I worked for a company that has been in the tech side of this space since 2004 until acquisition last year. You'll notice that the discussion in this article (which seems to be submarine PR for Cargill) talks about Cargill and ADM's relationship with the farmers. There are a lot of smaller elevators and coops out there that are working to help farmers capitalize on the increased flow of information while maintaining their ability to stay open against corporate competition from the ABC giants (ADM, Bunge, Cargill).
The big thing in the overall space is that the software side of ag lags behind profitability in the industry. The company I worked for was 6 people (fte 3 devs), and we were running on a .NET WebForms platform originally written in 2005 that we didn't have the time or resources to bring nearly 250kloc to something more modern. (That includes web, backend processes, api, our mobile app platform was another 40kloc)
Hopefully, modern web/big data/etc tech allows small farmers to move past occasional profitability to thriving growth, not just allows big companies to capture more profits.
The big thing in the overall space is that the software side of ag lags behind profitability in the industry. The company I worked for was 6 people (fte 3 devs), and we were running on a .NET WebForms platform originally written in 2005 that we didn't have the time or resources to bring nearly 250kloc to something more modern. (That includes web, backend processes, api, our mobile app platform was another 40kloc)
Hopefully, modern web/big data/etc tech allows small farmers to move past occasional profitability to thriving growth, not just allows big companies to capture more profits.