Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

"In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.

Social media - email, blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks - has revolutionized how people learn and share expertise on the web, but the Internet and its associated access technologies (broadband connectivity, PCs) are out of reach for much of rural India. Even if Internet-connected PCs were available, widespread usage is constrained by language and literacy barriers. But while computers are unaffordable or unfamiliar to rural communities, mobile phones are not.

Avaaj Otalo is a service for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. This service was designed in the summer of 2008 as a collaboration between UC Berkeley School of Information, Stanford HCI Group, IBM India Research Laboratory and Development Support Center (DSC), an NGO in Gujarat, India.

By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record, browse, and respond to agriculturual questions and answers. In addition to the Q&A forum, the service includes an announcements board of headline-like snippets updated regularly by DSC staff, and a radio archive to listen to past episodes of DSC's popular weekly radio program."

Avaaj Otalo led to the founding of Awaaz.De (literally, "give voice"), a company in India that provides a hosted solution for deploying voice-based social media.

We spent some time with the best and the brightest Ghanaian college students at Ashesi University [1], many of whom were middle/upper class and set on entering business and politics after graduation. Some discussed practical solutions to the problem, such as farmer co-ops. But all were fed up with the corruption and unstable governance of the country - which is actually extremely stable compared to Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad (Boko Haram). I heard that word 20 times during the half a day we spent with them - corruption this, corruption that. I left with the feeling that the current government and previous generations had let these students down, but that they were determined not to repeat those mistakes.

We also met the CEO and founder of the University, Patrick Awuah, who studied at Swarthmore in 1985 on a full scholarship and went on to work at Microsoft for 8 years as a software engineer and manager. He firmly believes in instilling ethics and self-reliance through education is the way forward for the country, and indeed the entire continent: "If you come back in 30 years, universities will be competing for the best and brightest students. I hope that universities will also be competing on things such as whose students are the most ethical. If that happens, it will change the continent."

I used to believe that religion was a crucial and effective way of passing an ethical code from one generation to the next. But every Ghanaian I met was either Christian or Muslim, and some even expressed concern for my soul when I said I wasn't religious. All taxi drivers would say a prayer and touch their jesus piece hanging from the rear view mirror before every journey (very disconcerting). I also spent some time in Afghanistan, where during the month of Ramadan, I and the other expats had to drink water out of sight in the bathroom at work when we were thirsty so as not to offend practicing muslims, and the entire country shut down after 2pm every day.

Yet despite hugely religious populations, both of these countries experience high levels of corruption, which I think isn't worse than the corruption that occurs in the US, it's just more visible - there's not enough to go around so favor currying/bribes/tribalism is more apparent than it is in wealthier nations where we've developed discrete ways of channeling and accumulating wealth. Corruption in poorer countries is very "in your face" - bribes to the police or politicians, kidnapping, torture, murder.

I'm not sure how it happened, but we were able to build better infrastructure in the US over the past 150 years - both physical (power, water, transportation, internet) and social (checks and balances, constitution, BOR, legal system, decently-managed welfare system). There was a lot of prosperity to go around, after WWII ended the great depression at least.

I suspect it had a lot to do with our financial successes following WWII and the unprecedented technological progress over the past century that allowed the majority of people in the US to prosper. I think our strong capitalist roots also helped, as we moved from an agriculture -> industrial -> services based economy (not a value judgment), while much of Africa was subjected to colonization and many of its resources, both material and human capital, were sent elsewhere. We corporatized and scaled up our agricultural sector, which has its pros (less back breaking labor, a lot more food) and cons (blander, genetically-weaker crops, danger of oligopoly). I think Mr. Awuah's comment is interesting because in 30 years, the best and the brightest Ghanaians may feel compelled to return home and improve life for their fellow Ghanaians, the same way he did after studying and working abroad.

In summary I believe more forward-thinking universities like Ashesi and more leaders like Patrick Awuah need to step forward to help instill a love for ethics, altruism, and the feeling of eating hard-earned bread after a long day of work in bright young students. This will address the core of the problem of the back-breaking labor needed for subsistence farming, but will take a long time. Until then we can chip away at edge problems, like cassava grating, and as another commenter pointed out, information access through smart phones.

