The very long cable sounds like a good enough reason to me ...
Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used.
Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable from some kind of power point, and without some aerial apparatus you're going to be running it across and through your crops.
Yeah I guess you could take the time to arrange the cable, and have somebody follow it around all day but that's a lot of extra work. Probably a lot more work than just the harvesting.
It's probably pretty dangerous too - trailing this multiphase high-power cable around where you've all this heavy equipment often doing chopping and grinding.
Someone needs to run the numbers for a modular chain of wire-carrying drones: if you get rid of the batteries, what length of cable could a drone carry? How much power would that cable be able to transmit, how much of that power would be consumed by the cable-carrying drones? Just how light could we make the power electronics to feed the drones from the (obviously, for weight reasons) high voltage power lines they would be lifting?
If this is possible at all, it could be an important base technology for a very wide range of new application fields.
Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used.
Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable from some kind of power point, and without some aerial apparatus you're going to be running it across and through your crops.
Yeah I guess you could take the time to arrange the cable, and have somebody follow it around all day but that's a lot of extra work. Probably a lot more work than just the harvesting.
It's probably pretty dangerous too - trailing this multiphase high-power cable around where you've all this heavy equipment often doing chopping and grinding.