting for the harvest, right, So you could end up having waves of of yields coming across because obviously you want to be able to provide produce as as

frequently throughout the year as possible. And you know, here in the United States, we are incredibly fortunate to live in a in a country that is affluent and has relationships with other parts of the world where we can import a lot of vegetables so that even in the dead of winter, we can get access to stuff because it's being grown somewhere in the world. We can get access to stuff that probably is not growing in most

of the United States at that time. And I know that there are ways that they're increasing to speed that these uh the plants come to maturity as well. So yeah, so I mean they're they're they're quickly developing that as well, so that instead of being able to grow two to three crops a year, you might be able to grow, you know, five to six crops a year. Yeah. Yeah, and then you're able to maximize your your fields use so that it's not laying fallow for long times of

the year. It's it's pretty incredible. Other automated devices I've looked into our automated planters, so these are planting vehicles that I actually saw one in action on a video and it was really interesting. So the video I watched had um engineering students, agricultural engineering students who were working with various manufacturers who would provide them the stuff that they would need to build out these automated devices. The

automated planter. There's a guy behind the wheel. He starts driving it and he says, all right, I'm gonna push this button, and he pushes the button inside the vehicle and then he takes his hands off the wheel and

you see the wheel operating itself. And what was happening was the automated planter was working with a GPS device and a pregenerated satellite map of where the crops needed to go, located by GPS coordinates, and it was literally following It's like like if you'd used Google Maps to give yourself driving directions, it was essentially following driving directions,

except in this case it's planting directions. It's in precise yeah, which is incredible because it knows how many seeds to put down per inch, It knows exactly where to go, exactly how many rows there should be. Amazing stuff I have. I've seen a few of these things and it does just blow your mind when you realize how accurate they are and what they're in, the technology that they're using, the you know what they're using to be able to be that accurate. It's almost like it's more accurate than

the farmer could be sitting in the vehicle. Really, Yeah, and it really is. Yeah. I mean, you know, you're talking about the capability of measuring down to fractions of an inch, and you know we as humans, we can do that, but it takes us, granted, a lot more time. And this this speeds things up considerably. I also saw weeding robots because I could use that at home. Oh yeah, me too. One of the best things about weeding robots is that, obviously it would mean that you could cut

down on herbicides. You wouldn't need to use as much herbicide to kill off weeds and preserve your crops. You could use a weeding robot to do it. Now, if you're if you're looking at a way of growing your crops and you don't want to use herbicides for whatever reason, maybe it affects your crops negatively. Hand weeding is pretty much your your big bet, and that means either you're literally pulling the weeds out by hand or you're using a hoe. Either way, it's backbreaking work. It's slow, and

it's not efficient. It's not efficient use of time, and it requires a lot of labor. So weeding robots tend to be something that you you tow behind another vehicle. So they are just automatically looking for weeds, and by looking, I mean they're using cameras or infrared sensors and they're using digital image recognition software to tell the difference between a weed and a crop and anything that's weeds gotta go. But they're even engineers working on building autonomous ones, like

the Hordabot project in Denmark that's an autonomous weeding robot. Now. Right now, they're more popular in Europe than they are in the United States because in Europe there are much stricter regulations as far as the use of herbicides and pesticides are concerned. In the United States, those restrictions haven't reached that same level, so there's less incentive to invest in this other technology because we already have an infrastructure

for pesticides and herbicides. But assuming that that eventually changes, will probably see that migrate over here to the United States as well. And just the thought of having a robot out there taking care of all that without having to actually do it yourself is pretty pretty awesome. Yeah, So, you know, the technology stands to really benefit us in lots of ways. Any others that you want to talk about before we transition to our our other kind of

the dark side of technology and agriculture. I've got a low tech version of what you were just talking about, that weeding machine. It's gonna come up. How about at the end of the podcast we'll talk about some farm hacks. That sounds great and again low tech, but it's a it's an interesting development, yeah, because part of the thing, like like we were saying, farmers, ranchers, they are the

problem solvers. Sometimes that means they come up with creative ways to use pre existing technology in perhaps methods that weren't originally intended small scale, large scale, all scales really. Yeah, but before we get into that, let's talk about tractors. I'm excited about this. Yeah, yeah, Now, I know you would be, Scott because it deals a lot with not just agriculture, but there is a lot of crossover to the automotive world and what we're going to talk about.

