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Bloomberg on why farmers can’t work in information technology

jelliclesfarm 7y ago
[..] Bloomberg on why farmers can’t work in information technology MB: “I can teach anyone how to be a farmer 1 dig a hole 2 put a seed in 3 put dirt on top 4 add water 5 up comes the corn” The skill 4information technology is completely different you need more grey matter[..]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rs23296008n1 7y ago
Done both. Farming is harder. Bloomberg has no clue whatsoever. Farming is not just gardening. That would be like saying programming is just typing. Wrong.
- salawat 7y ago
  To expand on this, Agriculture is so god-blessed complicated when it comes to doing it in a way that gets you worthwhile returns. Off the top of my head: Plant Ag: Soil quality is an art form of it's own. Figure out what your soil is, and ameliorate the he'll out of it to get it fertile again. Plant/crop choice: Guess what? Now you get to learn the biology of every crop you're familiar with, their cultivars, and the effect they have on soils/the local fauna. Decide whether you are going mono-culture, or companion planting. If monoculture, Note your lifecycle (for harvest times and other necessary processing ) then proceed to equipment maintenance, operation, and financials. If companion planting, get ready for making your jigsaw of a planting space, and figure out your crop rotation for the next few seasons; then jump to equipment operation, maintenance, and financial buggery. Oh yeah, make sure your choice properly reflects what your environment can support, and decide whether or not you're going no-till or not, pesticide/herbicide free and adjust accordingly. Did you remember pollination? Them Bees hardly ever just grow on trees anymore! Better make friends with a bee keeper! Animal Ag: Welcome to fence and belligerent animal hell. Make sure you have your herd culled of any children of the last sure, or you've rotated out last season's males, as inbreeding is a big fat nono. Keep your males spread out if you don't want injuries and be ready when your carefully orchestrated separation fails because somebody got randy. Farmers could make fantastic frigging programmers, I have no doubt; what I doubt they'll be is the most accommodating or tolerant of the typical code or feature mill environment; and for that God bless 'em. Besides which, I'm fairly sure you'd have some serious tech culture shock as the other side of the intellectual landscape filtered in. These are people who have become optimized in figuring out how to do things without creating extra work. If the man truly had the gall to suggest IT is somehow harder than farming, I hate to bust bubbles, but he needs a reality check. It often only looks easy because years of hard work have gone into the land and processes to keep it productive.
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    There is a general derisiveness towards farmers because we produce a lot of value and give it away for so very little. It became worse with govt subsidies and market forces because it further devalued what we do. Tech does not help farming and ag. Whatever ‘Agtech’ is happening now is a data play. Every technology out there that has gotten funding is because they collect data and that data is a commodity that can be sold for more than the value of the food produced by farmers who are at the bottom most rung of the supply chain. I do say this with a touch of bitterness because I applied for YC twice and won’t again because I was told that there is no money. (Without serving the data gods) I get the logic of it, but that doesn’t stop me from being bitter. It is particularly nauseating that Bloomberg should say this because the most invested Agtech is for commodity crops that get traded on Wall Street and the kind of crops like corn and soy and input companies and land surveys etc. and it’s business. I will never vote for Bloomberg even though he was in my shortlist. Something has been triggered that bought forth all that I have witnessed and subconsciously recorded about the devaluation of farming by tech and business communities since 2011 when I first started looking into at ways to improve ag with tech. The bubble just burst when I read that. This quote was from 2016.
    - rs23296008n1 7y ago
      I remotely occasionally support a bunch of farmers with fleets of raspberry pi, arduino and psoc. Those guys probably directly look after more computers than a lot of webguys. Writing C/python seems the most common.
      - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
        Farmers can learn anything. Still laughing over Mike Bloomberg’s instructions for growing corn “1. Dig a hole..” Show me a guy who digs a hole to grow corn..and I will show you someone who has never farmed before. Don’t need gray matter for that..
        rs23296008n1 7y ago
consultutah 7y ago
What an idiot. We deserve better leadership
aaron695 7y ago
He clearly is talking pre the information age (500 years ago) farming was not complex. Which it wasn't. Now farmers have to use robots, and machinery and data services and chemicals, breeding patterns. It is far more complex. Fake News FTW. On Twitter even. The clip is specifically cut to be bad, but actually is in context if you have ears, but it seems people are really really stupid.
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  How is it ‘Fake News’? Also: how is it helpful or informative to call ‘people’ ‘really really stupid’? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture : wiki link to history of farming. Which kind of farming is as what Bloomberg suggested and as what you think is ‘simple’. ‘500 years ago’ would be 1520 AD. How do you think and what do you think people farmed in 1520?
- aiscapehumanity 7y ago
  He's literally talking about farmers now.
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  Not Fake News https://www.theblaze.com/news/bloomberg-triggers-bipartisan-backlash-for-condescending-remarks-about-farmers https://www.theblaze.com/news/bloomberg-triggers-bipartisan-... [..]While speaking at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School in 2016, Bloomberg was asked if Americans living on the coasts — who are generally more liberal — could be unified with those who live in middle America, who are generally more conservative. In response, Bloomberg implied that anyone could be a farmer because it requires a low-level of intelligence to be successful. I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then we had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture; today it's 2 percent in the United States. Now comes the information economy. And the information economy is fundamentally different because it's built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.[..]

