Farmizen lets urbanites grow fresh food on a remote farm (2017)

The product is a sense of connection to the food and it sounds like some customers are willing to pay a high premium.

It sounds like farmhands employed by Farmizen do all of the planting, maintenance, and harvesting, and the customer is able to view the crops from afar, probably by video feed with a personalized blog about how their tomatoes are doing.

As someone who grew up on a farm it seems very silly and inefficient but also as someone who now lives in a city and hears fellow yuppies complain about how "disconnected from nature" they feel, it makes sense that they could get some customers, but I don't see customers staying customers because the yields will be low and the prices will be high and the quality won't be as good compared to the farmers market or organic grocery.

> A farmer with, say, 3 acres of land usually grows only 2-3 crops at a time. With Farmizen, the company claims, he can grow up to 20 crops using natural methods. This also improves the quality of the soil. Multiple crops also help from the risk management perspective. If there are 30 crops growing on a farm and three fail, the rest compensate for the loss.

While heterogeneous plantings can reduce herbivore pressure, I feel like this could result in higher soil pest load by removing the opportunity for crop rotation. For instance, with some crops it's important to not plant them in any given area for more than a couple years in a row, otherwise the infectious nematode population (or whatever) builds up in the soil. Intercropping with a solid field of brassicas can help break up the pest population cycles.

But maybe this would work if they keep rotatating where the Farmizen plots are.

In any case, an interesting twist on Community Supported Agriculture.

Hi all ! I am from the farmizen team. Let me answer some of the questions raised so far 1. Crop rotation happens in individual beds - when a user is choosing crops to plant in a particular bed - the app provides recommendations based on what was growing in that bed previously, as well as the season. We do see some consumers override the recommendations, and that affects the yield in most cases. 2. Photos of individual beds are drone images stitched and then sliced up in some cases and farmer clicked in some cases 3. Farmhands may be employed by our partner farmer, not by us. 4. This is actually kinda reverse share-cropping - most of partner farmers are small land holding farmers with a couple of acres - who would otherwise earn about $120 per month per acre. Now they make approx 7x of that. Consumers do pay a premium of about 10-20 percent over organic prices - but given the fact that a majority of consumers don’t trust organic labels in case of fresh produce in India (with good reason) - many are willing to pay the premium.

If this works, more power to them, but on it's surface I don't see how this has anything to do with the game FarmVille other than it taking place on a farm. I'd also encourage anyone who takes part in a scheme like this to go over their contracts with a fine-toothed comb, as arrangements like this have been used to awful effect here in the United States:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

CSA models - farmer does everything, focus on the end output. Community garden/allotment garden - consumer does everything as DIY, focus on the experience. Farmizen is kind of in the middle - you can do as much as you want, and you have more control over what you want to grow than in the case of CSA. At the same time, you can also just sit on a couch and participate in the experience, unlike in the case of a community garden.

How does this model compare to a CSA or csa-like subscription businesses (e.g. Full Circle, Farmigo, Good Eggs, etc.)?

So there’s an aspect that one ‘rents’ a portion of farm to choose what grows, but I’m having a hard time understanding why one would want that over a fully managed service where one trusts the farmer to grow the appropriate food.

This feels like more of a ‘control your farmer’ idea over ‘know your farmer’

How much do you actually "do" as the remote farmer? Are there a lot of digital tasks you need to accomplish from the app?

This kind of thing is kind of common in Korea.