So the great side of this ag tech we've been talking about is that it can potentially very much increase uh, the efficiency of farms. It can end up decreasing the amount of work needed to do. However, there is a flip side to this. The flip side is As technology increases in sophistication, it becomes much more difficult to do any d I Y maintenance, repair, tweaking, any of that. It gets harder and hard to do. And we're seeing that now, not just in these giant like cloud based

services we were talking about, but in tractors. This is a great source of frustration among farmers today is that the modern tractor is much like the automobile, nearly impossible to diagnose and repair on your own, you know, in the in the barn, in the field wherever. Um you know, days of you know, being able to use, as they said in this article from Wired, using you know, making

a duct tape and baling wire repair. Uh, it's it's becoming, you know, less and less possible for stuff like that to happen, because now we're dealing with much more are many more UM electronic components, you know, modules that that talked each other on a can bus system UM that you know is controlled by one central computer, and in order to access that computer you have to have very specific diagnostic tools and connectors and UM factory passwords that

you know, you just have no idea what those passwords are because they vary between make and model in different years. And UM, it's becoming very very complex for the common uh, modern farmer to be able to and I don't mean common by the driver, the average farmer, the average farmer to be able to make his machinery work in an optimal way as he could in the past. I mean whether it's adjusting the timing on the tractor or something

that's just out of calibration. You need to reset that. Uh, it's becoming virtually impossible to do that without the proper tools. And these tools are very expensive. Or there's a flip side of this, some of them even require a technician to be brought to the tractor because you can't just you can't drive it down to the dealership. You can't throw it on the on a trailer and haul it into town. Um, it's much more complexness because we're talking

about machines that are two stories high have twelve wheels. Uh, they are. There are half a million dollar machines now there and I'm no joke, there are half a million dollars in some cases. Uh. In this article we read on Wired again, I think they're talking about a mid range tractor and the mid rains tractors were you know, somewhere above one hundred thousand dollars. So these are very very expensive machines and it could be incredibly frustrating for

farmers to to realize that. Well, you know, we just talked about how important it is that you know, you plant this this uh this crop on noon or at noon on Wednesday. Well, what happens when that machine goes down and you have to fly on a technician in order to repair that machine, right, and it's and then three days have gone by and you still haven't planted any Yeah, and your and your tractor is still stuck in the middle of the field because you know, some

modules not communicating to another module. But you can't do anything about that until you get the technician there. And meanwhile, you're watching the estimations of your yield drops steadily, yeah, because you're getting those stupid smartphone alert Now, man, you're you're really messing up this crap what you're doing, Hey, buddy, you get off your buttons. They're planning becoming more and

more you know, insulting as the day goes on. Right. So, so, just like like cars have their own little control units, tractors like you mentioned have them that they tend to be called tractor engine control units or or t e c use tech coos, and yeah, they're they're They're also often proprietary, kind of like we've talked about proprietary connectors here on on tech stuff before. This is where you

don't use a universal connector. You have very specific ones that work with that particular technology, and if you don't own that, and generally speaking, these are things that are not sold to the public, then you cannot get access. You cannot easily access the the the computer that's aboard the tractor. I talked about this all the time, like I remember, Uh, I hate to shame any company, but I'm gonna do it in this case. Uh. Well, the

Apple is a great example. Apple's connectors are all proprietary to Apple. But Sony was very much the same way. I remember having a Sony camera and it had a USB connector, but the end connector was proprietary. You couldn't just go out and buy a mini USB or micro USB and use that pair that with your Sony camera. You had to go out and buy a very expensive Sony one or try and find some off brand knockoff

that may or may not work with your camera. Well, imagine that frustration magnified to a hundred thousand dollar or more machine, an investment, a significant investment that not only wasn't a significant investment, but you're the success of your business depends upon it working, and you can't even find out why it's no longer working. So the article talks about how there was The author talks about a farmer friend who had called the author out to check on

the tractor. Right, the tractor was no longer working. There was a sensor that was burning out, and what they were trying to do is find a way to route the tractor systems around the sensor so that the tractor could at least be operational until the sensor could be replaced repair right. And the issue that the author found was that the system was completely inaccessible, not that it was physically inaccessible in the sense that there was no way to get to the computer, but there was no

