TL;DR

We harvested tomatoes, eggplants, bok choy, squash, cucumbers, and sunflowers today. It was perfect farming weather, 65°F with breezes and no bugs. I also had time to reflect on the importance of social interaction in farming, both external and internal to the farm.

In my blogging tech work, I added a few new processes to further automate detection of missing media files (photos at least) and the need for a PR (pull request) to be created once the media tags and human writing are applied to the blog post.

Harvesting So Many Tomatoes

Today, we harvested many things, but especially the four tomato field rows and in the new greenhouse. In total this resulted in 15 trays of tomatoes, where when on average there are anywhere from 20-25 slicer tomatoes per tray, this means we harvested between 275-325 big tomatoes today and a few full trays of cherry varieties. In total, it took about four of us 2 hours to complete this work.

This is what it looks like from the field (video), maybe if you were a bee living the good life:

While We Work, We Listen and Talk

To pass the time while we work, we talk. We share stories, jokes, music, TV and movie recommendations, recipes, and tips about farming. We listen to each other’s perspectives and ideas. We learn from each other and grow together. New team member compatibility can also be assessed and improved through these interactions. It’s only natural for us to do this, and it’s a key part of what makes farming a rewarding and fulfilling experience.

In aggregate, these micro-interactions build trust and understanding between farm staff which is essential for effective teamwork. They also help to create a positive and supportive work environment which leads to increased job satisfaction and retention…when done well. Sometimes there’s too much talk hinging on cultural or generational references which can be difficult for some people to understand or relate to, but it’s all part of us learning from each other.

We often also share lunch together, which is a great way to bond and build relationships with our coworkers. There are many times where a special snack or dessert is brought by someone which is also a great way to show appreciation to and for each other

Social Interactions of Small Farms

Every farm makes it’s own unique decisions about its business model, its goals and targets, how it complies to regulatory standards, and how it interacts with it’s community and customers. Some of these factors are more under the control of the farmer, while others are more influenced by external factors such as market demand, government regulations, and consumer preferences.

While all this sounds very kumbaya, camaraderie developed in the field is visible to customers. How the farm staff interact with each other and the community is a key factor in the farm’s success. What’s inside a person often determines what comes up outside by default. It’s important to be aware of what is ‘internal’ vs. what is ‘external’ to a small farm’s operations.

This paradigm of ‘internal vs. external’, when combined with the lens of ‘unidirectional vs. bidirectional’ communication, can help us visually map out communication activities involved in farming. If we take a moment to quadrant these dynamics out, it might look like the following:

To be clear, this is just a sketch of an idea based on my limited but growing experience in farming and it’s business modeling. I’m open to feedback and suggestions on how to improve it, especially references to prior works that I might not be aware of.

Every Farm Is Social

Though my experiences in farming are limited, I listen to a wide variety of podcasts and audible sources while driving and working on the farm. My internship focus is small, independent organic farm operations but these other sources help me round out my understanding of the industry.

One podcast I’ve recently been enjoying the learnings from is Singular Agronomics because it’s non-militant and yet educational approach to sharing the whole story on particular practices via guest speakers, farmers, and industry researchers. Without socializing this information, I wouldn’t otherwise have learned about many of these deeper soil health topics. The way I see it, diversity in personal research, just like diversity in soil biology, is vital to developing my understanding of farming in a well-rounded manner.

Every farm can’t devote a lot of time to publishing videos and articles, but they can still share their knowledge and experiences with their community. By sharing their knowledge, farmers can help others learn and grow, and in turn, help themselves grow as well.

How Tech and AI Could Encourage Social Interaction

What I often see is that when people do their work, they leave even greater opportunity for group collaboration and creative thinking on the table by not capturing, refining, and sharing the details they encounter in their daily activities. There is a lot of opportunity for innovation and growth in this space, but only if it is radically easy to do these things in a way that doesn’t add (much) overhead to the work itself.

About 10 years ago, I was introduced to a publication called “The Creative Thinker’s Toolkit” by Gerard Puccio which helped me understand that creativity is a process as much as if not more than an innate skill certain people posses. It also catalyzed my hunch that social interactions lead to better and more creative outcomes, something that came in handy in my career as a director of incubation engineering. This backdrop of creativity is perpetually in my mind while I work on the farm and especially so with the recent explosion of technological advancements driven by the AI craze.

Recently, I watched a video featuring Po-Shen Loh about his research at Carnegie Mellon University around social entrepreneurship via elementary and high school students.

Similarly, I feel that many of the internal social interactions on farms can be an incubator for micro-innovations but also the next generations of agricultural leaders. I know that farm work isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it teaches people that seemingly insurmountable piles of work and projects can be accomplished through collaboration and perseverance.

Having individual experiences and developing personal work ethic is the first step, but sharing it in real-time along the way can be a challenge. It takes time to observe, reflect, converse, refine, and put into practice profound knowledge. So while it takes time to do this human learning, much of the busy work about the real-time capture and then rapid synthesis of the information can be automated.

While working around the farm, it should become natural to say what you are doing and what you observe into something like a smart watch or voice assistant on a mobile device. Of course, as others on the team might also be doing this, a way to aggregate and share this information in real-time would be a great addition to the farm’s communication and collaboration tools. This is, I think, a worthwhile area of investigation and prototyping for me over the next year.

Living in My Own Glass Apparatus

AI Summary from Field Notes