Everything About Grain Bins (Farmers are Geniuses) - Smarter Every Day 218

There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work. Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9 month long harvest. Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output. And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money. Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0]. [0] ▶ this video

(absorbed by osmosis during my time at Zest, a JIT produce handling company) Harvest time is extremely hectic. There's a very small window to get months worth of produce picked, sorted, cooled, packed and shipped. Cooling is a major bottleneck, because capital for refrigeration is not unlimited. Likewise any delay can be a major issue- if a truck is slow to load, how do you know whether or not you need to re-cool your produce first? It's well known what temperatures produce does well at (can't be too hot or too cold without MAJORLY affecting end margins) because it's easy to test by setting a fridge to a given temperature. It's much harder to know, for a given type of produce, how fast it will cool or heat, and how long you need to spend doing that. It's not as simple as sticking a thermometer in it, which will create paths for heat to move into and out of the produce. Even then you still don't know what the heat distribution inside the produce is so you can optimize the temperature over as much of the plant as possible. It's really quite tricky and stuff like this helps farmers a lot . IMO farmers do more actual number math more than almost any other occupation (ex: [1]). Much of it is rules of thumb and guesstimation, but they still are constantly balancing dozens of figures to make choices every day. They're always doing mental calculations in economics, biology and physics. Even if the job wasn't so physically and technically taxing, I would respect the hell out of them j

SmarterEveryDay has glowing accolades for farmers [1]. Similarly, the highly-constrained Cubans are notorious matter hackers [2]. My grandfather, and Italian peasant, had the same MacGuyverish attitude towards making stuff keep running long past the point most Americans would have chucked it. I think all software devs should spend some time on a farm. Great for inspiring simple yet clever "shipped is better than perfect" style solutions. Manual labor is also great for Sitatdeskitis. 1] ▶ this video 2] link

That made some faint sense when he said it, though even that is easy to overestimate as many tasks of the day required more skill than Marx probably appreciated, but is gibbering lunacy if you want a 21st century technological society. Only a few people are honest enough to say they want socialism and would be perfectly happy to live an 18th century life to have it. Example: You could just pick up and be a farmer tomorrow, right? ▶ this video Certainly not at a 21st century farmer level. (Consider your criticisms of that idea carefully, for instance "yeah but those practices aren't sustainable" will just get you "sustainable practices are going to be just as challenging or even more so" in reply, along with the fact it's not really a relevant point; M(r/s). I Decided To Be A Farmer This Week isn't going to come up with breakthrough solutions in sustainability, either, as they will be far too busy.)