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Comment by waihtis | Hacker News Reader

What I've been very interested in lately is whether there's a way for us to enable local food production (local meaning on the individual/family scale) via some technological or business innovation. Maybe something along the lines of automated remote farming which would factor in the lack of local space to farm + time limitations.

Something that concerns me personally is the globalistic nature of the food supply chain and just from a risk management perspective it would be great to push it into a more localized state. But I don't think a world where everybody moves to homesteading is realistic, quite the opposite.

Just superficial pondering. If there's some nice initiatives / startups / other working on this would be keen to learn more about them.

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Hey check out twistedfields.com

We're trying make small farms more automated and enable them as economically feasable businesses. Our main project is a precision farming robot, and within the next year were hoping to ship dev kits

Haha, kudos for doing exactly what my imagination thinks slightly scifi-esque "autonomous remote farming" looks like! Really neat.

I have some arable land a couple hours away from home so will be following your progress.

I can't find any information about the automation project(s) on the website you linked above.

Would you mind elaborating a bit more?

Take a look at spacebuckets ( eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceBuckets/ ) works awesome for cannabis -- but also: lettuce, herbs, cuke, growing aquaponic pineapple in the winter in Oregon, etc. You can get a bucket (or larger controlled envrironment) and control the whole thing via Pi and this thing is cool too -- https://github.com/kizniche/Mycodo

e: and we're working on this :)

Can't do it at the individual/family scale. Gotta go back thousands of years for that model. Population is too great (mostly enabled by highly scaled, highly efficient agriculture)

Remember the blockchain hype? Well it turns out it's actually incredibly practical for food traceability and provenance. Governments around the world are starting to demand transparency around this, and in the near future it will be common for consumers to be able to see where their food was grown, processed, shipped to, and how long that took.

So, scan the QR code and pick the produce with the shortest supply chain. If consumers demand it, local food production WILL be a big thing.

Great use case! But why would't a centralized database be fine?

In an honest world, yes. Blockchain prevents people tampering or revising the data, ie removing unflattering stuff like the refrigeration being turned off on their container, or stuff being sent to a third port, etc.

There's a lot of fraud in food.

I still don't see the value a blockchain provides here. You could just have the database be append-only...

Makes sense, although if I think about my personal super market experience, you buy one of two variants: local (grown inside the country borders) or foreign. I assume EU regulation already makes it mandatory to inform consumers of the origins of their product. May be different elsewhere of course.

There's a big difference between knowing the country of origin, and knowing the whole journey of the product, right from the farm.

Where are the major inefficiencies in the supply chain at the moment, from your perspective?

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