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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

So far at posting time I don't see a whole lot of signal to gain from the noise here if I were legitimately someone who had zero agriculture experience and was trying to gain understanding.

This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just political using couched language to pretend they aren't.

Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the results are a little scary.

And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well over a decade.

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Perhaps these issues cannot be solved from a desk and computer.

HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades reduction to a dataset.

The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!" Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawberries. Neither of these solves food scarcity issues.

If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed

>If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers.

are you implying a farmer's market? they exist.

Thank you for the helpful sarcasm.

Yes, I am implying farmers markets. There is not currently an effective way for these small farms to network their production in aggregate to sell at a level commensurate to an industrial farm. This is the reason big ag can sell for cheaper.

If farmers markets could achieve cost-parity with big grocery (by competing at-scale) then distributed small-scale farming could contribute to solving many issues in climate, environment, nutrition, etc

To make this work there would need to be a big social push towards eating in line with the seasons again (which was obviously the norm for 99.99% of the history of humanity). I think this might be a hard sell, people are now very used to being able to buy whatever they want whenever they want, e.g. strawberries in january

Seasonal eating of farm-fresh foods would certainly make free public healthcare a more reasonable proposal in the US. It would surely cut into the bottom line of the pharma industry

the reliance on the cold chain in distribution is a large inhibitor to this.

> my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed

Very astute comment.

If any farmers in WA (or elsewhere) want a free consult on how to connect with your customers via the internet, please reach out!

I think the specific problems would-be technologists have in approaching farmers are:

(1) beliefs that farming is simple and farmers are inept

(2) beliefs that the technology they (our facile technologists) know (e.g., robotics, saas, ai, etc) can be shoe-horned into or sprinkled onto agriculture for revolutionary results (at best these things tend to be incremental improvements and at worse they are detrimental).

In general, technologists need to understand agriculture as a global dynamic system in order to understand the opportunities for innovation (there certainly are places where applying robotics or AI or etc can lead to revolutionary results, but it's probably not obvious to someone whose experience with agriculture was an elementary school field trip 30 years ago).

> The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed

Will it? In my area the main agricultural products are apples, dairy products, beef, wheat, and potatoes, because those are the things that my area's climate and geology support. I can already buy those things cheaply and readily and they are farmed efficiently and widely by very large operations. How does farming get more resilient when individual farms get smaller? Smaller farms, by definition, have higher overheads because they benefit less from economy of scale, right? Logistics get more expensive for a zillion small actors, equipment and maintenance is a larger slice of the overall operation, smaller operations have less efficient access to capital, etc...

Smaller and simpler was the comment.

The current option is to use industrial farming technology until the raw inputs run out or become cost-prohibitive. Or until tillage soil for field crops becomes nutrient-depleted and barren.

Also, the comment was about using intellectual capital to work on the Markets problem of agriculture, not the act of farming itself

Usually I shill my blog (in bio) where I _hope_ i'm sharing signal.

In a weird type of way, there's little we can do immediately. Almost like a solar flare type of event. Ag and food production systems are so massively scaled, even if we WANTED to change everything for the better, it would likely take years, if not decades. Not like software where any bug can be fixed in a week or so. Human population numbers have exploded on the back of cheap, abundant food. If anything seriously disturbed that, yikes.

> Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots

I met a young man from Missouri.. he had a large frame but was just 20 years old or so.. He was harried and furtive and was getting into some trouble here and there. Upon knowing him a little bit, he was traumatized by large, loud, dominant men giving him orders, while as an intelligent young man he had questions. Of course many of the men I refer to here are from the Ag community.

North American Ag is not solved, and with the Oklahoma Dustbowl and current crop patterns in California, it must be obvious to science that sometimes, Ag has evolved for CONTROL not INTELLIGENCE. American factory animal farming is a living nightmare in places. American treatment of topsoil, and of fresh water, and industrial placement at the Great Lakes for that matter, are a DISASTER. You defend the Ag "community" like they need defending, from urban smart-people? They are beetle-like survivors of decades of market distortion, ego and alcohol.

Disrupt the Ag sector, yes please.

ps- your elected representative William Gates already started the ball rolling with farm ownership. see any news story after his "revelation" .. first result in GS

" Today, Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland in 19 states. In addition, he owns 25,750 acres of transitional land and 1,234 acres of recreational land for total land holdings of 268,984 acres. His largest holding is in Louisiana (69,071 acres), followed by Arkansas (47,927 acres) and Arizona (25,750 acres). Aug 27, 2021"

Comments like this show how out of touch the average person is with how much waste is involved in animal products - particularly beef.

We can so easily grow enough food to feed everyone.

Livestock takes up >80% of land, yet produces <20% of calories.

The <20% of land that is used to grow food - only ~55% goes to feed people. The rest goes to animals and ethanol.

The apocalypse is nowhere near close.

The Earth's crust is ~2.5% potassium. A lower supply of Potash is not going to cause the end of the world.

How much arable land does livestock take up?

Not much, most of that land literally has no use besides animal grazing.

The majority of animals doesn't "graze", they're locked in factory farms. And you're ignoring the land needed to grow the feed, which makes a major difference.

Speaking of beef, there's a lot of cows that graze in the US West on a lot of pasture.

At least here in Europe most meat is produced with animal feed grown on arable land (mostly in South America).

Nearly everywhere cattle can graze, you can grow other crops.

As a percentage of all livestock land usage, there is not much chicken, goat, or pig grazing left in the world.

It is true most other livestock CAN utilize land that can't be used efficiently for other forms of agriculture. In practice, less so.

There's not much use for the heaths in western England besides grazing sheep.

Who eats the animals?

for the hardware/software interest, the signal is precision agriculture. Using sensors and data to optimize yields.

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