This hasn't been true in practice. For example, farmers did not lead the small sat revolution that's democratized the use of satellite imaging for farm management. They did go "wow!" when the option was presented to them, but technologists saw the use case (and its immense utility) before most of their customers did.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Farmers certainly didn’t launch satellites or write the software on them, but I don’t think anyone would expect or want that.
Long ago, when I was young though, the first satellite imaging I saw was at my uncles farm. This was dedicated equipment in his home office with a simple UI with ridiculously high res satellite imagery of all the nearby land. This was way beyond anything a PC was capable of at the time. Definitely felt like he was on the bleeding edge.
is a "composite radar loop" that stitches together several ground based radars tuned to detect water.
Grain farmers in the wheat belt here, and elsewhere, can generally get by fine w/out sat data as long as they can have their cloud data.
What most (large) farmers heavily rely on today though is GPS - sat based positioning. That'll often be projected onto high res local imagery .. which can often come from an air photo survey or sat photography AND | OR high res vector data showing fence lines and boundaries but no actual image data (they can see out the window of the tractor after all).
The point - are any of those folks that lead the small sat revolution running successful farms now?
No.
It's hubris to think that one skillset subsumes another just because one uses the other.
The food those sat folks eat whole developing said revolution- growm by farmers, so they are the onea that enabled the sat revolution. We can do this all day.
Most of that early work sourced "the good images" from air survey photographs.
Early tech leaders (ERMapper, LizardTech, famously fought it out over "infinite" image formats with "unlimited" resolution) in Earth resource mapping that integrated air, sat, geophysical, etc. data absolutely had significant members that came from farming families and retired to farm ownership.
"Running a successful farm" has a high business and tech element these days, and certainly did in the 1980s, growing ever since.
There are overlapping skillsets here, it's entirely possible to be able to fly a cropduster or drape lowlevel air survey lines, higher photographic runs, and understand, run, and own a farm, and have some mathematical and programming chops.
Unsurprisingly a number of those pioneers had overlapping skills.
