15/04/2019
I have titled this post "Crowd Farming" because I feel this may be a better way of describing a collective effort of producing food without carrying the negative connotations of "co-operative". I also think that it inherently speaks about leveraging currently available technology to create the necessary economies of scale.
Although I am a big fan of tech and what's going on with etc I am of the belief that we (the proverbial) are not necessarily looking at how to apply to solve the fundamental issues e.g. , etc. The dialogue around Smart Cities is one that is premised on and how current infrastructure and services need to improve to accommodate rapidly increasing populations in our major urban centers. There is very little to no debate on how we should curb the problem of urbanisation at its core by tech enabling people to thrive in rural settings and making farming "sexy" again so that we can prevent the youth from leaving the farm land in the first place. The same goes for all the amazing precision farming developments in the Agri space with self drive tractors, drone seed planting, smart centre pivots etc but this is primarily in aid of improving the yield of unsustainable crops. We need to address the issues at a more fundamental level and I believe a "Long Tail" approach to will help do this.
Let's call the current dominant focus a focus on the "short head" which I will explain below. I believe that there are diminishing returns and incremental at best improvements when investing in the short head vs massive scope for growth and meaningful improvement opportunities by investing in the long tail. The long tail is just a smarter space to invest and deploy technology in. The essence of the concept is that as much food gets produced collectively by small scale producers as the short head of of high volume mono-culture producers and we should pay as much attention to the former as we do to the latter if we are going to feed the ever-growing population.
I have to credit Dustin Bajer for the below image and this well articulated article on the concept of Long Tail Food production where he does a great job of making the concept understandable and from which my loose ideas of long tail farming (decentralised farming) have solidified.
The most common and long standing argument against investing in the Long Tail has been one of scale. How do you aggregate produce, ensure quality and scale the operations to meet global food needs at any meaningful level? I believe that technology has reached the necessary tipping point to allow us to answer the question. If can completely cut out the middleman and with complete trust allow me to rent out my space to a complete stranger I may never meet, then surely we can connect producers (no matter how small) to consumers (even directly) while creating the necessary transparency, traceability and trust.
This is not just a technology discussion though and I think innovative business and farming models need to play an equally important role in securing our food production. My "Tiny Farms on a large scale" Big Inja Farming concept will hopefully be a model for how we can produce hyper local food with minimum inputs and waste while collectively farming to reach scale and overcome many of the Big Farm challenges.
