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I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and this post definitely gives me some motivation. I'm a programmer who loves to code and build stuff, learning new
by iagooar 11y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and this post definitely gives me some motivation.
I'm a programmer who loves to code and build stuff, learning new programming languages and frameworks, discussing about architecture, etc. I love shipping new features and making customers happy.
BUT inside of me a desire has been growing to go back to the roots, to live a life closer to the nature. I feel the need to spend more time outside, with less time pressure.
I've been thinking about this idea to build something like a "tech-farmer colony". Maybe it's been done in the past, never heard of it, but it would be a group of engineers and their families, living together and working part-time as software / hardware engineers, and part time as farmers, with flexible division of tasks. Maybe the software / hardware company could even work on projects closely related to farming, in order to improve productivity / efficiency / cut costs / promote ecologic food, etc.
I'd be curious to see if there are more people in the tech industry who would love to do something like this. I'd love to read some interesting ideas / critique.
- j-b 11y agoI'm in. Actually, it's a long term goal for me and my family to move to a farm and escape the cubicle/office environment. The article resonates deeply with me. Until then, weekend camping trips, nature hikes and tending to our small flock of chickens in the suburbs will have to suffice.
- snikeris 11y agoI would be interested in something like this as well.
- tsunamifury 11y agoYou may have to accept a world where you need other people besides engineers.
- dasmoth 11y agoWorld, maybe. But in terms of building a somewhat-self-sufficient community -- which seems to be what's being suggested here -- why wouldn't all-engineers work?
- tsunamifury 11y agoLand management, cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, teaching, schooling, animal husbandry, community health, repairs, safety, upkeep, music/arts/entertainment, policy... the list goes on And while many engineers seem to believe they can do anything with applied knowledge -- practice and execution are two very different things.
- iagooar 11y agoIt doesn't have to be 100% self-sufficient, that's not what I meant. I was thinking more about a community of families living around the same farm and company.
- yellowapple 11y ago> Land management You mean "civil engineering" > cooking You mean "culinary engineering" > cleaning You mean "sanitary engineering" > teaching You mean "educational engineering" > schooling You mean "educational engineering" > animal husbandry You mean "agricultural engineering" > community health You mean "medical engineering" or "civil engineering" > repairs You mean "engineering" > safety You mean "engineering" > upkeep You mean "engineering" > music/arts/entertainment You mean "acoustic/visual/recreational engineering" > policy You mean "political engineering" > the list goes on And the list will still be refactored into engineering fields (some of which I may or may not have extracted from my rectum in an ad hoc fashion). Engineering really just boils down to using the scientific method, mathematics, and ingenuity to solve problems. Pretty much every activity you described could very easily have an engineering mindset applied to it.
- iagooar 11y agoI wasn't thinking about excluding non-tech people (my girlfriend has no tech background). I was just thinking about building a company with like-minded people with some technical skills and experience, while living together and working on a farm, including the families which may or may not have a technical background. Sure there might be a need for marketing or sales people as well, but that's a bit too detailed for now, considering it is nothing more than an idea yet ;)
- tsunamifury 11y agoApologies -- just was bein' a bit snark about the engineering master race.
- javajosh 11y agoYup, similar thought for me as well. A kind of high-tech commune/company (perhaps a consultancy) where people work and live together in a healthy community in a beautiful place. Of course a key factor to me would be daily meditation group-sitting. Peer pressure really helps with that one, and meditation done properly is the best happiness/productivity tincture you can get, for any price.
- snikeris 11y agoI would sit with you.
- ccallebs 11y agoI'm in. Not at all joking / exaggerating. My wife and I would love something like this. We are currently looking to switch cities with no specific desire for one place so the iron is hot. I'd not limit it to engineers though -- just makers in general.
- ccallebs 11y agoThere seems to be enough interest in this to actually start talking seriously about it. I created a Slack account for it. https://farmcombinator.slack.com/ https://farmcombinator.slack.com/ You'll need an invite, so if you're interested in this sort of thing seek me out on Twitter (@ccallebs) or send me your email (chuck@callebs.io).
