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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

While it's great this guy has the money to run his own research farm it's a bit unusual. In the Midwest where I live it's far more common for universities to do this task. Coupled with cooperative extension agents to spread adoption at a county level when they find something that works. Universities do basic science very well.

When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and precision ag in the nineties farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools. No-till isn't exactly new but perhaps some of the Montana variations happen to be?

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So, this is just a pilot project, and he's actually trying to fund the research center. I'm pretty sure that's why he was willing to spend so much time with me on this project.

The big thing is that each farmer or region needs to be experimenting to see what works there, since every place is different (climate, land management history, culture, resources, etc), and things are always changing.

The universities mostly do the commodity crop research. You're definitely right that Quinn is ahead of that system. It seems like we need other structures to support more forward-thinking work like his, whether it's private equity, nonprofit or something else.

My partner is figuring a lot of the same things out through https://farmsproject.org. Farmers are taking huge risks, literally "betting the farm" on their regenerative practices because as you say the universities focus on commodity crop research.

Your note somewhere else in this thread about comparing farmers to silicon valley entrepreneurs was a cool moment of clarity; they don't get several rounds of VC financing to try their ideas, just regular loans and a lot of paperwork tied to crop insurance.

Down in eastern Colorado/western Nebraska & Kansas farmers are having a harder time being regenerative _and_ organic but a part of that is because they're also dryland farmers.

Anyway it's exciting to see your stories hit hacker news! The innovation and work of the farmers you're covering are going to have a huge positive impact on US agriculture.

Yes and:

> ...farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools.

Rogers' book Diffusion of Innovations is the seminal text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

"The study of diffusion of innovations took off in the subfield of rural sociology in the midwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Agriculture technology was advancing rapidly, and researchers started to examine how independent farmers were adopting hybrid seeds, equipment, and techniques. A study of the adoption of hybrid corn seed in Iowa by Ryan and Gross (1943) solidified the prior work on diffusion into a distinct paradigm that would be cited consistently in the future. Since its start in rural sociology, Diffusion of Innovations has been applied to numerous contexts..."

My introduction to "innovation" was Geoffrey Moore's pop biz book Crossing the Chasm. Derivative work that doesn't even cite Rogers' work. Moore spins "just so" stories. Rogers explains the research, concrete and actionable.

Imagine my chagrin when I stumbled onto Rogers. If it's not obvious, I'm still grumpy about Moore's omission. I don't mind that he profited from popularizing important ideas. Not acknowledging the precedents is something like theft.

Just a nitpick: Plowman's Folly was published in the 1940's, so no-till was definitely not brand-new in the eighties.

I think no-till became more common in the 80s, because that's when Roundup became more widely available, at least in Montana.

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