When I was young I got sick. I spent days in the hospital and the doctors made sure my immediate family all came to visit because they where worried about if I would make it. Of course they don’t tell kids this. I only found out later.
When I was a little older I got my drivers license and pretty quickly totaled a truck by rolling it. A few friends also got to join in on the ride. We where lucky. No one was harmed.
When I studied abroad in Europe I spent a few hours visiting some pubs with a friend and someone decided to play a prank on some tourists far as we can tell and drugged us. We both woke up on the streets of Budapest the next day with no idea what happened but essentially things where fine. …
Version 2 of anything is probably an “intermediate state”. Don’t build it. Build whats next instead.
Let’s start out with what I am defining as an intermediate state.
An intermediate state is the point between a current state and a future state. More robustly, it’s an infinite number of possible states between what exists now, and an infinite number of future possible states.
Take a loading bar for example.
Its December 30th.
I’m in the tail end of a sugar hangover from all the Christmas cookies I utterly destroyed during yesterdays family Christmas party.
I’m not going to get any “real” work done so I am thinking about what 2020 means to me and if 2019 was worth a shit.
Tis the season.
I try to do “more” every year. 📈
More of what I want. More of what I will remember. More of what makes me enjoy being alive. Thats how I define “more.”
2019 was big.
2020 should be “more.” Obviously.
My “more” recap of 2019: (chronologically-ish)
- Drank cheap beer with an Aussie man with only a few teeth in an opal mine in the town they filmed Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Slept under the stars in the outback. Made some new friends. Got some wicked sunburn and saw some cricket with a friend I met on a different continent. Australia. …
You may be thinking that is one hell of a typo. But it isn’t.
So let’s talk cows.
Cows are kind of like dogs. Domesticated. Different personalities. Fat cows. Skinny cows. You get the drift. The main point is that we took these animals and we have integrated them into our society. We have domesticated them.
For the most part, cows where domesticated because they are tasty piles of high quality protein that we like to eat. They take grass, corn and other plants that not even our most devout vegetarians can eat and convert it to wonderful protein rich meats and milk via a symbiotic relationship with millions of hungry little bacteria in their stomachs. It’s a pretty good deal. It was super important in the early days of mankind that we had access to protein. …
Agriculture is a vast complex system . It’s cows, plows and sows. Sure. But it’s also everything that goes on between farm and fork. A chaotic mix of every discipline imagine-able.
Only 1% of the companies in this Y Combinator batch are considered to be in ‘agriculture’. Loads of these startups not labeled as agriculture are going to make waves in how food happens. So I’m going to take a broader view.
So sip your coffee and use your imagination. We have some important things to build if we are going to feed the planet. …
If you’re a farmer in 2018 its totally on point to be freaking out about trade wars and Trump tweets wether it be in person or on #agtwitter. It’s palpable how bad the books are looking on everyones farm right about now. The trade war is by far the most popular target for our anger.
When governments start playing hardball with each other over commodity trade it will always be the commodity producers that feel the short term pain. This is not new. It’s just particularly painful for U.S. …
I once read a book called The Lean Startup. It wasn’t this year, not even last, but parts of it stuck with me. The book is a guide to demystify starting companies. What to do. What not to do. Like most books some parts of it where great and others just sucked.
Why should I give a shi*t?
There are a few worthwhile ideas that I took from it that I use in my decision making process in life, farming, tech, business.
1. Don’t pretend you know anything. Do stuff, measure results, learn.
In a world of the Big Data, Big Ag, Trump, China, organic, local, quinoa, and kale do you really feel like what you did in the past is going to tell you exactly what to do in the future? …
Farming needs a new brand.
Sure organic is cool, and local is cool, and everything else is cool too.
This isn’t really a piece about saving the planet either. This is about wanting science to win.
Don’t want to stop using BST on your cows?
Sell BST milk as a value added product.
Don’t want to have to plant non GMO corn so that Dannon can make its costumers feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
Sell your use of GMO corn as a value added product.
🤔 Is that possible? (sounds a bit crazy)
It’s crazy enough that it might just work. …
Virtual Reality (VR) is just for gamers right? These crazy nerdy looking headsets you see on people’s faces have no practical value. Obviously.
Well…. Thats probably not the case.
The truth is VR might provide great new innovations for agriculture.
Think of VR like the internet. It’s just the next big platform to build stuff on top of.
Some things innovators might use VR for ( hopefully!🤞)
Operator as a Service (OaaS)
In a world filled with self driving everything there still is likely to be needs for human drivers in some cases. Rather than having a person sitting onboard for those rare occasions that the machine needs assistance wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have a pool of remote workers ready to take the helm of the machine? An in real life person to operate the machine on demand in that moment of need? Something like Amazons Mechanical Turk but for driving machines? For sure. People have better things to do that sit in self driving machinery. …
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