How can we disrupt the agricultural industry with tech? | Hacker News Reader

How can we disrupt the agricultural industry with tech?

12 pointshoonbae9 comments

Does anybody have any ideas or recommendation on ways tech can improve the agricultural industry (i.e. food production, marketing, distribution, etc)? Are there any startups out there doing something pertaining to agriculture? I feel like there's a lot of potential in tapping into Agriculture 2.0.

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I have in-laws who work for rural phone co-ops in northern Iowa. Back in the late 1990's they were laying fiber-optic everywhere because of the bandwidth farmers were willing to pay for...particularly the hog farms which were largely automated.

And that's nothing compared to the level of genetic technology and associated startups involved with agriculture.

I'm sorry but the idea that we are at Agriculture 2.0 only suggests a lack of familiarity with the contemporary agriculture industries and a lack of historical perspective.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution]

I think anything that brings value up the market will benefit consumers. Let me quote from Mark Mills of Forbes, where he explains that, although a tiny fraction of a percent of the U.S. population works in agriculture today versus 100 years ago, much of that population is now involved in food preparation.

Roughly a century ago when America had fewer than 100 million citizens, nearly 12 million worked on farms, a number that then comprised over 40 percent of the entire labor force. Now barely three million people call themselves farmers, accounting for a shade over two percent of today’s workforce. Meanwhile, technology enabled a 600 percent growth in agricultural output.

Both in absolute and relative terms technology blew the lid off agricultural productivity, and crushed direct farm employment. But, over that same century, somehow the American economy managed to generate enough wealth to create jobs for more than 100 million more workers.

Most of the new employment over the past century came from new services and new products that didn’t exist in 1900 – airlines and computing to name only two examples. It is worth noting that a lot of the new employment actually came from the same industry, food, as farming. It’s just that we count the jobs differently. While barely two percent of the modern American workforce is in farming, over 15 percent work in the food industry.

What is the next step beyond food service?

A site that connects growers with eaters, especially in dense areas. It's very easy to grow much more than you need in a garden, but it's not so easy to sell the surplusage.

I can buy vegetables and fruit at the store but it's not just-picked fresh. Why couldn't I buy right off the plant from a neighbor a few minutes' walk away?

Unfortunately, I believe that many places have laws (e.g. food safety regulations) that ban such informal growing and selling.

--VC-type or incubator funding (there are only a few) for agricultural startups --Social sites promoting education in agriculture--countries like Chile hold agriculture up as a profession on par with medicine and law --Full chain product based startups (see POM Wonderful) that manage genetic improvements through breeding, growing, sales and distribution of a novel food product.

Reverse the entire "Deal" process. Let the Farmer put the deals on its produce and auction its produce to the best bidder.

Have a look at this approach for Open Source Hardware for the agricultural sector.

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...

http://www.farmeron.com/

in all seriousness, stop subsidizing it and let the market deal with it

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