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Comment by kickout | Hacker News Reader

Free idea: There is MASSIVE distrust in the NASS right now in the farming community to the point of the data becoming questionable. It'd be nice if place like Indigo Ag (which acquired TellusLabs I believe) could assist/takeover some of the things remote sensing or satellites can do (like planted acres) so that USDA NASS doesn't need to rely on unpopular and time consuming surveys

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Where can I find the communities that are upset/distrust NASS? Is this on twitter/forums/fb? I'd like to take a deeper look into the problems they're discussing but I'm an outsider, not sure where to begin looking.

One problem is that farmers often consider it a secret they don't want to share. For good reason, if you know how much crops will produce next fall you can go to commody markets and make a lot of money. That money comes out of the farmers potential profit in some cases as they are playing the other side of the trade and so the less you know compared to them, the better the deal they can get.

Farmers know what is in their fields, but prices are affected by fields on other continents which the farmer doesn't know. Any information the farmer can get but you cannot is to his advantage. (this applies to all farmers, they need to know what happens in Ukraine, Brazil, Australia... But they need you to not know)

Very late reply...But if you want to hear an admitedly biased (towards negative) source, go read the crop comments on agweb.com

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