Join us Wednesday at 5:00 PM Pacific time for the IoT and Agriculture Hack Chat with Akiba!
Note the different time than our usual Hack Chat slot! Akiba willi be joining us from Japan.
No matter what your feelings are about the current state of the world, you can’t escape the fact that 7.7 billion humans need to be fed every day. That means a lot of crops to grow and harvest and a lot of animals to take care of and bring to market. And like anything else, technology can make that job easier and more productive.
To test concepts at the interface between technology and agriculture, Akiba has developed HackerFarm, a combination of homestead, hackerspace, and small farm in Japan. It’s a place where hackers with agriculture-related projects can come to test ideas and collaborate with other people trying to solve the problems of a hungry world by experimenting on an approachable scale with open-source technology.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 15 at 5:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
I once heard and then didn’t follow up on that it’s estimated we produce enough food for 10 billion humans but that it’s cheaper to waste it than distribute it worldwide.
That’s actually a good point – maybe we don’t fix the problem on the production side, but rather attack the distribution problem. Or better still, abstract it away – why have massive farms in the middle of nowhere with the only access to markets for the produce being long, skinny land transport lines plied by bulk carriers (trains, trucks, ships)? Why not eliminate the transport problem entirely by distributing the farms? Make millions of microfarms that are close to the end consumer. Akiba actually touched on that in the event page comments, so I’m sure he’ll go into it in the Hack Chat.
Back in the 80s when I was a teenager heard of the Asian sweatshops, where allegedly, people worked crazy hours, only to afford food and a bed to sleep in. I thought, “If I could engineer a solution that would halve the price of food, I could make a real difference in these peoples lives.” The thought was soon followed with the realization that, in that environment, halving the price of food, only halves the price of labour. This is not an engineering problem, it is a problem of dependence and the balance of power. To change it you need to reduce the dependence, or the balance of power. There is a engineering opportunity here, but only if it priorities decentralization.
You can’t fix your car by filling the fuel tank, when the problem is that you have a flat tyre.