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Comment by jiveturkey42 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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).

> 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!

> 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

>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.

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