Since the arrival of the plow thousands of years ago, technology has made farming easier. Now, farmers large and small have access to advanced robots, automated facilities, self-driving tractors, and pollinator drones. Tech can enable regular folks to grow their own vegetables and herbs too, as app-enabled home systems like Click & Grow and Lettuce Grow Farmstand have blurred the line between farmer and hobbyist. It's a phenomenon—and a market—that companies have become keen to capitalize on.

"Everyone's coming out of the gate trying something new, and some of it works, and some of it doesn't," says Thomas Graham, an environmental sciences researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. "It's still a little bit of the Wild West, and creativity is running rampant. That's a great thing."