Turn the Wayback Machine, Mr. Peabody, to the spring of 2020. We were up in Minnesota with Crystal Valley Co-op, attempting to plant soybeans autonomously. What started as a field operation quickly turned into a public demonstration. Word got out, and about 30 farmers showed up to see something they’d never seen before – an autonomous tractor planting a field.
Unfortunately, the gods weren’t quite with us.
One of our processors kept losing communications with another. Intermittently. The absolute worst kind of problem. There’s nothing more frustrating than something that won’t sit still long enough to be debugged. Whenever I run into these, I always imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Predator, saying, “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” Intermittent problems don’t bleed. They make you guess. Guessing leads to shotgunning, shotgunning leads to a time-sucking abyss.
The engineers were starting to panic, and I got it. When you’re trying to put your best foot forward and something unknown shows up, a growing crowd doesn’t help the situation. So I stepped in to alleviate the pressure.
I walked up to the group and said, “Thanks for coming out. What you’re about to see is something the generations before you felt when they saw the first tractor performing a field operation.” Then I told them the truth. This is hard – really hard. I explained the problem we were seeing, what we thought might be happening, and that we didn’t yet know the exact cause. I told them it might take another hour before it was running.
About 20 minutes later, the engineers found the problem. The only cable we had with us had an intermittent short. We didn’t have a replacement. So, channeling a little McGyver, we fixed it with a rubber band. We were one with the farmers!
There are moments where things don’t go as planned, where the pressure builds and the spotlight gets bright. That’s part of it. But the farmers who showed up that day didn’t walk away. If anything, they leaned in. They understood, because they know something most people don’t:
The things worth doing in this industry are never easy. But if you stick with it long enough, eventually it bleeds.