way to connect to it. So I guess in that sense, it's physically inaccessible and it's all running on proprietary software, so there was no way to even see how the system works, let alone reroute anything. Now, this is a little different than cars, because cars recently and in since I think, have had the same diagnostic port underneath the steering you know, you can you can reach around under

your car and feel it there. You've probably had, you know, somebody at the local oil change place plug into that just to get stats of your vehicle, you know, like the last time you're there and test or something exactly right. Yeah, So there are standards in automobiles and that's not the

case with these tractors. And and I have a feeling that, you know, the next decade or so, some of that's going to be ironed out, that you know, there's gonna be some some some type of uniformity among tracker manufacturers that's going to help out just a little bit. But still that doesn't really, that doesn't help a whole lot because unless they conform to a standard um UM software package I guess that that operates all these it's not gonna do much good unless you have you know that

as well. And they can still hang onto that unless part of this whole legislation thing includes that they have to use these a certain like like a standardized approach across the board. Yeah, and I don't see that happening so I don't know. Maybe maybe I'm off base here. Maybe it's not going to be controlled the way the automo deal industry is. Maybe it's going to be a little different, maybe it'll be a little tougher. But I also kind of think that I don't know, maybe this

is not true that you tell me. It seems like some of these systems are being becoming so complex that farmers are beginning to kind of buck the system. They're saying, I don't necessarily want that five dollar John Deer tractor. I'm going to get this nineteen seventy version of the same thing that it really does everything that I need, but it's all mechanical, it's not electronic. That is absolutely happening. We're seeing the market for brand new tractors start to

suffer while the market for pre computerized tractors is blossoming. So, in other words, this limited supply because you know that time's past though they're not really people making those anymore. Yeah, I don't think they're gonna go totally back to that. I mean, I just mean maybe they need to back it down a little bit bigger. Right there. There's a

now a market for the older equipment. Yeah, and it may even be that, uh, that could end up inspiring a change anyway, where the questions come in, like how how much of this new technology that's being incorporated into tractors is of of real demonstrable benefit to the farmer or the rancher, Like how can you show that this stuff that's supposed to make the tractor more efficient? Is it measurably more efficient because of these features? All right?

But you know what, because the features you mentioned features, and I gotta say this, but but there they are just like driving like a luxury yacht or something. I don't know, yeah, maybe a luxury RVU in a field. They're incredible. Have you seen the interiors of these things? I have not. There there again, like a story and a half high, so you've got a great view of

your field. You've got leather rep steering wheels, of course, the seats are super cushy, and they're on a suspension system almost like you'd find in a semi truck something like that. Very soft. Um. They've got air conditioning, of course, they've got CD players, DVD players of course, media inputs and out not you know, the CDs, I know, they're gone, right, they're giving me the scal from you know andoth whatever. Well they have that too, Yeah, but of course all

the screens for the GPS systems and everything. They've got autonomous features. You can go autopilot, you can go semi autonomous, you can go fully autonomous in some cases. Um oh, this is when one cool feature. I don't know if they can give this up. This would be tough to give up. Let's say you're driving a grain harvester and we can all picture what that looks like. I mean, I think a lot of people call them combines, but

grain harvester combines the same idea. They have that huge shoot at the back that it just pours out corn or whatever it happens to be wheat. Um. There's another vehicle that follows behind. It's usually a truck, but it's got a giant bin on it. It It looks like a just a big box and it pours everything that it's harvesting into that box as it drives along. They drive

along in tandem. There is a technology that they call follow me technology, and what it does is it it completely automates the following vehicle, so no one has to drive that second vehicle. There's someone in there manning the harvester, the the you know, the vehicle that's that's gathering the material, but there's nobody in the box and the one that just carries the box. So that way it's always following it precisely the right distance at the precisely little right speed.

I eat, whether the you know, the operator adjust that speed up or down doesn't matter. That is always going to be exactly where it is. It's never It's called following technology. That's pretty cool. It eliminates at least one other person has to do that. They can do something else on the farm. And then I don't know if this is possible or not, but wouldn't be cool if, like, when it's full it could it could signal that, you know, okay, we stopped for right for now, and they do that

and then another one takes his place. I don't know if that's possible yet or not. It seems like it would be. Yeah, swap out technology. I would imagine that you could do that. You would just have essentially, uh, you know, designating Clone one and Clone two, and then you just Clone one return home clone to take its place Clone two or Clone one, you know, drop off the load and return to the feed that kind of thing.

