Anything can change
Farms are changing as better machines are built and they too get on the technology bandwagon. Jobs that used to take 40 people all day long to do now only takes 10. It is bad for those 30 people but it is good for farms. The farms end up with better margins and are becoming more efficient.
I invested in a company called Full Harvest. The concept is smart as they help farms save money by bringing their excess surplus of food to market. That would be about 20 billion pounds of product that just goes to waste for multiple reasons. What Full Harvest is doing is a win win for everyone.
These concepts that I am seeing in this industry isn’t so much about technology as the majority of the start-ups in this area aren’t building machinery but it is about bringing new minds to an old business. A next generation is looking at the farming industry from down/up. How can we change the waste in the farms to be not only socially responsible but financially solvent.
I have always been a fan of hiring people with skill sets that can be applied to any vertical. It isn’t so much that they have spent years in a space but they understand what they don’t know which can change standard practices on its head. That is how I view Full Harvest.
I hope to see more companies like this coming in my pipeline that are really helping old businesses become new again.
Comments (Archived):
Bringing new minds to old businesses, where a fresh view is often better than ingrained expertise.Damn we are thinking alike on this!
Nice!
Great company with a great purpose! Do they have a NY presence or only West Coast?
West coast now
Very few investor outside of agribusiness concerns understand the development/ adoption cycle of agriculture. There’s a lot happening in this space and few investors ( except for draper, Fisher, Jurvetson) have valid contacts at ag schools.I grow avocados commercially and the most commercially viable improvements to my operations are suggestions from ag students/ grove interns.Jim Forbes (CalPoly ’73).
that confirms my theory.
A friend of mine in New Zealand is set to quit his job — actually, his career — at the end of the year to run a farm that he just bought full time. The fact that he can do this, live his dream, and still make good money is incredible. I’m so jealous.
I git my undergrad degrees at an ag college.I go back occasionally to refresh my roots and learn more about growing avocados than I know now.In my former life,I was a producer on two Demo shows and wrote all their newsletters. In retirement I chase a 50 year old dream, battle root destroying rodents and the coyotes that take naps on my roof. I also work on catching as much yellowfin tuna, albacore and halibut as i can. Not a bad life for a kid from Azusa, CA.
Yesssss. Agree with you. I saw today the govt is buying $20M dollars worth of excess cheese. Last year, the govt forced tart cherry farmers to dump $30M in tart cherries. I think change would happen much faster in farming if we ended price supports and all the govt intervention into the market. It is a relic of the 1930s, and was put in place by FDR for political not economic reasons.It is awfully hard to innovate in many areas of farming. If we got govt out of it-I truly think the price discrepancy between organic and factory farmed produce/protein would become a lot closer. Farmers would make different decisions about expansion and what crops to farm.Being a farmer is an awfully hard and risky job. There are both physical as well as financial risks. Most of the value of the business is in the land-and that’s taxed heavily upon death. Futures markets are there so farmers can get rid of risk. I traded hogs for a number of years, and understand the factory hog farm.If people think that farming is a true perfectly competitive marketplace, they need to come to the realization that it’s heavily influenced by government regulation and policy. Put a chart up of corn prices and oil prices and correlate them with ethanol policy and you will see what I mean.