I used to follow a blog of two people, he English and she from somewhere in Wisconsin, who met on an IRC channel I used to frequent and who eventually met up in real life, fell in love, and ran away into the world together.

I kinda fell out of touch with that channel and with the two people involved (lost the bookmark for the blog in a HDD failure years ago) but the last update I remember reading was about how they'd settled down (perhaps only temporarily) on some kind of hacker/robo farm in Germany. They had an old farmhouse and a gps-enabled tractor and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Anyways my point is that I think taking joy or pleasure in working the land and/or being close to nature is nearly universal and I think probably deeply ingrained in the human psyche.

My hobby garden is not as high tech as some but I have some RasPis and Beaglebones that alert me via push notifications when e.g. my basil needs watering, so I get to flex that muscle too. I have no desire to be a farmer as a career but I have my garden with herbs and tomatoes and beans and stuff, and I really enjoy watching things grow. Plus you get to savour the literal fruits of your labor.

As part of my job I keep close tabs on all alternative ways of farming. I have yet to find a model that is profitable and scalable.

A lot of profitable "farms" make money by selling their ideal to other wannabe farmers. Courses, books, influencer schemes, you name it.

Or they sell their produce to rich, idealistic people, who can afford to pay 10x the price of regular produce.

Or they are truly innovative, but make money by selling their technology.

None of this is scalable or capable of replacing the system we have right now.

Even vertical farms, with all venture capital that has flown into it, are basically incapable of competing with age old greenhouses.

I don’t think the goal of this farm is to produce a lot of food or make money (the article talks about this), and so measuring it by those metrics is a bit misguided.

Is an open source project a failure because it never makes a dime? Of course not. The goal isn’t to get rich or solve all the world’s problems. The goal of this farm is to give a few outcast people a place they can be happy. There are many interesting problems surrounding feeding the world, but nobody here is claiming to be trying to solve them - which is fine!

Current farming is strictly exploitative, it consumes tons of limited resources such as oil or quality topsoil - of course something more sustainable and responsible won't be able to compete with it. Perhaps in a couple of decades these resources will become more scarce (and thus more expensive) and alternative approaches will be closer to economic viability.

>I have yet to find a model that is profitable and scalable.

Too bad, because commercial farms are shitty in almost every way.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is there a tutorial out there on how to that. I have some spare raspi's lying around, and I would love to do this.