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There is actually more to this than is visible on the surface. And I can’t talk about some of it. But here it is: 1. Climate Corp was part of Monsanto before
by jelliclesfarm 6y ago
There is actually more to this than is visible on the surface. And I can’t talk about some of it.
But here it is:
1. Climate Corp was part of Monsanto before it became Bayer. It was acquired by Monsanto.
2. John Deere wanted to buy Climate as well as Monsanto but that was struck down by US courts and Bayer bought Monsanto.
3. What was Climate Corp doing before? They had something called Field View where they charged farmers to collect and collate data.
4. All precision Ag, Ag robotics and farm data collections have two big industry ‘partners’: Wall Street and Farm input companies.
5. Now add farmland to Precision Ag/Ag robotics.
6. This is a kind of consolidation of land, inputs, data and machinery.
6. Eventually, all land will be owned by farm machinery companies and input companies. There won’t be any more farmers in the future but only farming corporations.
7. It goes back to Wall Street because big Ag is commodities.
I am a small scale farmer interested in small acreage Ag robotics to save labour. But no one was interested even though food is important and Ag is a big deal in the USA.
No investors, no traction, no interest and I have no qualms about cold calling...and down that rabbit hole, I found out that diff between food farming and commodity crop farming.
In reality, there is no agtech for food farming. In the USA anyways. Agtech is about land, inputs and mostly commodity crops. And speculation markets.
I don’t have an opinion. Maybe this is more efficient. Maybe it’s not a good idea. And this kind of Ag isn’t even what I am interested in and I just stumbled upon this while trying to figure why Agtech is such a big deal but I can’t find interest in automating food production.
It is pretty fascinating how Big Ag has managed to consolidate and rein in together. The players are still the same and it’s a few big corporations that will control this sector.
Many of the players and VC companies and start ups are well known but it’s not really necessary to drop those names. But anyone can connect the dots if they invested some time. It is literally a web ..six degrees and all that.
Back to the article, expect ‘family farmers’ to be separated from their land in the near and near-distant future. Already a lot of American farmland is owned by foreign countries/investors, pension funds, insurance companies, university wealth funds and hedge funds.
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- kitotik 6y agoThanks for the extremely insightful context. With so much first-hand knowledge of this situation, I’m having a hard time processing how you don’t have an opinion on it. It seems that this is exceedingly detrimental to the well being of literally everyone and everything involved except for those that profit from it.
- redis_mlc 6y agoA similar story is unfolding in mostly small-time US aviation mfg. Chinese companies have bought around 20 makers, like Mooney and Cirrus, in the past decade. > With so much first-hand knowledge of this situation, I’m having a hard time processing how you don’t have an opinion on it. Similarly, I don't have an opinion since the US regulators have decided to do nothing, and private capital is scarce in that sector - it is what it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Air_Parts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Air_Parts https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2011/february/28/cirrus-sold-to-china https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2011/february/2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooney_International_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooney_International_Corporati...
- m463 6y agoThat reminds me of this (vagueyly related) article on unions and airlines: https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
- redis_mlc 6y agoPhil's a great aviation writer. Beyond what he wrote, the regionals were created to union-bust, but the 1,500 hour rule has already closed most of them, giving captains even more power. :)
- wjnc 6y agoThis is somewhat for discussion purposes. Farmers make a profit, a farmer retiring can liquidate his assets by selling his land to a pension fund where in the olden days he 'needed a son', the lessee of the land usually wouldn't start farming there is there isn't a profit involved. The produce gets sold to a middle man and an end user, again for a profit. The company I work for is in finance (non-US) and has a pretty large investment in farmland, which we lease out up to very, very long contracts. As far as I can tell people are quite happy with our stewardship. We provide liquidity and give farmers the optionality to choose a different time horizon for their firm. We lease out lands for biological farming, sometimes have historical properties we maintain and lease out, do solar parks. It's like real estate but with a different time horizon. Re the 'long game' discussion for finance and machinisation. The firm has literally been doing this for a few centuries so this hasn't been the original goal. I don't think it's come up yet as a current goal, although in all honesty I can see the appeal from a finance perspective. The farmer is the middleman we can cut out and replace by machines. First thought then is - what does it matter what the background of the owner doing the machinisation is?
- quattrofan 6y agoAnd it's bad for everything, the environment, our health, the animals and many farmers. I'm sure you've read the Omnivores Dilemma?
- TheMightyLlama 6y agoData privacy is something that I think isn’t really covered here. Do the farming equipment companies share data? To be precise do the have the level of fidelity required to know information regarding the size of land when the equipment is in use as well as the toolset in the equipment? This might conceivably allow equipment companies to sell data to stock market companies who speculate on futures.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoYes. Data is the key. You can’t automate and employ AI without harvesting data. That’s one of the reasons all this is being consolidated. Farmers are too fragmented to act together to generate and provide data that Ag AI/ML needs. There is no need for privacy if the same companies that own and run Everything. This is what happened with Monsanto. First it was round up and other weedicides. Then they said we will sell you the seeds that is round up ready. And then they convince farmers what to grow and what inputs and fertilizers to buy. And then what to grow and how to much to grow per season. And soon the same investment funds will own the land too. https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/14150-consolidation-permeates-ag-industry https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/14150-consolidation-... : this sums it up. It’s a tad dated and more consolidation has happened since. [..] The five companies currently seeking to combine their business enterprises — Dow + Dupont, Bayer + Monsanto and Syngenta, which is to be acquired by ChemChina — together would hold a 78% stake in the ag chemicals segment of the industry. It could put them in a position to squeeze out the remaining competition.[..]