It seems like it would be oh cool if you had like the system of like three vehicles that were just continually operating, because then you have minimum downtime. Yeah, very cool. I mean, so there's some really interesting stuff

that goes along with it. But I gotta say that, you know, some of this is really kind of rubbing me the wrong way, and that you know, I think it would because I mean, I I have I felt the frustration of the you know, opening the hood and not being able to do anything with my own car.

I can't imagine what it's like if you've got a five thousand dollar machine that you have to have running by Wednesday at noon, specifically to plant that field, and it's not operating and there's nothing you can do about it except fly a guy in from Utah to to fix it in the field. And even then, you know, you gotta pay for his ticket to come there. You gotta for the repair itself, which is not going to be cheap. You've gotta hope that whatever the repair is

works and that it's sustained. Because I've read stories about guys who would fly out mechanics to come and or actually, I guess technicians, it goes beyond mechanic because you're actually having to use the the authorized proprietary approach to even access the systems on board the vehicle. And you end up doing some work and then the person leaves and your vehicle works for a little while and then breaks down again, and then you think, well, I can't this.

This isn't something sustainable. I can't keep doing this. You can't keep that cycle going. So what are you gonna do. You're gonna just let that thing sit in the barn and collect dust, or you're gonna get a tractor from twenty five years ago that works every day and you know how to repair right. It may not have it certainly doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but if it works and you can keep it in working condition,

that's a very powerful story. Yeah. We talk about in in the text sphere, we talk about this approach, this uh, this trend really and it's across all areas of electronics

as the black box trend. And a black box essentially means any system or group of systems that is either sufficiently complex enough or is protected against you accessing it, so meaning that you know, in the old days, the really like the birth of the personal computer age, people were hacking, like physically hacking machines to make them do all sorts of stuff right, Um, And as they get more and more sophisticated, it's harder to do that, either

because it's just so complicated that it's rare for any one person to understand all the systems that are involved, or companies have gone to great links to keep certain components completely shielded from you tweaking them. So you own the physical machine itself, you want the engine, you want the transmission on the wheels, the axles, all that, the chassis. However, the company, the you know, the parent company, owns the software that makes your machine operates. So you're you're really

stuck there. You're essentially driving a black box. Yeah, and it means that you have to if you if you ever have to do any maintenance or repair, UH, you pretty much have very few options open to you other than contacting an official person from that company to come and perform the maintenance and repair. This has actually led to UH a lot of people kind of lumping in agricultural technology under the Right to Repair Act, which really

is not a single act. It's actually lots of different legislation introduced in many different states, and not just singly focused on agriculture. In fact, the main focus was automotive. The idea being that a person who purchases a vehicle should have the expectation that they could do repairs themselves or take that vehicle to an independent mechanic who also could do those repairs other instead of having to be forced to take them to the source the manufacturer. That's

the that's the point behind it. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this tex Stuff Classic ep pisode right after we take this break. If you do want to do repairs yourself, if you are absolutely determined that you're going to do those repairs that maintenance yourself, you're going to go to whatever links necessary in order to do that. What you would have to do is get hold of a computer and some software and a connector that works with that particular make and model of that vehicle. And

you'd have to be doing it essentially illegally. Yeah, and there's also because this is a piracy issue, right, and there's also the the issue of the password, the manufacturer provided password. Now that's something that they hold pretty close to their chest. I mean, that's something that but of course, if you've already got the software loaded onto a laptop, you've likely already got the pat you know, somebody with

the password as well. We're talking about a gray market here, aren't. Yeah. Yeah, there's a gray market for machines that have that software loaded onto it already. So that if you, if you want to try and do these kind of uh, you know, at least diagnose what's wrong with you know, you might not even know yet, you know, and it may be something very simple. And lack of knowledge is terrible right for anybody, because you are completely dependent upon what someone

else says, yeah, and you don't necessarily know. If you're someone like I'm not a car guy, Scott. If I take my wife's vehicle into a mechanic and he says, oh, problem is your hobbit fell off your unicorn, I'd be like, I don't think that sounds right, but I don't know, so I guess I gotta pay you this ten dollars. Yeah, I understand. I feel a lot of people are in

