Okay, Linux and farming.

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2021-05-14 16:09:52

Browsing Hacker News recently brought an unexpected story to my attention, namely the announcement of something called the AgStack Foundation. Browsing further, apparently AgStack is an off-shoot of the Linux Foundation (Hi Linus!). Interesting. Admittedly this is not the most natural intersection of industries, but agriculture has been under a ‘data revolution‘ with the adoption of satellite technology for field conditions, semi-autonomous planting and harvesting machines, storage monitoring, animal health monitoring, pest tracking, etc. The diversity of data, sensors, and applications are as varied as the crops and animals we produce to eat and clothe ourselves. It is understandable to want to bring some standardization to this wide space.

Modern agriculture is actually highly efficient in North America, South America, and Europe. As stated in this blog several times, agriculture has harnessed innovative breakthroughs that have unlocked both scale and efficiency that even the best Silicon Valley venture capitalists would blush at: mechanization of agriculture equipment, systematic hybrid crops, plant biotechnology, synthetic chemistry to produce fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides. Every single one of these things has helped the hundreds of millions of acres of agriculture ground achieve enough productivity to power human population growth from ~1B person in 1850 to ~8B person in 2021. Without exception, agriculture’s output eventually touches every single human, every single day. That statement alone is powerful. But there is no need to blanketly state agriculture is inefficient. Subsistence farming is inefficient, but that ignores the history and current status in the aforementioned geographies–which are bastions of efficiency.