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What are your goals for you research or project? Many ideas stumble not on the technology, but on the people aspects of the project. If your goal is a single
by stan_sf 10y ago
What are your goals for you research or project? Many ideas stumble not on the technology, but on the people aspects of the project.
If your goal is a single family sustainable farm, I've read reports of 2 or 3 acres being plenty for a family of four if you are in an area with enough rainfall (Ohio, for example). However, they needed to have outside income since their land did not produce everything the needed.
If you are thinking of a larger group like commune of 25 people, or a town like you mention, you will to look into the issues present in those communities, and getting food is usually not the biggest issue. For example, several co-housing projects fail due to the families involved not being able to raise enough money to purchase the land the need. Other small groups buy farmland but don't have the capital or expertise to actually farm and produce enough to be economically viable. Useful farmland is not cheap, and the economics get in the way quickly.
Farming is a complex business. It won't be "fully automated" anytime soon, particularly for the variety of crops people like to have. For example, my parent's potato farm also had a vegetable garden for carrots and onions, and they raised chickens. They ate a lot of soup, since that is what they grew without needing to spend money, meat was expensive. Economically they sold potatoes to have money to buy everything things they needed (gas for tractor, salt, tools, etc.).
Note: I am a cofounder at www.powwowenergy.com, a data mining company based in San Mateo CA where we help farmers be more efficient. If you are a data scientist or developer looking to help the world feed more people, drop me a note, we are hiring.
- tabeth 10y agoThis is just a tiny part of a much broader goal, which is to create a completely self sustaining town of 100 to 1000 people within my lifetime. My intention is with 100k that could get you 10 acres. 1 acre for food, 5 for solar/energy production and 4 for housing/community. Of course, with the comments in this thread, I'd need more land, haha. As far as the economics goes: I've been doing reading but haven't formed a good conclusion yet. Initially I thought a communalist approach would work. I thought of too many ways that would fail and then opted more for a centralized, socialist approach, but that seems like it would fail as well. Capitalism, of course, would just result in what we have now, defeating the purpose. Personally I think communities where each person knows everyone else have unique advantages not present in large cities. Disclaimer: I haven't done a ton of due diligence on these things yet. When I get closer to actually doing this I'll start doing more serious research.
- hueving 10y agoHow will this town get medicine and technologies like replacement solar panels? Will people pay with USD into a general fund that would be used to buy from the outside world? What happens if people can't pay? Sorry about all the questions, but a community that small can hardly be self sustaining in a real sense without lots of imports or a massive step down in quality of life.
- tabeth 10y agoIndeed. Ideally (need to do more research) the community would self sustaining with a low quality of life, however, all of the usual amenities would be provided. The difficulty is setting it up so that they don't necessarily become entitled or dependent on the advanced amenities.
- mikekchar 10y agoThis may be exactly the opposite way to look at it, but have a peek at [1] the One Straw Revolution. TL;DR: Masanobu Fukuoka was a scientist with an idea of using existing biological systems to reduce the amount of labour involved in farming. He created a very nearly zero-input farming system with the hope of enabling people to grow enough food to sustain themselves in their spare time. Unfortunately, lots and lots of hype surrounded the project and reliable numbers of yield, etc, etc are probably not to be found. Still there have been lots and lots of similar initiatives with interesting results. I think you would need quite a lot of land for 100 people, but land is cheaper than robots (and is self repairing, and adds to your quality of life). I have a friend who grows all his rice and vegetables for the year in his spare time using Fukuoka's methods (he studied with him for a while). I helped him harvest once and I was quite surprised how well he was doing (easily as much yield as his neighbour's commercial farm). Farm land is trivial to get in Japan and you can often borrow enough to live off of in exchange for a bottle of whiskey or so per year. [1] http://www.onestrawrevolution.net/One_Straw_Revolution/One-Straw_Revolution.html http://www.onestrawrevolution.net/One_Straw_Revolution/One-S...
- Tarlitz 10y agoThere is an on-going initiative to build a small self-sustaining town close to Almere (20 km from amsterdam) in the Netherlands: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jul/12/eco-village-hi-tech-off-grid-communities-netherlands-circular-housing-regen-effekt https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jul/12...