"Cattle production is the most important U.S. agricultural industry" [1]

"Animal husbandry, is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products" [2]

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_husbandry

A large industry, but also a much smaller group than ‘live stock producers’.

And the cattle farmers massively benefit from these things. There are now custom monitors being put on to cattle that constantly measure how much they eat, how much they walk, body temp, etc. If they fall out of expected range the system will call a vet automatically to come treat them as they're obviously sick. This is keeping the cattle healthier and the production numbers high.

Farmers are also really getting into things like drones for pesticide application as it's faster, more accurate, and has less waste.

It's happening whether or not people want to believe it, from Texas up to Illinois/Wisconsin and everywhere inbetween.

hey, if you want to get away from big tech and you're not scared of rural life -- farmers need IT folks. They have racks of Supermicro servers on premises that need maintaining because they can't trust the cloud // internet can be unreliable. They have sensors and repeaters on the field perimeters that need maintenance.

There's a lot of IT work to be done in rural America with a slower pace of life if you're not afraid of coexisting with country folk. For those of us that grew up there and migrated to the city for corporate IT jobs -- I expect we'll be going back to our roots and serving our communities with these skills instead so we don't have to deal with AI screened jobs and take-home programming tests

Something like AI hallucinated produce? Random taste tomatoes anyone? Leaving the joke aside, probably GMO will probably accelerate with the help of AI and will still be called GMO foods.

[delayed]

I think this isn't going to hapen. The economy of the scale favors monoculture and it combines well with automation. The most likely outcome will be that combine harvester not requiring a driver and a synchronous operation of multiple harvesters as a robot swarm such that much bigger fields than currently possible could be worked: monoculture at a much bigger scale.