This is all conjecture though, and I'm not big on either African or US history, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

[1] In 2012, the university was ranked by PwC as the seventh most respected organisation in Ghana, becoming the first university to make the list. Ashesi's President, Dr. Patrick Awuah, was also ranked the 4th Most Respected CEO in Ghana. In 2015, Africa.com again named Ashesi among its list of top 10 African Universities (excluding South Africa). (From > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashesi_University)

The last sentence in the article is quite shocking, though unattributed:

> By 1989, Hungary's total annual agricultural output was larger than that of France.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_Hungary

1) Government identifies some area that needs focus, usually so they can say they're doing something.

2) A fund is created with whatever the government thinks is enough to sound like they're doing something.

3) Request for proposals on how to spend the money within said area is sent out.

4) Interested parties figure out how to get their hands on the money in the fund.

Examples of who will apply:

a) Existing companies who try to spin something they already have into something that can give them free money for whatever they were already doing.

b) Scammers who have no intention of doing anything of value and simply try to do the minimum to say they tried (like some Kickstarter scams).

In best cases the winners are picked based on superficial evaluation of who lives up the criteria and who can bullshit most on paperwork. In worst case winners are picked based on who can provide the best kickbacks, ranging from just professional relations or dinners to actual kickbacks.

Just stop. There is a reason why companies like GoPro (which abusively write cards to death) bless only certain products (the top of their list being modern generations of Sandisk Extreme and Extreme Plus, Samsung Pro and Pro Plus, and Lexar Pro).

In this case, they also make industrial SDs that survive unusually high and low temperatures, which given the nature of this specific context, is worth looking into (although expensive and of low capacity).

Yeah I can imagine at least having a truck to cart away all those rocks would be pretty handy. But once you're established you won't have to do it again, right? Could just rent it when you need it.

The potatoes, on the other hand, he grows by the bucket in piles of hay thrown into old, bald tires. I suspect the damned things will grow in anything that's been near a nutrient.

I lost my entire crop to the Colorado Potato Beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle in 2016.

Note: "However, many chemicals are often unsuccessful when used against this pest because of the beetle's ability to rapidly develop insecticide resistance."

If that was my staple crop, I'd be dead of starvation right about now.

I would add a bit of barley/oat but that's more work than the rest.

If you're after some flavour, I'd also add onions and celery, which I guess go in normal soil with the cabbage and potatoes, and also carrots, which will want sandy soil. There's a good reason these three veggies together form the basis of lots of French and Italian cooking.

Excellent, I roughly computed 26,000 US$ (actually 25,000 Euros), I was lower on the connectivity and on the solar plant and missed the water tank, but I will gladly accept a 10% increase, let's call it rounding.

Still we are around 100% margin, which should mean that the "manual" and "lessons" must be overpriced.

And they are doing this in San Francisco, which would greatly up the costs of everything vs doing it pretty much anywhere else. If they aren't careful with shipping everything to them that can easily eat $5k or more (a shipping container can cost more to move than the cost of the container itself).

(I am a small farmer with a side job in tech.)

And indeed the planning board can make an exception:

A private road, but as with Class VI roads, only if the governing body, after consulting with the planning board has adopted a policy allowing building on that particular private road, or portion thereof, and then only if the owner has recorded a notice in the registry of deeds acknowledging that the town is not liable for maintenance...

So I would think that a farmer that wants to build a storage shed on the far side of his field would be able to get a permit as long as it's accessible by some private road (even a class VI dirt road)

This is Africa, dude.

By your metric, even large parts of the "west" and United States aren't "pro-west". Sadly.

Then they throw the tape away at the end of the season.

Commercial strawberry growers use this quite often.

But yes, to your point, high dollar crops.

This product wouldn't be all that useful. The hard part of running a farm is knowing the local growing conditions, crops which work in these conditions, and then, the harrowing amount of work involved in getting the thing productive.