- dudifordMann 11y agoThat sounds amazing. Lately I've been picking up hobbies, like wood working or building more hardware centered projects because day-to-day I design and produce software, which itself is intangible. My girlfriend is from upstate New York, and her father is a farmer. It's backbreaking work to run a farm if you're mostly by yourself, hiring farm hands when necessary, and when ROI is sufficient. Yet, at the same time, the "Mega farms" of corporations tend to use a lot of hands BUT also inappropriate a lot of tech. There seems to be a middle ground where, like you mentioned, a tech+farm group could be formed either members own their own small plots, or own one together. The burden of tech costs could be spread amongst the members, but the tech can be incorporated to satisfy the intellectual engineering approach to things, as well as the "close to nature" manual labor wants. I feel like I'm rambling... Anyway, this is sounding very much like a hippy commune, but I am not sure if that bothers me at this point.
- mturmon 11y agoIf you have a connection to upstate NY, and are interested in this stuff, you might want to visit the Ithaca EcoVillage: http://ecovillageithaca.org/live/ http://ecovillageithaca.org/live/
- bra-ket 11y agoor visit Israeli Kibutz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
- jroseattle 11y ago> I've been thinking about this idea to build something like a "tech-farmer colony". Now that is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time. Knowing how farms work, I could find a ton of ways for this to be difficult, but we're engineers -- let's solve hard problems. :-)
- ctb_mg 11y agoIt would be interesting to subsidize your tech R&D (and therefore your food output) by using a CSA-style subscription service. You don't have to only self-sustain. You could produce quality food for the local community using technology.
- iagooar 11y agoThanks for this information. Looks like CSA is a lot more common in North America than in Europe, but I guess there are similar solutions worldwide.
- pjc50 11y agoThis is essentially the hippy commune / kibbutz concept, with the wrinkle of generating most of its "foreign exchange" through tech work rather than pure agricultural produce. With a bit of careful tax planning you could offset all the fun unproductive stuff against tax and claim both R&D and small farmer allowances. Division of tasks is where this kind of thing tends to fall down.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago> hippy commune / kibbutz concept It's been tried over-and-over-and-over for centuries and there's a ton of research. If it's not based on a religion, it fails, is the long and short of it. Only works with religious people.
- crpatino 11y agoIt is interesting to speculate why is it that religious groups fare better in this kind of arrangements. I think it has to do with 2 things: The ability to shame individuals into compliance without resorting to violence, and the ability to shut off free-loaders. That's the problem with intentional communities. Everybody (claim to) have the best intentions, until push comes to shove and you have to actually put your self interest on hold for the greater good of the community.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y agoThey do a good job avoiding freeloaders in the first place with rules like, for examples, You have to be circumcised and we meet daily for prayers. Gaming the welfare system is one thing, but surgery and dozens of hours a week of time would be a bit much for a mooch.
- sliverstorm 11y agoI would focus on one even-simpler thing: Power structure. Religion usually has a built-in power structure that nothing else has been able to replicate.
- mikeg8 11y agolooks like you are getting some positive feedback with this idea! If it pushes you to act on it, please let me know. I'd love to participate in something like this.
- stickfigure 11y agoI'm actually working on something like this, although minus the hippie aspect. The biggest hurdle (at least here in California) is zoning. Every county in California restricts ag-zoned land to (at most) two dwelling units, where "dwelling unit" is typically defined by having a kitchen. There are some ways to work around this, especially if you're willing to go the "tinyhouses on wheels" route, but you get into grey zones pretty quickly. I wrote some more in an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437392
- iagooar 11y agoI don't think that it has to be hippie at all. There would be some shared areas, but people would live at their own homes. The company and the farm would be shared, but that's the idea. Guess that the whole twist would be to not only depend on agriculture for providing income and food. Also, I wouldn't make it about living isolated from society, without electricity, cars or mobile phones. It would be a much more relaxed, simple life, but every individual or family would put their own limits, respecting their comfort zones. And yes, there would be life in community, maybe sharing some meals or having kids play together, but as I said at the beginning, families would have their own houses or appartments, so they could also here decide how far they want to go. The cool thing would be having lots of like-minded people (= engineers) living and working close together, which could develop into some nice side projects and ideas.
- randomdata 11y agoDigital Hutterites. If you haven't already, you should look into how they (the Hutterites) structure their communities. It seems like there are a lot of parallels with what you are thinking, religious aspects aside.
- secabeen 11y agoGenerally, this is called cohousing, and has had some success over the years.
- mikeg8 11y agoCurious, which part of CA?
- s73v3r 11y agoI thought it might be cool to do something like that by buying up a bunch of foreclosed land in Detroit.
