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Comment by emilywolfe | Hacker News Reader

ok great. Makes sense. And people have definitely moved to Montana during the pandemic! Another q:

What new markets in this space are interesting to you?

The whole “right to repair” thing gets a lot of traction with this crowd. One of the worst offenders is John Deere, which won’t let you repair your own tractor. Vehicles are mostly software now so tinkering with them is basically criminalized under the CFAA.

This sucks and echoes the repairability problems with modern laptops and phones. Apple and the other major consumer tech companies make more money by selling stuff that can’t be fixed, or that only they can fix. That gets consumers slightly thinner, less expensive stuff, but it’s terrible for e waste and weakens the secondary market for tech, making tech more expensive overall while boosting corporate profits.

So, to answer your question, you could probably get traction by talking about people who are building tools that aren’t encumbered by repairablility and IP problems. Let’s see some open/source crop cycles. Let’s see bootleg tractor repair. Let’s see weird local regulations that force people to play fair.

Thanks for these ideas. I think the right to repair is going to get a lot of traction right now with the new executive order—or at least I hope so. The robotics for weeding are definitely interesting too. In terms of reporting on problems or potential solutions, this project is “solutions journalism,” which means rigorous reporting on responses to a problem. The problem part is built in as you look at the how well (or not) the response is working.

...and "solutions journalism" itself sounds like an interesting topic. There are lots of posts on HN discussing journalism in general, challenges faced by "serious" news orgs, and fresh takes. Searching for "journalism" (search box is at bottom of the main page) turns up lots, such as [0], [1], [2], [3], and [4].

And now I'm off down the "Blendle" rabbit hole...

[edit] Arggh. Homepage blendle.com, subhead "To our Beta users": "Today Blendle starts its beta in the United States..." -- undated, and "... Continue reading on medium.com"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020950 Social media's effect on journalism is greater than shift from print to digital

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146086 Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12611377 Best practice examples of data journalism and visualization projects

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11343822 Blendle: Pay-per-article journalism platform that refunds you for clickbait

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453821 Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later

These are interesting, and I second a lot of the journalist’s comments in the Lehrer discussion. I see that Blendle is one response to the problem of the lack of funding for journalism, and someone here suggested Substack as another. I’d love to see this group hack how to pay the real cost of in-depth journalism. I spent 450+ hours on that first story. Which is great, and I’ll do it again, but we can’t expect journalists to always shoulder that load.

More than the new markets, it would be great to get "boots on the ground" information of real honest no bullshit understanding of the pain points of farmers, agricultural industry in general. Sometimes markets are not well defined or don't exist but taking a fundamental look at problems is fascinating. This information is hard to come by and people like yourself can help.

The major pain point is a simple one: we have a cheap-food-policy in place in the US to keep revolution at bay. I have many friends dumping hundreds of gallons of raw milk daily because that's all the state will allow them to do with it. It would be fantastic if farmers could once again post a profit by charging consumers true cost of production.

What I want to know is what steps can be taken to re-engineer incentives so that the major players in agriculture are pushing for regenerative agriculture and organic farming in their financial and political strategies.

I'm interested in small-scale robot farms that take the drudgery out of distributed food growing, particularly in suburbia. Robotic pest control is the most exciting because it would be a nice application of computer vision and chemical free pest control. Gardens in general are good uses of food waste and recycled water; so if you could lower the barrier to entry and operational costs, they might become more common.

In this talk from 2017, around 1h30m in, he says that he hasn't yet found a way to make no-till organic work in terms of weed prevention. But, he said he was close to figuring it out. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

Has any progress been made since? Is this an area where technology could help (eg robotic precision weeding machines)?

Disclaimer that I have yet to read your article so it may already be covered.

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