How will technology change farming?
Farmers are looking for information to help them grow more with fewer resources and less environmental impact. The “Internet of Things” — in the form of cheap sensors to measure water and soil composition — could help them do that. You’d have to work hard to make a breakthrough improvement on the smartphone at this point. But it’s a lot easier to improve farms, since farmers are still using distinctly analog methods to understand what’s going on in their fields — like burying blocks of gypsum in the ground to measure their soil moisture.