These days, agriculture headlines sound more like a tech expo: AI-driven farming, drone spraying, satellite-linked soil sensing, real-time crop analytics. Great to hear… but who exactly is using all this? Because the last time we checked, 86% of Indian farmers still have under 2 hectares and hires tractors for ploughing.
Yes, the idea of precision agriculture is powerful. But the reality? Most of these technologies only make sense beyond a certain scale — where farm sizes, margins, and infrastructure allow tech to breathe. And here’s the twist: even mega-farms hit an upper limit, where complexity makes tech inefficient again. So if we don’t define the Scale Parameter — the minimum viable farm size and maximum effective deployment size — we’re just shouting "Smart Farming!" into the void. Also, tech that only works for large corporate farms will widen the inequality gap. The real goldmine? Developing precision tools for smallholders — low-cost, high-volume, hyper-local solutions.
Tech that ignores scale is like a drone with no GPS — flying, buzzing, hyped… but totally lost.
