Here Be Dragons

In 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller completed what would become the most influential map of the early modern world. It was the first to name America, a single sheet of vellum that captured the boundaries of continents only half-understood.

He worked from letters, rough sketches, and rumours brought back by sailors who had seen the edge of the world and lived to describe it.

But across the oceans, where no ship had sailed, Waldseemüller left the parchment empty. In the margins, he wrote three Latin words: "Hic sunt dracones."

Here be dragons.

It was not a warning about monsters. It was a statement about knowledge. Waldseemüller was honest enough to admit that maps end where experience begins. Every explorer who followed would have to fill in the rest for himself.

Farming has always had its own version of those blank spaces.

We've spent the last two decades perfecting the map. We have drawn boundaries, modelled elevation, colour-coded soil types, and measured compaction to the centimeter.

Modern agriculture is a triumph of precision.

Yet precision, many of us have come to realize, is only the known part of farming. The map describes the field as it exists on paper; it tells us what is measurable, repeatable, recordable.

But farming does not unfold on paper. It unfolds in motion, in judgment, in the subtle decisions made when a plan meets the reality of weather, and time.

Intent, the reason a grower turns early, skips a patch, or harvests diagonally against seeded lines, lives beyond the edge of that map. It isn't captured in a data layer or a shapefile.

It's discovered through experience, in the same way explorers once discovered new lands: by doing, by noticing, by remembering what mattered.

That invisible layer of intent is where agriculture's dragons still live.

The Human Element

For all the advances in automation, farming remains deeply human.

Machines can steer straighter than any operator, but they cannot explain why a grower chooses one line over another. The tractor knows where to go; only the grower knows why.

That difference is not trivial. It's the difference between automation and autonomy. Automation is repetition without reasoning. Autonomy is execution informed by intent.

Today's autonomy efforts in agriculture have focused on hardware: sensors, steering systems, and vision systems.

But the real bottleneck is not mechanical. It's cognitive.

We haven't yet found a way to translate human judgment into a form that machines can use. Until we do, our equipment will keep moving efficiently, but blindly, across the landscape.

Making Maps Learn

When we founded Verge, our ambition was not to redraw the map, but to make it learn.

We wanted to capture the knowledge that already exists inside every grower's head. The experience that guides each choice before a wheel ever turns, and makes that knowledge usable, repeatable, and transferable.

The result became what we now call Grower Intelligence: a system that connects the precision of mapping with the adaptability of human intent.

Instead of treating a plan as a fixed artifact, Verge allows it to evolve. Each time a grower creates or refines a route, the system records not just the geometry of movement but the reasoning behind it.

It learns from the way intent meets context. From the thousand small decisions that determine efficiency, fuel use, soil health, and other meaningful factors on a grower's operation.

Over time, the farm begins to reveal its own logic.

Patterns that once existed only in memory become visible. How certain slopes are avoided due to predictive rainfall patterns, how machinery paths change as soil conditions vary, and how headland turns compound to reduce compaction.

The static map becomes a living map, a reflection of the farm's intelligence rather than a substitute for it.

From Intent to Intelligence

The difference may sound abstract, but its effects are tangible.

Across millions of acres, growers using Verge have reduced unnecessary passes, saved fuel, and cut emissions equivalent to removing hundreds of vehicles from the road. Those gains did not come from bigger engines or faster processors. They came from the translation of grower intent into grower intelligence.

When intent is captured and shared through the system, each farm contributes to a broader body of knowledge. Patterns that once lived only in memory now become part of a living network of intelligence; how operations adapt to terrain, how they sequence tasks to save time, how they coordinate across machines and operators.

That's the real shift.

Grower Intelligence is not just information; it's understanding. It's what happens when experience becomes structured enough to scale, when thousands of local decisions create global insight.

And that's the foundation of true autonomy. Machines that don't just follow instructions, but act on the accumulated intelligence of the people who know the land best.

Beyond the Map

I think often about Waldseemüller's dragons.

They were never really about fear; they were about humility. They reminded explorers that discovery begins where certainty ends.

Agriculture stands at a similar threshold today.

We have mapped nearly everything measurable. The next frontier is understanding what those measurements mean.

Grower Intelligence is that missing link, the connective tissue between precision and purpose.

The growers who document and refine their intent will lead this new era of autonomy. Their maps will not be static diagrams but dynamic systems that learn, adapt, and improve.

Autonomy, in this sense, is not about surrendering control to machines. It's about extending the grower's judgment through them.

Progress in agriculture has never come from perfecting the known.

It has always come from venturing into the unknown, where data ends, decisions begin, and shared intelligence moves the entire industry forward.

Look beyond the map. Turn intent into intelligence. Build autonomy from the field up.