Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by worik | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

worik

> To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.

Yes.

That is not to say that farming is not due for some revolutionary redefining.

But it will be farmers leading the change, not software people

View on HN

Not a farmer, but I think it's a mistake to say that farmers haven't modernized.

I saw some videos about more modern farms, and they utilize drones, GPS, and a whole litany of other bits of modern tech to help with the farming stuff.

I agree that it needs to be farmers leading the change, but I don't think that the farming world is as primitive as people seem to think it is.

Ah, my father in law was a farmer, grew wheat, corn, soy beans, but sometimes raised chickens. Along with the corn, when he fed the chickens anchovies from Chile he noticed rapid growth, called the little fish a growth factor.

Wellllll, long before his growth factor, we assumed we knew what a good balanced diet for chickens was. Then, presto, bingo, the issue was what barrels of fish, soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost. Right: Linear programming, the "diet problem", applied math in farming!

>soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost.

Which points to the irony of all this. The real goal of the “project” is not better nutrition or more efficient farming, is a marketable product. You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly.

> You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly

I hear that a lot.

Apart fom the nutritional benefits of eating meat, notr every place in the world is suitable to the sort of cropping required.

Where I live the land is well suited for grazing sheep, and not well suited for cropping

Cattle crammed into feed lots is a sad thing, I am not advocating it. I am advocating an approach sensitive to the needs of the land and people

>not every place in the world is suitable to the sort of cropping required.

That would be relevant if the livestock were grassfed but in the modern world where Soybeans from brazil are shipped to UK to feed cattle or From USA to Australia to feed pigs that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Soybeans is pretty much one of the best crops for feeding animals because it fixates all the nitrogen it needs, unlike 95% of other grain crops. The only thing more efficient to grow fertilizer wise is alfalfa, which is what most cows are fed, but would not be any good for feeding pigs or chickens because it is hard to digest like grass.

Animals are grass fed around me. There is some supplementary feeding, but mostly hay made in summer for winter.

The economics of farming do not stack up, here, with feed from off the farm.

Mostly sheep, a smattering of beef.

What most people tend to forget is the scale of factory farming. About 30,000,000 cows 130,000,000 pigs and 8,000,000,000 chickens are killed yearly in the US alone. You can imagine that they cannot be just grassfed besides the fact that pigs and chickens do not eat grass so they are fed soy that could fed to humans, animals are not magic machines that turn air into food, the only thing capable of converting nitrogen water and sunlight into protein are plants, any step in the middle generate loses, animals need energy for their vital processes so the rate of conversion of fed-to-edible calories is aprox. Poultry:11% pigs:10% Beef:1%

(I could cite the sources if anyone wish to investigate more) All this is just the efficiency aspect of it, let’s pretend they don’t need water or create any waste.

The only people who think that farming is "primitive" in a modern economy have only themselves to blame for being completely uninformed.

I'm saying the exact opposite. Farmers now are required to have modernized. I'm saying that (modernization) doesn't mean they don't view themselves first and foremost ad farmers.

These tech folks don't. They'll say they're a software developer working on agtech.

It's a totally different mindset, it has nothing to do with the technical details.

Exactly. It's companies like John Deere who automate their combines, not software/automation companies learning how to make combines, that have been (and I expect will continue to be) successful.

This hasn't been true in practice. For example, farmers did not lead the small sat revolution that's democratized the use of satellite imaging for farm management. They did go "wow!" when the option was presented to them, but technologists saw the use case (and its immense utility) before most of their customers did.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Farmers certainly didn’t launch satellites or write the software on them, but I don’t think anyone would expect or want that.

Long ago, when I was young though, the first satellite imaging I saw was at my uncles farm. This was dedicated equipment in his home office with a simple UI with ridiculously high res satellite imagery of all the nearby land. This was way beyond anything a PC was capable of at the time. Definitely felt like he was on the bleeding edge.

I'm saying that none of those satellite companies are running successful farms.

Satellite imaging is not farming.

Name one farmer who doesn’t use satellite weather imagery

The data layer most grain farmers rely upon is often ground based radar showing rain bearing clouds ..

eg, this: http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR581.loop.shtml#skip

is a "composite radar loop" that stitches together several ground based radars tuned to detect water.

Grain farmers in the wheat belt here, and elsewhere, can generally get by fine w/out sat data as long as they can have their cloud data.

What most (large) farmers heavily rely on today though is GPS - sat based positioning. That'll often be projected onto high res local imagery .. which can often come from an air photo survey or sat photography AND | OR high res vector data showing fence lines and boundaries but no actual image data (they can see out the window of the tractor after all).

Hi, we farm, and we use radar, not satellite based imagery.

You completely missed the point.

The point - are any of those folks that lead the small sat revolution running successful farms now?

No.

It's hubris to think that one skillset subsumes another just because one uses the other.

The food those sat folks eat whole developing said revolution- growm by farmers, so they are the onea that enabled the sat revolution. We can do this all day.

Most of that early work sourced "the good images" from air survey photographs.

Early tech leaders (ERMapper, LizardTech, famously fought it out over "infinite" image formats with "unlimited" resolution) in Earth resource mapping that integrated air, sat, geophysical, etc. data absolutely had significant members that came from farming families and retired to farm ownership.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....

"Running a successful farm" has a high business and tech element these days, and certainly did in the 1980s, growing ever since.

There are overlapping skillsets here, it's entirely possible to be able to fly a cropduster or drape lowlevel air survey lines, higher photographic runs, and understand, run, and own a farm, and have some mathematical and programming chops.

Unsurprisingly a number of those pioneers had overlapping skills.

You mean we can’t grow food asking an LLM?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com