that position. If you just if you don't have the the the knowledge ahead of time when you come in and what it possibly could be, you feel like you might be taken and and that is another source of frustration, is that you're at the mercy of the manufacturer at that point, because they can tell you anything, and you'd say, well, okay,

here's the manufacturer telling me that's what it is. It has to be that, and and a lot of people are just like, well, I'd rather I'd rather know that, find that out for myself, you know, or maybe narrow down to three possible things. And if they tell me one of the three things, I'll believe it. If they say something, you know, from out and left field, then I'm gonna question that rist them why I'm gonna follow up with him. But it's just easier to accept if

you do that research ahead of time. And the problem is that if you want to access the tractor's computer, you are essentially breaking the law, because the Digital Millennial Copyright Act specifically makes it illegal to try to get around or break protection around any sort of DRM. Now, typically we think of d r M as something that happens to be attached to a music file or a computer file, not a tractor, but the principle is the same.

And while I'm not necessarily. I don't know that we're going to live in a world where John Deere is going to sue a farmer because the farmer chose to get around. The point is, under the law, they would be completely within their right to do that because the d m c A allows for it. And that's why the Right to Repair Act this this group, these various elements of legislation that are in different stages. Only Massachusetts I think, has actually passed a Right to Repair Act

into law. But what that says is that it should they should get an exception essentially to d m c A that that in order to do repairs on something, uh, it should not be considered illegal to bypass this protection because it means that you have created kind of almost like a monopoly. Like you you have created only one

means of addressing the problem. And it also means that people who are like you know, independent mechanics who do not work for any specific manufacture or dealership or whatever, they're seeing their business decline because if more and more of the vehicles have to be taken to those dealerships or individual or manufacturers, then the mechanics don't they don't they aren't getting as much work or less and less

need for the older equipment to be repaired. Unless they start to turn towards using that old is going to flourish again. And can I can I just say that we're we're not picking on John Dear. It's just an easy example for us to make that everybody is familiar with. But all of the modern tractor manufacturers are doing similar things. Yes, So it's not like, you know, John DearS, you know some evil corporation doing this on their own, and that's

the only one that's like that. And to get their equipment, you have to submit to this. It's it's everybody, and and these companies have, you know, very understandable reasons for pursuing this sort of stuff too. It's not like their motives are. They're not all slightly whiplash. They're not twirling their mustaches as the train is coming down the triplis that.

Don't you agree though, that if they wanted to make it easier on the on the ordinary farmer that they were on the on the average farmer, that they would maybe not make it password encrypted. You I think, I think what my own personal opinion is that they could throw in a simple device that hooks up to the tractor and gives a readout of exactly what's wrong. Maybe just a diagnostic tool, but maybe it's something that's uh boy that you know, what level do you allow it

to go to? Though? Because you start allowing everybody to recalibrate your machines, there's gonna be problems and they're going to blame the manufacturers to So how would you how would you ever determine what level you would allow them to fix or repair their own machine versus this is

a factory repair. This is something that we have to do right, and and when you are getting into this level of sophistication and complexity, it is not an easy questioned answer, right because, uh, some people, you know, you might say, all right, well, here are all the basic mechanical systems that we think people should reasonably be expected to be able to address. Here are some of the ones that we think are beyond the pale when it comes to the average person's ability to access it and

change it. The problem is then make sure that the ones that you can't touch essentially aren't also going to completely shut down the vehicle should they go bad. Yeah, I mean it's it's incredibly difficult. There's there's so many possibilities here that I don't know what the answer is.

I really don't but it. But it does seem to me that if they would at least allow them access to to look into the T C T E C U and figure out what's going on, at least at least to understand, all right, the problem is with this hydraulic sensor over here on this on my number eight wheel or however they designate that. Um, then they would at least know, Okay, that's where I'm gonna look, and that's where the problem is gonna be. Then know, um, it just gives you a better better sense of what's

going on. No, no, no, I I agree. I think I think being ignorant of the situation just adds to stress. Instead of just calling the manufacturer and saying, well, my tractor doesn't work. Yeah, I mean, then you would at least say, like, well, I'm having a problem with my my number eight wheel by hydrock sensors doing this. But you can't even do that now, and that's the problem.

