Options beyond multiplexing

My friend wanted to monitor food amount (weight) in 400 feeders on one farm heh)
Your best bet is WiFi or BT or design non standard protocol translating and forwarding spi/i2c etc.
My other engineer friend designed some kind of device transferring data over one wire in large warehouses.
That was inhouse company job and I know it is some kind of common standard just look it up.

I found this info:
https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/1796