Becoming Farm Focused
A decade ago, I looked down at the scale and decided it was time to change my unfortunate food habits — to become a healthier, lighter person. I exercised, of course, and I started trying to understand what I should eat. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was starting down a much more complicated path than I could ever have imagined. It turns out, our food doesn’t always make us healthy. That’s something I knew emotionally, but logically it stood out as a horrifying fact. I was living in San Francisco and the current startup boom was just taking off. What good was all of this innovative, world-changing disruption if our food has so many problems?
So alongside my decade-long journey as a developer-turned-product-manager in the heart of startup land, I also started researching everything about food and agriculture. I read endlessly — everything from Pollan to the USDA Agriculture Census. I talked to agtech experts. I watched documentaries. I attended conferences and meetups. I took online and on-farm courses. I spoke at Meetups about how open source could benefit agtech. I learned from agronomists and a chicken nutritionist. I met with farmers. I even tried to become a farmer, briefly. It felt a bit foolish trying to become an expert in something I was far removed from, but I managed to learn enough to uncover unexpected truths and reach a simple conclusion: There are not enough people working on improving our food system.
So I started to ask myself — why not work on food and farm problems? Although our food system isn’t nearly as evil as the documentaries tell us, there is an immense opportunity to apply the latest innovations in data analytics, machine learning, autonomy, genetics, etc. These technologies have the power to drastically change our food system for the better. And by better, I mean that our food system should make us healthy, make the farmer more money, harm the planet less, and be accessible to everyone.
At last, I’ve taken the plunge: I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Leaf as Head of Product! I feel lucky to have met a team that’s as passionate as I am about bringing change to food and farming. I look forward to leading them to solve ever-greater challenges as we grow.
At Leaf, we’re enabling developers working on food and farm problems. It begins with API access to field boundaries, precision agriculture data, and advanced satellite imagery. These problems represent just a few of the most common challenges facing the developers building solutions to food and farm challenges. By focusing on enabling developers, we’re also working on solving that conclusion I reached years ago — making it possible, perhaps even likely, for more people to bring change to our food system.
