Two observations:
1. Drones are currently offering good heuristic tools for farmers to be better aware of what their fields really look like. Multi spectral cameras, cheap drones, and rudimentary tool sets have really opened the door to optimize. However, not enough is currently being done to turn those visual heuristics into data that can be acted upon. (No double blinds, poor color calibration, limited software platforms that don't allow time-series data to be used well.) We are still in the observation phase, no measurement, statistics, or predictions are really happening yet.
2. I've heard from several farmers that they desperately want a good sensor that indicates free carbon in the soil so they have a proxy for microbial content. Just as gut bacteria has been a major topic of research on humans, soil microbial content serves that same purpose on farms. Significant effort is going into adding organics and microbes back to specialty farms, however, the measurements to observe how this is done are very limited.
2. I've heard from several farmers that they desperately want a good sensor that indicates free carbon in the soil so they have a proxy for microbial content. Just as gut bacteria has been a major topic of research on humans, soil microbial content serves that same purpose on farms. Significant effort is going into adding organics and microbes back to specialty farms, however, the measurements to observe how this is done are very limited.