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoWow thanks for this info. What a shitty situation. Venture capitalists buying land to rent it back to farmers seems like the exact opposite of the kind of innovation we need. I work for a small farming automation company. I’m designing a solar powered weeding robot. when you say “small scale” farming what do you mean? Its still early for us but it feels like we need to target farms that are hundreds or thousands of acres to justify the engineering investment. That may still count as “small” compared to the real big stuff, but it leaves out the really passionate five and ten acre organic farms I’ve come across. My personal interest is in lowering the cost of healthy food production. Maybe we could talk more via email? taylor {at} twistedfields.com
- pas 6y agoA bit off-topic, but I'm very interested in gaining an insight into what do you think what kind of innovation we need, and why?
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoIt’s a good question! I’ll be honest - I’m a robotics engineer not a farmer. I’ve found that weeding is a good place to start according to the farmers I’ve spoken to. But the real innovations needed should come from a large group of users. That’s why I’m doing my best to ensure we can open source our machine. I’m inspired by the way open source 3D printers crowd sourced much of the innovation that got us where we are today (along with many dedicated companies which made their own improvements).
- jessaustin 6y agoHow could a robot keep more than a couple of acres weeded? Small amounts of acreage in real food would be more valuable to humans than vast tracts of frankenfood like Monsanto soybeans. There are already "at-scale" solutions for that crap: just spray it (and everything downwind!) with tons of noxious chemicals.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
- swiley 6y agoI feel like a lot of “technology” companies are like this: consolidation of production and locking people out rather than actually making things more efficient.
- MattGaiser 6y agoGenerally, those are the same. Manual labour does not scale well and is prone to error.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoBut there's a difference between selling a product that reduces manual labor, vs. selling a service that does the same - the latter being what usually locks people out.
- MattGaiser 6y ago> diff between food farming and commodity crop farming. What is the difference between these? Aren't crops generally commodities? I’m familiar with the subsistence farmer term of the crops they eat verses the crops they sell, but the farmers sell both here.
- tsimionescu 6y agoI'm guessing commodity crops in this context may refer to non-food crops, like corn for bio-ethanol, rapeseed, cotton, tobacco?
- derekbreden 6y agoThat was close to my guess, the only small difference is I would add some maybe-ends-up-in-food-eventually crops as well. My family would refer to the roundup ready corn and soybeans we sold to the grain co-op as commodities, while the small sub-acreage of sweet corn grown to sell at the farmer’s market might be much more likely to be referred to as food. Food being a perhaps overly generous word for partially hydrogenated soybean oil or high fructose corn syrup.
- dd36 6y agoSo, sprayed with more bug poison? I wonder if this disconnect becomes detrimental to the land.
- kasey_junk 6y agoBigger difference is the breed of plant. Commodity corn for instance is not something a human would eat normally without extreme processing. One way it becomes human good is as feed for animals and another is being processed into adjuncts. Sweet corn on the other hand is delicious to eat. I tend to think commodities vs food is if there is a mainline futures contract for it.
- saalweachter 6y agoCommodity agriculture is any agriculture where the products are sold into the commodity markets, basically -- corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, pork, beef, etc. Commodity agriculture is all about scale and price; there are certain quality standards that must be met (your corn must have a specific moisture content; your pigs must weigh in a certain range and be free of disease) but there is no real competition on the quality of the good produced. You assume all hard red wheat is fungible, and buy and sell it by the ton. Some products exist in both commodity and non-commodity markets -- you can produce pork for the commodity markets, or your can sell it door to door.
- lucb1e 6y agoWith formatting: """ 1. Climate Corp was part of Monsanto before it became Bayer. It was acquired by Monsanto. 2. John Deere wanted to buy Climate as well as Monsanto but that was struck down by US courts and Bayer bought Monsanto. 3. What was Climate Corp doing before? They had something called Field View where they charged farmers to collect and collate data. 4. All precision Ag, Ag robotics and farm data collections have two big industry ‘partners’: Wall Street and Farm input companies. 5. Now add farmland to Precision Ag/Ag robotics. 6. This is a kind of consolidation of land, inputs, data and machinery. 6. Eventually, all land will be owned by farm machinery companies and input companies. There won’t be any more farmers in the future but only farming corporations. 7. It goes back to Wall Street because big Ag is commodities. """ (Command to format, since this comes up regularly: sed 's/ \([0-9]\. \)/\n\n\1/g')
- aguyfromnb 6y ago>There won’t be any more farmers in the future but only farming corporations. Is this any different than, "pretty soon there won't be any local movie rental places (or retail places), it'll just be content delivery corporations"? I do share concerns about this kind of movement, and think it needs to be done judiciously, in every industry. However, I do not agree that just because you're "small" or "independent" you are inherently better or care more. There are pros and cons. People are people and don't become "evil" by working for larger firms. Silicon Valley seems to be very suspicious of corporate consolidation in every industry, but turns a blind eye as Facebook/Google/Amazon do it on a scale rarely ever seen.