As a former founder of an Ag-Tech startup, I feel like this article is vastly minimizing the on-the-ground reality that are facing a lot of farmers. Sure, for smaller farmers cost might be a factor, and I'm sure nostalgia plays in a bit, but the biggest issue by far that we found when we were talking with farmers working on building our products was a profound frustration with the use of DRM, draconian licensing terms, and vendor lock-in. John Deere is basically the Oracle of the tractor world.
These farmers are not a bunch of ignorant backwater hicks- the ones that we worked with are shrewd, generally educated, and not at all afraid of technology. In fact, the reason I founded a company in the first place was that there's clearly a lot of demand for better technology among farmers. The problem is that the licensing terms and lock-in from their vendors have squeezed Farmers into a corner. None of their equipment is interoperable, they are bound by expensive recurring fees for software, locked into support contracts, can't repair their own equipment; the same situation those of us in tech have been shouting about for decades.
Maybe if we paid more attention to the farmers we could find some good allies in some of our movements.
These farmers are not a bunch of ignorant backwater hicks- the ones that we worked with are shrewd, generally educated, and not at all afraid of technology. In fact, the reason I founded a company in the first place was that there's clearly a lot of demand for better technology among farmers. The problem is that the licensing terms and lock-in from their vendors have squeezed Farmers into a corner. None of their equipment is interoperable, they are bound by expensive recurring fees for software, locked into support contracts, can't repair their own equipment; the same situation those of us in tech have been shouting about for decades.
Maybe if we paid more attention to the farmers we could find some good allies in some of our movements.