Real Food for Real Farmers
Hi Kimbal, I watched your TEDx talk with interest, and wanted to share my perspective on what you’ve presented as a first year organic farmer in Quebec, Canada.
- The $100bn food company
You present the goal for your audience of starting the next $100 billion dollar food company. While I understand these kinds of numbers drive a lot of excitement among entrepreneurs, it seems to me to have little connection to my own experiences running a new farm startup.
After a summer of intense work and learning, I made just over $7,500 CAD in sales — ending up about $1,500 in the hole, but with freezers full of meat.
What if instead of encouraging people to form the next $100,000,000,000 food company, you encouraged people to start the next $10,000 farm and helped them with the tools to succeed on a very small, very personal/familial scale?
That would still be 10,000,000 new farms, each making $10,000. The collective impact TEN MILLION new small farms would have on our personal experience of food and nature and labor would positively transform the planet. Much more, I think, than one new company amassing a fortune into the hands of a few entrepreneurs who have never ventured out to work in a field under the sun all day long, selling the fruits of their labors for next to nothing…
There is just a glaring discrepancy here in what’s being presented, and the greater agro-alimentary realities you seem to be attempting to open people’s eyes to:
We can’t have “Real Food” without “Real Farmers” and real farmers aren’t making $10 billion.
Food doesn’t come from companies, anyway. It comes from farmers. Let’s get real…
2. Engineers not Farmers?
You offer the idea for people who want to get involved in agriculture, but who don’t want to become farmers that they can get involved in engineering. For most of the AgTech crowd right now, this seems to be all about “building apps” and gathering data for precision agriculture.
Personally, I think this is a really risky way to approach the problems facing us. Our problems aren’t just technological, but cultural. That is, the cultivation of living things as a livelihood.
I found this quote from a Forbes AgTech article earlier:
“I’ve spent 100% of my time over the last year [learning] and I still feel like I’m only understanding 1% of what I need to,” said Samantha Wai, the lead at Farm 2050, the ag investing arm of Google GOOGL -1.51% chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors venture capital firm. Despite that comment, Wai has spent a lot of time getting up to speed, including a handful of days in the agricultural communities of Salinas and Davis. That’s a lot more than most Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
If you want to really understand agriculture and what it means to be a “Real Farmer” — the type of person responsible for “Real Food”, I think we need to shake once and for all this notion that you can go out and spend a “handful of days in an agricultural community” and then come back to your computer workstation and magically “disrupt” agriculture.
This might convince people sitting in a board room drinking coffee, but anyone who has ever had to actually work in agriculture as a laborer for someone else or as a farmer on their own account will recognize this as a “big pile of shit” like you reference in one of your slides in the talk.
Personally, what I’d like to see is: if you want to be an engineer working in agriculture, first go work in agriculture. For more than 2–3 days. For more than a week. Go do it for 2–3 years, full-time. Go make a life of it. Live with farmers. Live with families who have done this for five generations. See what the life is really like. Work on your research and development at night, if you have enough energy left after shoveling manure and moving rocks and weeding and feeding and watering animals all day. See what is actually useful and what is necessary, and then come back and build us your ground-breaking product.
3. Eliminating Stoop Labor
I identified a lot with the passage in your talk about stoop labor. It really is the worst to be hunched down in a field for eight hours a day, and now that I work for myself, I do absolutely everything in my power to avoid it.
I’m a little confused by what you present in your slides though. Your first image talking about how horrible stoop labor is shows people working on the ground:
And then you talk about how companies are innovating by allowing workers to work standing up instead:
It’s a little unclear what’s happening here though for me. It looks like they are performing two different operations. The first appears to be harvest and the second sorting on a conveyor. I could be interpreting it wrong, but the difference appears to be in the level of technological complexity of harvesting equipment?
This is neither here nor there, except that I want to ask what is the small farmer supposed to do to eliminate “stoop labor” who can’t afford (and frankly doesn’t need) mechanical harvesters? Ideas that work at a really large scale of farming do not necessarily adapt downwards when we get to the family and neighborhood scale of farming — the only level, in my humble opinion, that will ever actually change anything until they themselves actually change and start reflecting Real Life for Real Farmers.
Also, how is it that Mexicans and laborers imported from other countries seem to be able to work 40+ hours per week doing stoop labor in the hot sun no questions asked (for minimum wage or less), but somehow magically white people refuse to do it?
4. What do Real Farmers really need with Big Data?
I’ve seen so many stories now about using drones and satellites and sensors with spectral imaging to capture Big Data for farmers, but I personally can’t conceptualize what actual practical impact these technologies have on Real Farmers.
So you have aerial photos of your fields with some color-coding. Maybe it even tells you something about biomass accumulation. But are you going to run out and harvest your field suddenly because a micro-satellite or a drone hooked up to an app told you to? I certainly hope not. What you’re going to do is follow your schedule and follow the seasons. You’re going to actually physically go and look at your crops and your land, and your machines and your gas and your storage or transformation facility and your workers and the weather and you’re going to wait for the right time. No amount of technology is going to veer you off your schedule of what’s actually possible, practical, useful and good in the moment. And “Real Farmers” aren’t — despite what engineers think — suffering from a lack of data. We’re suffering from a lack of hours in the day, a lack of materials, infrastructure, management techniques and money. We have more than enough information about what’s happening. We have to choose what to ignore for another day, another week, another season. What will not crash the day-to-day operations…
The problem, as I see it, again is cultural. We have on the one hand an engineering culture which is applying a certain mind-set to problem-solving in agriculture (while precious few have actually gone out and done the stoop labor themselves), and then a business & investment culture accustomed to having people bend over backwards to tell them how good their ideas and products are. Meanwhile, Real Farmers are, for the most part, left outside this technological loop.
Real Food comes from Real Farmers not drones and satellites.
The tools and technologies being created today around so-called AgTech do little to nothing to actually help farmers (especially small farmers) on a day-to-day chores level (literally 100% of farming — don’t believe me, go start a farm!). The technologies piled up in front of Real Farmers and touted as being “saviors” do not come from us and do not help us. They help you, the $100bn dollar investor and technology company and vertically integrated manufacturer and sales distribution network. They sound big and important in TechCrunch articles passed around on social media, but on the ground they don’t change anything.
And even if we wanted or needed all these new gizmos and gadgets, we can’t afford them. As is so often repeated, the margins in agriculture are “razor thin”. Every part of the farm must pull it’s own weight; everything must at the very least pay for itself. Where will the added profits come from in my production when we adopt these new tools? Instead, what we get will be deeper debt and a greater dependence on technologies that we can neither build nor repair ourselves in our workshops. So to me, the technology solution seems to be — in general — hollow and empty. More promises from city people who don’t know what it’s like out there, who haven’t gotten their hands dirty (and probably won’t), who haven’t experienced the myriad small successes and failures Real Farmers face every day.
I want to talk about Real Food. But we can’t do that without talking about Real Farmers and the Real Situations we face today. Anything less is a futile exercise in imagination…
The Future of Food might be bright, but the present is more bleak and harder than anyone is letting on. So let’s go there together — let’s talk about it.
#Future of Farming