Drip irrigation is cool once set up, but it's not durable and you need to replace it frequently as it gets damaged, breaks down due to weather, some animal chews it, whatever. Their solar driven pump is indeed a labor saving device, but it's a low power low volume pump useful for drip irrigation. I can guarantee you that nobody's going to be supplying affordable drip irrigation gear in a poor area. However, given a well, a powerful irrigation pump would be a huge help, particularly if it can move enough volume to fill traditional irrigation ditches for the times drip tubing is unattainable.

The IoT metrics stuff isn't very useful. The sort of person who farms in the places targeted by this isn't very tech savvy, and what's more important than temperature and water delivery statistics is walking the field and inspecting for weeds and pests.

The shipping container could make a usable shed, but so would a traditional shed, usually made from scrounged, cheap, local materials.

If you want to help poor farmers, I would suggest the following - A powerful irrigation pump, after helping to drill a well, solar driven is cool. - A small ride-on type tractor built to be dead simple to fix and reliable with plowing, seeding, and harvesting attachments. This is the major work of running a farm. Bonus points if this thing doesn't require gasoline, but that would be prohibitively expensive in terms of solar and batteries, since duty cycle would be very high. - Some kind of good, watertight and pest resistant grain storage containers, enough to store a few tons. - A bunch of lessons in the local language teaching people how to maximize food production from minimal resources in a given part of the world. What crops, how to plant, weed, and harvest them, how to store the harvest. - A bunch of fertilizer and pesticide. This will run out one day, so perhaps lessons on how to farm without it, but that drops production to like 1/4 of what's possible for a given unit of land. Modern high density farming requires a permanent supply of modern chemicals.

Now, A farm in a box is a cool idea, and the market may be affluent hobbyists, but this won't fix food shortage problems because the gear in it isn't particularly useful to a small farm, but also because food shortage problems are primarily political.

In other words, it's probably not for when I get pissed off at my job and decide to move into my parents' house and work their two acres in Texas with no idea of what I'm doing.

So I could sign up, go on there and decide what to plant and how to do it from that kind of site. Maybe I heard of this on a This Week In Startups podcast?

Edit: I've found it. It's called Farmer's Business Network [1] and I did indeed hear about it on a This Week in Startups podcast [2].

[1] https://www.farmersbusinessnetwork.com/ [2] http://thisweekinstartups.com/amol-deshpande-fbn/

I've long considered a similar "in a [shipping container] box" for fast-start retail establishments. Have access to retail space? have just days/hours to put up a fast-food shop? won't be perfect, but the box contains what you need to get a functioning restaurant delivered & running in hours. Likewise I can appreciate an "in a box" for a farm; get some cheap land and get what you need to reach harvest before snowfall.

* 30 HP tractor - $14k

* brushhog, back blade, cone spreader, log splitter - $3k

* 1,000 ft^2 greenhouse - $5k

* water to greenhouse - $5k

* haying equipment (baler, tedder, disk mower, rake) - $5.5k

* buckets, pails, tubs, lights, etc for livestock - $1k

* hoses, hand tools, etc. - $1k

* drip irrigation, raised beds, soil tests, etc. - $1k

* fencing materials - $5k

I could keep going down the list, but even just barely starting, I'm sure that the $50k number is correct.

Obviously, this package doesn't include haying equipment or chicken egg incubators or chicken feather removal machine, but I can easily imagine how you could spend $50k.

Green houses and hydroponics are great, but they can just as well be done on cheap land.

The biggest difficulty in food production isn't land, water, and sunlight - its management at scale.

This is why the vast majority of everyone's calories comes from large tractor managed commodity crops.

As a metaphor, the easy part of IT is ordering the servers, switches, etc. The setup takes some labor, but the real difficulty is the ongoing management.

Indeed, you could consider investors and shareholders in a similar manner to workers and lenders; investors provide money and in exchange the company gives them profits.

Why is money going back into the company "good", but investors get the negative connotation of "siphoning" money? What is with the disdain for the people who own the company making money from it?