Small farm wish list

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Well water pressure gauge; propane tank % meter; split unit heat pump control; electric fence voltage reader to 18K volts; compatibility with SENSE electric use monitor; compatibility with Nissan Leaf and REFRIGERATOR/FREEZER temperature monitor with probe so battery outside freeezer; remote car & diesel truck starter; cow in heat monitor (these work by checking tail wag) I could get cameras to monitor exsiting gauges on 5 LP tanks, but these exist for bluetooth. I am surprised at how few things Smart devices can monitor and/or control on a farm. Hopefully, this stuff will be out soon without custom work arounds.

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Sadly I would guess that a home automation system would be well out of scope for a farm of any size. The products for which you have would be designed (and priced) for the larger agricultural market and not really something SmartThings would be looking at controlling. It might even fall into something like industrial control units etc.

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There’s a whole industry based Around farm automation. Back in the 90s and 00s it was usually called “agri-tech” or “Agtech” and some of the blogs and journals still call it that. For the last 5 years or so people started to say “Smart Farm.”

Very Little of it matches up with SmartThings, though for three reasons:

  1. reliability is usually the absolute first priority. Both for the health of the animals And crops and for the business aspects. SmartThings just has never delivered anywhere near the reliability required for this market segment.

  2. almost all Agri tech avoids dependence on the cloud. This isn’t just because of reliability, it’s because broadband Internet isn’t always available in rural areas. So the design philosophy has generally been “local wherever possible.“

  3. costs are typically higher than what the usual SmartThings customer is looking for.

So most of this stuff exists (yes, including tail wag sensors), but I don’t know if it’s in a price range that would work for you, and it’s not going to be compatible with Samsung SmartThings.

Here are a couple of example articles:

One more note: in the US, agritech has been mostly focused on big operations or on helping small operations get products to market. But in India, Africa, and the Netherlands, there has been a focus on agritech for small farmers, Including a lot of sensor-based projects built on raspberry pi’s. So don’t be afraid to broaden your search to international resources, there will be a lot of discussion of projects that could be built in the US as well. But again, not something you would use SmartThings for due to the reliability and cloud issues.

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Hey Rob, it’s quite sad to agree with this. I read about this a month ago or so and was curious about the reliability concern, given the fact that we now have Edge Computing from ST.

So I wanted to test this on my own so I started a small project at home, and so far so good with the automation set to water my crops… but one day the automation stopped working because the zigbee plug got somehow unreachable, so it stayed on for about 3 or 4 days…

And given the fact that it was working well, these 4 days were enough to almost drown the crops sadly, but its ok now.

So, grasping my thoughts based on that experience

  1. Automating cycles through the SmartThings App can be a headache… or I’m doing it wrong (didn’t tested using Rules tho… I wanted the user-oriented approach)
  2. As every system, 100% bug-proof performance is not guaranteed, and regular monitoring can be ok for small setups, but for huge systems can be tricky