Arthur David Hall III (1924-2006) was a systems engineer who spent the first part of his career with Bell Telephone Laboratories and later taught at the University of Pennsylvania and conducted an independent consulting business. In the latter capacity he developed a patented automated agricultural production system that the called "Autofarm," but was unable to make the leap from invention to true innovation. It was an early, but failed attempt at "green" farming.

Hall was born at Lynchburg, Virginia on April 13, 1924. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering and physics from Princeton University in 1949 and received postgraduate training through the employee training programs of his first employer, Bell Telephone Laboratories, as well as coursework at Newark College of Engineering, MIT, New York University and Johns Hopkins University. Upon graduating from Princeton, Hall joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in northern New Jersey, where he became head of the Broadband Systems Studies Department and later of the Television Engineering Department. His most important project was the development of the Picturephone and teleconferencing, but he also worked on cable television and systems for educational television. He also authored a pioneering textbook, "A Methodology for Systems Engineering" in 1962 and was first editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics in 1965.

Hall left Bell Labs in 1966. He subsequently became an expert witness in the Justice Department's ultimately successful antitrust suit against AT&T. Hall then took a short-term job as vice president of engineering for Jerrold Corporation, but in 1967 became visiting professor of systems engineering in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he established the first Ph.D. systems engineering department in the U.S. In 1969 he became adjunct professor of communications at the University's Annenberg School of Communications, where he was employed until 1985 teaching systems methodology and public policy issues related to telecommunications. From 1968 to 1970, he was also vice president of research, systems engineering and development at the Smith-Corona Marchant Division of SCM Corporation, but after that he augmented his academic salary by running an independent consulting business.

On May 4, 1971, Hall incorporated Arthur D. Hall, Inc., in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, he formed the company as joint tenant with his second wife, and the marriage ended a few years later in an acrimonious divorce. As a result, Hall incorporated Advanced Design Handling, Inc., in Maryland on August 6, 1975. It was based at his Colonial-era farm at Port Deposit, Maryland. The names of both companies allowed him to create a common logo from his initials.

Although Hall contracted for a number of small consulting jobs through both firms, beginning in the early 1970s, he became increasingly preoccupied with the idea of applying computers and systems engineering principles to agriculture, culminating in the patenting of what he called "Autofarm" on April 5, 1977. A combination of a small computer and feedback mechanisms would monitor and adjust inputs such as soil moisture. Processes would be integrated so that waste products could be utilized, and plants would be used to recycle water and remove harmful waste products from the environment. Robots would perform picking, harvesting and mulching. Hall refered to this as a "jumbo patent" (a term not used by the Patent Office), because it was almost a half-inch thick compared to the typical two or three page issue.

Hall spent considerable effort to secure federal funding for pilot projects and trying to find people willing to deploy it, from Israel to Poland. He liquidated Advance Decision Handling, Inc. in January 1986, although he made an attempt to revive it in 1990.

A new Autofarm system was trademarked in 1999, but it was the work of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs based at Stanford. There is no objective evidence linking it to Hall's earlier work. Although present-day Autofarm embodies some of the same principles of regulated drip irrigation, its principal feature is the use of GPS, a completely new technology, to control the movements of tractors and other farm machinery, and of course, it is successfully targeted to the needs and means of modern agribusiness.

Hall died in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on March 31, 2006.