Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
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Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
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Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#2"Imagine getting paid 50 times in your career instead of 50 times a year".
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#3> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet)
This is done all the time. When evaluating a new seed variety, a different seed spacing, a new nitrogen application, farmers will do a test plot next to the control. If things looks good then they'll expand the new change to more acreage.
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#4> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet)
Pretty sure you can subdivide a farm however you want and use different methods across them. Iteration cycles are in the year time frame but otherwise seems pretty easy to test whatever you want.
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#5The key insight Silicon Valley lacks about agriculture is that there is little potential for a big win. Major improvements mean 10% of something, not 10x. US agriculture is already highly efficient.
On the down side, there's potential for a big loss if you screw up.
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#6Farmers also hate to be dependant on closed technology they can't fix themselves. When you are out in the field and something breaks, you can't wait 3 days for the dealer to come around and plug a computer in to fix things... There is a reason farmers hack their John Deer or use older equipment like my dad does.
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#7thats a bit of hyperbole, farmers do like to experiment as well, and bad yields do happen, they are not risk averse.
at this point there are many places in the world that crave for more agtech
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#8Silicon Valley is great at tech because it has a high concentration of tech companies and top universities. It doesn't have that for agriculture.
The "Silicon Valley" of agriculture is in Wageningen, a small university town in The Netherlands. In the surrounding area you have a huge number of food/agri-tech firms.
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#9> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) This is done all the time. When evaluating a new seed variety, a different seed spacing, a new nitrogen application, farmers will do a test plot next to the control. If things looks good then they'll expand the new change to more acreage.
This is really funny to me after living near a place that has done exactly that for ~100 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Experimental_Farm
Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture
#10Silicon Valley is great at tech because it has a high concentration of tech companies and top universities. It doesn't have that for agriculture. The "Silicon Valley" of agriculture is in Wageningen, a small university town in The Netherlands. In the surrounding area you have a huge number of food/agri-tech firms.
There is a huge amount of agriculture within driving distance of Silicon Valley. The main obstacle is culture, not distance. Most people I meet in Silicon Valley have zero clue how food is actually produced, and lack the proper respect for farmers and ranchers.