So super frustrating on both sides. Now, one thing that's not frustrating, the thing that we wanted to kind of conclude with is that some farmers have found really creative means to boosting their efficiency by taking matters into their own hands, by actually hacking either systems or are tools in order to get more efficient. Scott, you looked into this source of stuff, Yes, I did. There's a site

called farmhacks. Now. Farmhas kind of came about when I was reading about the gray market and um, you know some of the software proprietary stuff you're talking about, like maybe a friend of a friend as a laptop that you could use the software in the passwords. Well, they said, well, there there's sites out there that can help you with some problems, not all problems like that, but looking farm hacks,

and there's a site called farmhack dot org. And I can just give you a few examples, just quick examples, but there's probably I don't know, maybe two hundred examples on this site so far of just really simple things. And it's exactly what it sounds like. It's it's they're not all high tech either. Um, some of them are are you know, large grand scale projects, and others are very very small, like made in a five gallon bucket

type small. So really really small like let's say they got a problem of I don't know, the the the metal pan that you put the chickens water in on your small farm, it keeps freezing in the wintertime. But the solutions that are out there, you know, in a I guess in the consumer realm, are you know a two heater for this thing? And you don't want to pay two bucks for that? You just got a small farm. You got ten chickens to take care of her? Twenty chickens? What do you do you want to you want the

five dollar solutions? So you know, you go to this farm haack site and they've got a solution there for you, and it's things like that. So um. One thing that we mentioned earlier was the the automatic weating machine, the

robotic weating machine. Yeah, well here's an idea that This one at farm Farm hacks Head and they're called farm bikes, and there's a bunch of different types of farm bikes, but one of them that really caught my eye was the type that writers live face down just above the ground.

So you're you're kind of on a almost like in a sling, just above the ground, kind of maybe a little less than arms length and big wheels that go down the rose you know where there aren't plants, and you pedal this with your feet behind you, so it's like a reverse recumbent bike almost. You're you're laying head first, so you're like you're like flying over the weeds like Superman. Yes, picking weeds. Yes. And there's buckets hanging next to you

and you can pick them. And it's very very simple, and you can have two people, three people, however big you want to make this device, you know, this this thing and again it's foot power, you know, it's pedal powered. It's just like a bicycle. It's just a rework bike really. So it's a very low tech version of the automated wating machine that you talked about. It's only it's not automated. It's human powered and and humans are are suspended they're

doing that. But it's it's a weird thing to look at, but it's it is so smart. When you look at it, you realize, like that that's the way to pick wheats. I kind of want to try that, just to try it now. It's fun. I'd almost like to ride it fast on the street. The only thing is that you would you would imagine that their ability to maneuver is probably somewhat limited, seeing is how it was designed to go straight down. It's mostly straight. The turning is a

little subject. Right, So there's a few and well just kind of let's quickly go through these ships. We're nearing the end here. But um, of course there's a lot of three D printed parts on the site. And that's interesting because you know, I knew you've talked about them many times. We've talked about them on car stuff. Um, we're talking about things like seed rollers or spray nozzles. Any any non electric tractor part maybere far, you know, any any implement part that you can think of, you

could you could do a three D printed part for that. Um, how about this homemade livestock scales for about a third of the price. It's something you don't really think about. You have to weigh those cattle before they go on the truck to the to the market. How do you do that? Well, you have to buy a scale, and the scale can be you know, thousands of dollars, maybe two thousand dollars for one. If you could do the same thing, if you can create your own for about

a third of the price. Of course you're going to do that, so why not and it's just as effective. Um, how about let's see quick attachments. Uh, you know ideas for quick attachment. Um, for things that require like maybe a three point hitch, very difficult to line up and get it get correct. But just simple ways around that. You know, things that that speed up your time, that that maximize efficiency. It's like a plug in play approach. Well,

it's very very similar. You're exactly right. Um. Okay, So we talked about mobile temperature alarms and things like that. There's a lot of pro rr apps out there. I guess that are not advertising the site, but people are saying, I use this one. It really works, So you can go there and kind of Again, this is back to

the the shared ideas, the community aspect of the collective expertise. Yeah, I mean that way, you know, if your greenhouse gets above or below temperature, you're alerted no matter where you are. If you're in town buying feed for the livestock or whatever, you know that the greenhouse is getting a little too hot. I gotta get back there and set that or you can manage or you know, maybe it could be an

