Comment by dejv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dejv | Hacker News Reader

I spent more than 15 years working in technology. During my career I did various jobs as a developer, product manager and pre-sales engineer as an employee, contractor and freelancer.

I am fulltime farmer now: growing wine grapes and making wine, building my own independent winery. It is tough and you have to invest tons and tons of money into it, which I don't really have. There is reason, why are wineries started by rich people. I still have to work few hours a week as a developer to supply my income.

I am in my fifth year and I am happy this way. Working outside is awesome. Work can be very hard, your body hurts sometimes, your income is determined by weather and compile time is one (or more) years.

There is something calming in the rhythm of this work: your work is changing by season and you have to wear tons of hats (which doen't mean that you are doing BE, FE and then maybe devops).

Not that I am caring about it, but I find interesting that being broke winemaker seems to give you much higher social status than being developer.

I'm in a very similar situation as you are, except instead of starting a vineyard, I started a goat dairy and cheesemaking business. We produce a variety of raw milk goat's cheeses:

  http://imgur.com/a/KWSy7

and raise +/- about 100 dairy goats:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb0ur8cdOfY

Weather definitely affects our income as well; we were in a drought for the last couple years, which limited our grazing time.

As you also noted, being a broke cheesemaker seems to be far more interesting to folks than being a developer. :)

Animals are tough, thats like goodbye all of my vacation ever.

I still manage to make it away from time to time, but they are a significant ball and chain. We do seasonal production at the moment (though as we grow, we'll move to more of a year round production schedule), so we have about 2 months of downtime in the winter with fairly minimal work on a day-to-day basis. I usually get an employee or family to check in twice a day, feed, and make sure nothing's dramatically wrong.

Interesting. I have an early background in farming (before I got into software). What online resources or books would you recommend for the goat rearing business? and in what sort of climate do you do it?

Resources out there are going to be dependent on the scale of goat rearing you plan on doing. What works for 2 goats won't necessarily work for fifty, and what works for fifty goats won't necessarily work for 200.

They're also notoriously difficult animals to get right. Most vets do either cats and dogs, or cows and horses. Goats are an entirely different beast, and really, the best education I had was just doing it, and learning things the hard way.

I'd spent some time prior to farming working with herds in both France and England, which was very informative. If you're able to find someone who's at the scale that you imagine your self to be at, some day, learning from them is likely the best option.

Thanks for the answer. That makes sense, to ask someone doing the same.

Aren't you the person who wrote about your Delphi product work in a thread here about Delphi some time ago? I seem to remember your HN username as the one who wrote that post, saying you had a Delphi product you worked on for quite a while. And your comment about software seems to indicate that it might be you. I found that Delphi comment of yours interesting (if it was you).

Yes, thats me and those are few remaining hours of (paid) programming I do.

Cool, and good luck with your work.

How much land do you have dedicated to grapes?

Too little, about 1 hectare (2.5 acres) in the production. Buying more land is quite hard as there is not much of it for sale, but I am trying to accumulate it slowly.

I am also planting new vineyards, but it takes about 5 years (+ 3 years of prep work) to have any production.

Interesting, I always thought the incentive to grow grapes was rapid production compared to other crops.

Are you in Sonoma or somewhere land is cost prohibitive?

I am in Europe and there is just not that much of a land available. Also the rules are different here: you can plant vineyards just at designated areas, which are fixed and cannot be expanded further.

That means you have to buy land with vineyard from somebody. Current situation is also that we are in golden years, all holdings are trying to buy more land and very few people are selling.

Come to Romania! Land is cheap and you can plant as much as you want.

TIL Romania is the 6th largest wine producing country in Europe, and 13th largest in the world [1]. I live in California, and I've never heard of Romanian wine. Is the wine mostly consumed within Romania?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_wine

Eastern European wines suffered long years under Communist regime and planned agriculture. It was all about quantity, so the quality was not that important.

Nowadays quality is rising up and wines from the region are great. International marketing and global wine trade is quite complex subject, but you can find quite a lot of Romanian wine in UK and Germany. In the US this niche of market is usually taken by wines from South America.

Considering the potency of Romulan ale, I'm not sure I'd want to try Romulan wine.

Oh, you said Romanian.

:-)

I was actually considering Romania (and still thinking about Hungary) as a place for winery. It is great place with huge potential and new generation of wine makers is doing interesting stuff.

But at the end, I decided on Moravia region, as my family is making wine here for few hundreds years and it is always good to continue tradition.

Interesting perspective. Do you find yourself using Algorithms to make your harvest/process more efficient?

Of course I build whole software for managing winery: everything from time tracking to profitability calculation. I am trying to sell it to other wineries, but not luck yet.

I am also building prediction model for my NIR spectrometer, using ML to predict various analytes in the wine spectra. This is ongoing research project, which might be commercialised someday.

Maybe online software as a service? Lufthansa does something similar with their backend airline systems to defray the development and operating costs (and turn a profit). Maybe more uptake of the product from California wineries.

Well, it is SAAS software. I am trying to sell it locally first, but it is tough sale. Most of the wineries I spoke to are fine with pen and paper or maybe some Excel if they feel really advanced.

I don't blame them, most of the laws actually require them to keep paper version of their documents filled in special purpose paper notebook with numbered pages. Law mentioned that you can keep your document in computer format, but this software have to be accepted by ministry of agriculture and after speaking with them the chances of getting this permission is very slim.

I keep trying, but it is uphill battle. Well at least I have some activity to fill my rainy days.

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