[..] Bloomberg on why farmers can’t work in information technology MB: “I can teach anyone how to be a farmer 1 dig a hole 2 put a seed in 3 put dirt on top 4 add water 5 up comes the corn” The skill 4information technology is completely different you need more grey matter[..]

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

rs23296008n1 7y ago

Done both. Farming is harder. Bloomberg has no clue whatsoever. Farming is not just gardening. That would be like saying programming is just typing. Wrong.

salawat 7y ago
To expand on this, Agriculture is so god-blessed complicated when it comes to doing it in a way that gets you worthwhile returns. Off the top of my head: Plant Ag: Soil quality is an art form of it's own. Figure out what your soil is, and ameliorate the he'll out of it to get it fertile again. Plant/crop choice: Guess what? Now you get to learn the biology of every crop you're familiar with, their cultivars, and the effect they have on soils/the local fauna. Decide whether you are going mono-culture, or companion planting. If monoculture, Note your lifecycle (for harvest times and other necessary processing ) then proceed to equipment maintenance, operation, and financials. If companion planting, get ready for making your jigsaw of a planting space, and figure out your crop rotation for the next few seasons; then jump to equipment operation, maintenance, and financial buggery. Oh yeah, make sure your choice properly reflects what your environment can support, and decide whether or not you're going no-till or not, pesticide/herbicide free and adjust accordingly. Did you remember pollination? Them Bees hardly ever just grow on trees anymore! Better make friends with a bee keeper! Animal Ag: Welcome to fence and belligerent animal hell. Make sure you have your herd culled of any children of the last sure, or you've rotated out last season's males, as inbreeding is a big fat nono. Keep your males spread out if you don't want injuries and be ready when your carefully orchestrated separation fails because somebody got randy. Farmers could make fantastic frigging programmers, I have no doubt; what I doubt they'll be is the most accommodating or tolerant of the typical code or feature mill environment; and for that God bless 'em. Besides which, I'm fairly sure you'd have some serious tech culture shock as the other side of the intellectual landscape filtered in. These are people who have become optimized in figuring out how to do things without creating extra work. If the man truly had the gall to suggest IT is somehow harder than farming, I hate to bust bubbles, but he needs a reality check. It often only looks easy because years of hard work have gone into the land and processes to keep it productive.
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  There is a general derisiveness towards farmers because we produce a lot of value and give it away for so very little. It became worse with govt subsidies and market forces because it further devalued what we do. Tech does not help farming and ag. Whatever ‘Agtech’ is happening now is a data play. Every technology out there that has gotten funding is because they collect data and that data is a commodity that can be sold for more than the value of the food produced by farmers who are at the bottom most rung of the supply chain. I do say this with a touch of bitterness because I applied for YC twice and won’t again because I was told that there is no money. (Without serving the data gods) I get the logic of it, but that doesn’t stop me from being bitter. It is particularly nauseating that Bloomberg should say this because the most invested Agtech is for commodity crops that get traded on Wall Street and the kind of crops like corn and soy and input companies and land surveys etc. and it’s business. I will never vote for Bloomberg even though he was in my shortlist. Something has been triggered that bought forth all that I have witnessed and subconsciously recorded about the devaluation of farming by tech and business communities since 2011 when I first started looking into at ways to improve ag with tech. The bubble just burst when I read that. This quote was from 2016.
  - rs23296008n1 7y ago
    I remotely occasionally support a bunch of farmers with fleets of raspberry pi, arduino and psoc. Those guys probably directly look after more computers than a lot of webguys. Writing C/python seems the most common.
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      Farmers can learn anything. Still laughing over Mike Bloomberg’s instructions for growing corn “1. Dig a hole..” Show me a guy who digs a hole to grow corn..and I will show you someone who has never farmed before. Don’t need gray matter for that..
      - rs23296008n1 7y ago

consultutah 7y ago

What an idiot. We deserve better leadership

aaron695 7y ago

He clearly is talking pre the information age (500 years ago) farming was not complex. Which it wasn't. Now farmers have to use robots, and machinery and data services and chemicals, breeding patterns. It is far more complex. Fake News FTW. On Twitter even. The clip is specifically cut to be bad, but actually is in context if you have ears, but it seems people are really really stupid.

jelliclesfarm 7y ago
How is it ‘Fake News’? Also: how is it helpful or informative to call ‘people’ ‘really really stupid’? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture : wiki link to history of farming. Which kind of farming is as what Bloomberg suggested and as what you think is ‘simple’. ‘500 years ago’ would be 1520 AD. How do you think and what do you think people farmed in 1520?
aiscapehumanity 7y ago
He's literally talking about farmers now.
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
Not Fake News https://www.theblaze.com/news/bloomberg-triggers-bipartisan-backlash-for-condescending-remarks-about-farmers https://www.theblaze.com/news/bloomberg-triggers-bipartisan-... [..]While speaking at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School in 2016, Bloomberg was asked if Americans living on the coasts — who are generally more liberal — could be unified with those who live in middle America, who are generally more conservative. In response, Bloomberg implied that anyone could be a farmer because it requires a low-level of intelligence to be successful. I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then we had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture; today it's 2 percent in the United States. Now comes the information economy. And the information economy is fundamentally different because it's built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.[..]