automated system. Yeah, so what about if UM Again I mentioned the five gallon bucket thing, but UM humidifiers for small buildings in barns or whatever, you know, that's that's a simple thing to do. There's UH bucket based humidifiers that you can make that that are continually refilled themselves. So it's a self sustaining system that it's very smart and it's there on that site. UM also compost sensors

again for recording temperatures inside the compost piles. And you wouldn't think that's important, but some of those compost piles can self combust. They can spontaneously combust because they get too incredible temperatures. I've seen piles of mulch and dirt and things that that are steaming in the winter because they get so high. You have to go out and turn them. They keep them cooler, they'll they'll just burn up. Compost is the exact same way. What about biodesel biodiesel

processing trailers. Oh, we talked about biodiesel quite a few times on text, so also on forward thinking biodiesel is pretty cool stuff. You uh, you can essentially use that in place of diesel. Some diesel engines take it like you could have pure biodiesel. Some diesel engines will process it just fine. Are other ones where you've got to have more of a mix between diesel and bio diesel. But so this is this is something that you could

use like like a self contained trailer. So you've got a biodiesel processing um I'll call it a plant, but it's smaller than that. It's a it's about diesel processing um uh system, and it's it's a way to house that in a trailer safely and to be able to use your product, your your waste products, whatever that happens to be. So whatever you farm, you're able to use the corn husks or whatever decrease stuff or algae or whatever you have access to to be able to create

your own fuel for your own farm. So it's a very smart thing to do. Yeah, I mean, otherwise you've got the stuff that would just be waste that you know, you might be able to find one or two other uses for it. But reuse of this stuff, making use of as much of the crop as possible is another means of reducing environmental impact and increasing efficiency, cutting your fuel costs at the same time. Very very important for farmers.

So things like pedal powered root washers for like things like carrots and potatoes, you know, just small stuff like this that you wouldn't think of, but you know, for somebody who's just going to uh, you know, maybe harvest a small area that's you know a couple of hundred feet and they want to take it into a local farmers market or something. They gotta find some way to wash that before they bring it into town, and they

can be a very time consuming process. So these pedal powered root washers that are very effective, very efficient, um smart design. You're just use an old bicycle in a tub of some kind. Yeah, I've actually I've actually seen an entire uh nonprofit startup that does this very thing.

They take bicycles and they repurpose the bicycles into pedal powered machine are much many of many of them are dedicated toward farming, and they end up bringing them to places where electricity isn't even always a part of life. So you're seeing this in developing nations where it's really improving people's ability to do more work with less effort even in the absence of electricity. So agriculture, they could use it to power radio. They just just about anything, right,

I mean power something that cooks. I mean, you know, it's amazing. It's the one that was a pedal powered blender. I think you go ahead and make your mixed drinks right there. That's pretty good. I could use that this weekend. Yeah. Oh man, So let's just talk for a second about how hot it is in Atlanta. Yes, the farmers, we've got to be really feeling the heat right now. Yeah, And I know that affects them because it's not every day that when you know, the temperatures are in the

one hundred degree range and humid like this. Yes, it's got its own heat indexes around a hundred twenty some days, got its own set of circumstances to go along with it. And yeah, and I don't I don't have any idea what it does to farmers, but I'm sure that it just drives them crazy because you never know when it's coming. It's coming, you don't know what week that's going to hit. Yeah. Yeah, So this has been a really fun topic to talk about. This. This is again one of those things where I hadn't

really lent it much thought I really should. I've got a cousin who is um very much in this world. He and IT does incredible work. He flies all over the world working with farmers to help increase crop yields. I should talk with him and see what other interesting technologies are on the horizon, because he's awesome. What am I doing on the other side. You've been talking with that guy? Well, he's in Tokyo. It's hard to touch base with it. I know a little bit, but he

knows a lot. Yeah, yeah, he knows better than to come onto a podcast with me. Well, I hope you enjoyed that classic episode farming. I have to admit is one of those things where it didn't really occur to me that knowledge he could play a huge role. I mean, obviously I knew things like tractors and harvesters and stuff like that were important, but over time tech has really revolutionized our approach to agriculture, and I'm sure I could

do an update to this episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.