- chrismarlow9 11y agoI'm in
- yellowapple 11y agoCount me in. For a specific location recommendation, there are quite a few existing agriculturally-oriented towns that are pushing hard to get a tech scene going. Of particular note (and one in my neck of the woods - figuratively and literally) is Loyalton, CA, USA, which has been pushing for a "tech-and-rec" environment (which sounds a lot like what you're describing, though with the "farming" component replaced with general outdoor recreation), and has been working on wireless hotspots and fiber connections to that effect in order to lure techies into the town.
- iagooar 11y agoI'm pretty sure that finding the right place could have a huge impact on the success of this project. Maybe even having a group of 10-20 "tech" families willing to relocate to a small town could have enough power to negotiate with local government. Thanks for the info!
- joshmarlow 11y agoVery interesting! Not something I can be involved with right now, but it resonates with a couple of ideas I've kicked around. Maybe they'll be useful? 1) what about (possibly automated) vertical farming? It sounds like there's a fair amount of research/discussion of that right now and could be a neat blend of technology/nature. I'd love to see open sourced versions of this technology; possibly with toolkits for anyone to setup on their own. Also, might in the long run give you higher ROI for given land/water resources. 2) I've often thought of setting up some kind of ranch where fellow developers could go for a bit when feeling burnt out; you join for free (or maybe a fee) for a month or so and grow your own food (or else grow food for the next wave of burnouts and eat that grown by the previous wave). Getting back to nature and doing some strenuous work could be a great way to get back in your normal groove, or to see if this is the life for you.
- iagooar 11y ago1) Vertical farming sounds great. It could help getting started a farm where land is expensive. I love the open sourcing idea. 2) I love this idea! It could be a way of providing additional income for the farm. Classic farms often offer vacations for families and kids, I guess this would be a similar idea, but for engineers.
- joshmarlow 11y agoWhile super cool, the vertical farming idea may take more up-front capital and effort. Maybe a phased approach: start with traditional farming subsidized by 2) and build up funds and resources to eventually setup 1)? Anyone can work on the vertical farming ideas while they are there with the agreement that it's part of the project to released under Creative Commons (or similar license).
- yellowapple 11y agoIf we go with the idea some other commenter proposed of buying up a bunch of foreclosed properties in Detroit, at least some of that initial up-front capital and effort would be offset. You'd then just need to turn some abandoned factory or warehouse into a makeshift greenhouse.
- beambot 11y agoYou might consider volunteering for Open Source Ecology: http://opensourceecology.org/ http://opensourceecology.org/ They're building open source farming tools -- or as they say, "blueprints for civilization". Perhaps they're open to volunteers? Their TED talk is worth watching: http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski?language=en
- iagooar 11y agoThanks for sharing, I knew that posting to HN would make some amazing projects pop up :)
- jalcazar 11y agoSo interesting! I would love to do something like this
- logfromblammo 11y agoFirst off, there has to be a clear division of responsibilities. If you don't want to be the "chickens guy", there has to be some way to incentivize and cleanly hand off all the chickens chores. If everyone is responsible, no one is. The first thing that comes to my mind is a ticketing system with a time-dependent bounty attached. The chickens investors establish the chicken requirements, such as "ensure that all chickens are inside the coop and secure it against predators before civil twilight". That ticket repeats daily, with a bounty rising until the deadline, at which time the bounty freezes at the maximum, and the nag program starts messaging people to go do the task before a raccoon shows up. When you do the task, you press a button, which attaches a timestamped photo of you to the ticket log, which is freely auditable by the stakeholders. The mobile farm app is continuously updated with outstanding chore tickets. The investors pay the bounties, so it would behoove them to more often do the chores attached to the farm products for which they are larger stakeholders. If someone would prefer to skip a chore to bring in some outside income, they will essentially be paying someone else out of that to pick up the farm slack. If everyone winds up doing that, there might be professional farmhands available as the fallback, so the bounties would have to reflect what it actually costs a farming professional to do the tasks. I am a software worker because I am an essentially lazy person, so if I were involved, it is very likely that I would invest heavily in a perennial polyculture plot, and spend much of my time researching robotic harvester designs and preservation methods for uncommon fruits and vegetables. For instance, how do you get a pawpaw off the tree and to the customer before it rots? How many walnut trees can you use in your canopy before you start shading out your persimmons? How cold can a trifolate orange tree get before you lose the fruit? Would people eat linden leaf salads? How do I encourage permanently resident pollinators? The only people seriously looking at these questions, if anyone, would be Ag-Sci professors and their grad students. And their research might not necessarily have practical utility when it comes to making a profit as a part-time farmer. And, of course, it goes without saying that we would have to jailbreak the Deere and come up with some open source firmware.