Hey chicago shout out, this is neat but holy smokes 'array of things (AoT)'? It seems like its just a network of sensors, i thought that was internet of things.
Check out Agrible. agrible.com and morning farm report which is our flagship delivery platform. Instead of focusing on data collection/organization (a digital farm notebook) we are focused on predictive analytics which is essentially decision support for the grower. We combine high res weather / soil / field info and have a built a model that literally is growing virtual crops and we are using our model to predict yields at the end of the growing season!
Currently working at UIUC at a relatively new startup and yes there is a good community building here. There is lots of agricultural innovation going on here and having giants like John deere, adm, ABinBev as well as tech companies like said yahoo hadoop analytics group. Cool to see some UIUC research park love here on hacker news. Can't wait to get up and go back to work at the research park where I will be hacking on python all day!
I don't get what is so impressive about what is essentially an accounting app. it's a well done technology but some people get so carried away by this farm tech stuff... a CRUD app is not going to make farms more productive... I've
seen that farmlogs is using satellite NDVI data now to predict yields etc.... I've done a data science project and found the the NDVI has minimal correlation to yield. part of we thinks that this is a group of CS people pretending to be ag engineers. ..