The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about how farms are utilizing data and technology to be more productive. People often seem to have sentimental ideas about farming and ranching, so sentences like this may be surprising: “The world’s largest producer of autonomous four-wheeled vehicles isn’t Tesla or Google, it’s John Deere.”

Unlike most other areas of technology, this is happening today. John Deere has been selling self-driving tractors for 15 years. What’s new is data-centric companies with Silicon Valley pedigrees, like 2 1/2-year-old Granular and aerial surveillance startup DroneDeploy, that have the ability to tap into all this machinery and run farms as efficiently as Google runs its data centers.

These technologies are important because

Getting more food from every acre without devastating the land for future generations requires accomplishing two contradictory things at once: Making farms ever larger—consolidation leads to efficiency, as in any other industry — and allowing farmers to understand every single thing happening on their farms, down to a resolution of single days, square meters and even individual plants.

(On the other hand, another land-based industry is different: “Ultimately, real estate has proved less prone to disruption than other industries that have been transformed by digital technology.”)