This is more than amazing [stream of conscious to follow]:
This could be the only tool in fighting against massive congloms like Monsanto PLEASE NEVER SELL TO THEM - THEY WILL TRY TO DEVOUR YOU
FarmLogs could be used to actually teach ANYONE how to farm efficiently.
You take the data that each farmer uses to track their crop and harvest and teach people how to do the same.
You will need to incorporate sensors into the system, such as the TWINE SENSOR [1] into your system -- track the weather and moisture for every location, as well as the crop.
You can build a DB of the yields over time for any given farm. Use this to inform people of the best times and conditions to plant various crops.
You can track man-power-hours to yields as well and be able to help people understand that if they want to grow X amount of Y crop, they need Z people and Z1 hours...
Finally, the most obvious, is cost - you can then say that for a property of X size, you need Y labor and Z dollars to produce Z1 crop!
Seriously - alongside fake meat - if you have an APP that can actually TRAIN a farmer, this is farking planet changing.
Use this info to build out a tutorial to train 3rd world people to micro-farm with HIGH yields.
There was this articla about big-data being the next billion dollar industry: big farm data will be the trillion dollar industry. NEVER SELL OUT TO MONSANTO. NEVER.
Ultimately:
Build an app that asks me what my resources and interests are, and help me build a farm that suits my capabilities: If i have an apartment in seatlle with a balcony of 200 square feet and $50 per month to apply to that square footage, what can I grow.
Knowing what the cost per squarefoot to yield is for massive famrs will allow such an engine to be built.
Every single person on the planet should be able to access this app - enter their capabilities and determine how much they could produce to either sustain themselves or sell to the local market.
This is revolutionary. If you can build this into an app that is stand alone, it should be married to the open-source civ kit [2]
Look at big data as the future - this is the biggest (most important) data.. [3]
> This could be the only tool in fighting against massive congloms like Monsanto PLEASE NEVER SELL TO THEM - THEY WILL TRY TO DEVOUR YOU
This being a site for entrepreneurs, I'm going to give a different piece of advice: if the likes of Monsanto come to you and attempt to buy you out for a price and other terms that you find acceptable, do it. Do it in a heartbeat. You can do far more good with a bunch of money than without it; you can always circle back and make another attempt to change farming for the better, and be in a better position to do it.
But at the end of the day, you need to do what's right for you; not me, not the parent, not the world. I wish you all the best of luck.
I, as a former farm boy, would support this. Contrary as it is to the spirit of HN. My dad, and his father before him, ran a dry-land wheat farm out west. When he finally decided to sell, and get an actual job, the level of stress reduction was quite amazing. For example, the growing season for wheat is about 101 days, while the growing season available was 99 days. The rain was 12 inches a year, and you had to leave half the land idle to get enough moisture to grow a reasonable crop. As a young boy, I saw one year's crop destroyed in a 15-minute hailstorm.
The risks inherent in farming resemble those of starting a new business, but without the potential upside.
Monsanto is going to do what they will, with our without your small (to them) farm. Better plan of action is to remove the distortion in the marketplace caused by the farm subsidies.
But as daeken says, take the money and do good with it. Like start a small business helping small farmers.
Straw-man much? You are mischaracterizing both the letter and the spirit of what daeken said, framing a convenient caricature of it to say "hey look everybody, I disagree with this mean badie".
Sorry but I don't think your analysis of this particular argument is on the level...
Read it several times - I did no such thing as straw-man this argument. I simply disagree with his position. I didnt call him out as being completely irrelevant in any manner...
If I did, and I am unaware of this, please educate me.
Farmlog is a web-based CRUD app. Monsanto is a billion dollar, multinational behemoth. All daeken said was not to be afraid to sell out to big-agro if you have a chance, take the money and run, be a martyr on your own damn time and dime.
You somehow think selling your company to another is matter of morality. It's not. An stupid CRUD app is not gonna give big-agro powers they didn't already have. This is not a strain of grains that can feed the planet: it's just a web app, specific to the farm-management "line of business". This is the Remember The Milk of agriculture technology.
Biggest revolutions in agriculture will not be in software, but in geo-politics, law, finance, real-estate, insurance, equipment, transportation, fertilizers, packaging and preservation, and genetic engineering, etc. Real stuff.
Farming is our bread and butter, meat and potatoes. Food is the #1 on every living being's list of Important Shit™.
We've been collecting this kind of data for hundreds of years. It is all pretty well understood at this point. It looks like a great tool over pen and paper, but I'm just not seeing the future potential that you are. Even sharing how farms operate in North America to less fortunate areas of the world isn't going to get them very far. I often cannot even practice the same techniques used by my neighbours a few miles up the road, let alone half way across the world.
> Build an app that asks me what my resources and interests are, and help me build a farm that suits my capabilities: If i have an apartment in seatlle with a balcony of 200 square feet and $50 per month to apply to that square footage, what can I grow.
Ignoring the challenges of scaling the volumes down, I can tell you right now that my average input costs for 200 square feet of grain is about $2. You can expect to make about $0.20-$0.40 after harvest. Vegetables will have better returns, but you are unlikely to grow more than you can eat yourself in such a small area. For a garden, you may as well plant what you like to eat. You don't really need an app for that.
This could be the only tool in fighting against massive congloms like Monsanto PLEASE NEVER SELL TO THEM - THEY WILL TRY TO DEVOUR YOU
FarmLogs could be used to actually teach ANYONE how to farm efficiently.
You take the data that each farmer uses to track their crop and harvest and teach people how to do the same.
You will need to incorporate sensors into the system, such as the TWINE SENSOR [1] into your system -- track the weather and moisture for every location, as well as the crop.
You can build a DB of the yields over time for any given farm. Use this to inform people of the best times and conditions to plant various crops.
You can track man-power-hours to yields as well and be able to help people understand that if they want to grow X amount of Y crop, they need Z people and Z1 hours...
Finally, the most obvious, is cost - you can then say that for a property of X size, you need Y labor and Z dollars to produce Z1 crop!
Seriously - alongside fake meat - if you have an APP that can actually TRAIN a farmer, this is farking planet changing.
Use this info to build out a tutorial to train 3rd world people to micro-farm with HIGH yields.
There was this articla about big-data being the next billion dollar industry: big farm data will be the trillion dollar industry. NEVER SELL OUT TO MONSANTO. NEVER.
Ultimately:
Build an app that asks me what my resources and interests are, and help me build a farm that suits my capabilities: If i have an apartment in seatlle with a balcony of 200 square feet and $50 per month to apply to that square footage, what can I grow.
Knowing what the cost per squarefoot to yield is for massive famrs will allow such an engine to be built.
Every single person on the planet should be able to access this app - enter their capabilities and determine how much they could produce to either sustain themselves or sell to the local market.
This is revolutionary. If you can build this into an app that is stand alone, it should be married to the open-source civ kit [2]
Look at big data as the future - this is the biggest (most important) data.. [3]
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...
[2] http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Civilization_Starter_Kit_D...
[3] http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/doug-hornig/is-bi...