Shell Lake, Wisconsin
I build for work I actually do.
Software engineer by training, farm operator by trade, fabricator by habit. I write the code, design the part, print it, and then go use it at five in the morning with wet hands.
That last step is the one most people building for this work skip.
2012 →
BS Information Systems, systems development. Production Java for a manufacturer — order systems against a real factory floor.
2018 →
Eight seasons running a working berry operation. Irrigation, frost protection, spray programmes, crew, and a harvest that does not wait.
2025 →
Parametric CAD and production 3D printing. Geometry written as code, so a revision costs an afternoon rather than a week.
2025 →
Sensors, embedded firmware, RTK GNSS, LoRa telemetry, and a small fleet of machines running agents unattended.
Most software for agriculture is designed by people who visited a farm. I have been on the other end of it — the person who has to make it work while a crew stands waiting.
It is a narrow overlap and it turns out to be the useful one. I can read a schema, design the part, wire the sensor and tell you honestly which of the three you actually needed — usually fewer than you were sold.
Independent work, remote or on-site in northwest Wisconsin.
Ag-tech
Moraine Works
Full stack
Websites
Automation
Advisory
Pricing
AI tooling has multiplied what I can get done — many times over. I would rather pass a good share of that on than gate it behind expensive pricing: a fair price for you, fair money for me, and more people get to try the thing they have been putting off. The world is a little better for it.
What I actually want is for you to be able to do this yourself. If you would rather pay me to get you there — build it, hand it over, show you how it works — that could be fun.
Open source · AI
Almost everything I run is Linux and open source, and I prefer it that way — it is the future. Frontier models from Anthropic and xAI — Claude and Grok — do the heavy lifting here; never OpenAI. What I am rooting for next is affordable hardware and local, open-source models good enough to be the daily driver: intelligence you own, running on a box in your own shop, with no meter on it.
Independent work, in various states of finished.
Availability
I work best on problems with a physical consequence — something that has to hold, measure, survive a winter or run without me.
I am one person with a shop and a farm, so I take few jobs and finish them. If the timing doesn't work I will say so in the first reply rather than the third month.
jacob@jacobkunselman.com