In his blog post Are we ready for post-modern farming? Jon Miller outlines the work of Cornell faculty member Rebecca Nelson, and her efforts in understanding and helping realize the promise of agroecology – an approach to farming that looks for and capitalizes on synergies and complementarities among crops, trees, livestock, birds, insects, microbes, soil, water and people. It talks about a dramatic shift agriculture is undergoing as it transitions from an era based on cheap fossil fuel intensive inputs, designed for “optimized simplicity” (externalizing many costs), to a multi-functional agriculture based on cheap information intensive inputs, designed for “optimized complexity” where a more full accounting of costs and impacts occurs. Mutually beneficial relationships supported by dynamic and timely communication feedback loops lie at the heart of this approach.
This "Meta Problem Statement" is being submitted to help generate and connect a series of more more discrete problem statements, tools and services which focus on particular aspects/challenges of this work optimizing complexity, including those needed to create, store, share and re-purpose raw data and actionable information. A growing number of existing and proposed tools are already appearing within the Farm Hack community that potentially address various aspects of this challenge. As Farm Hack itself evolves, the hope is these and other problem statement will be linked with larger collective goals/challenges like this one, encouraging ongoing social innovation and collaboration.
Realizing this goal of optimized complexity will likely require a number of new organizational, cultural and technical entities and roles to facilitate this transition. Farm Hack is an excellent example. The Northeast Food Knowledge Ecosystem is a collaborative initiative grounding these ideas and the necessary work within a regional context. And the Farmer Dashboard is one example of a proposed tool supporting these goals. Hopefully over time many other initiatives and tools will emerge and be linked to this and related Problem Statements, with new Farm Hack tools developed to navigate and map those connections as needed. Please add you suggestions/comments below!
Cheers, Jeff Piestrak