TL;DR

In anticipation of the first frost tonight, we harvested the last of the peppers as well as eggplant, basil and lettuce for Saturday farmer’s market. I also thought a lot about how next year will be different, personally and professionally.

Scurry, Little Humans

If you really think about the absolute power nature has over the human race, it’s astounding that we’ve survived this long as a species. Meteors, earthquakes, fires, flooding, draughts, freezes…none of these things are under our control or immediately predictable. In my home, we use the term ‘natural consequences’ when a kid does something that has directly correlating outcomes to the behavior or decisions that we make, but that’s not really how nature works. As societies, we pretend that there’s causality far more often and in unrelated circumstances than there really is. Just have a conversation with anyone not trained in statistics about economics, politics, religion or science to find out how often we’re wrong.

On the other hand, there are some practices like meteorology that can predict to a high certainty the likelihood of certain events occurring, such as an early frost warning on farmer’s mobile phones. This kind of thing is not to be ignored without consequences where heeding the warning can save crops, revenue, and time. So we harvested what is likely the last of the peppers this year today, even donating much of them to a local charity food distribution organization called Nourishing the North Shore.

Food insecurity is a real concern for many people, even north of Boston…a consequence of broken food and economic systems in the modern world. Inequality and access disparity exists in the United States but is also a global challenge as well. It’s a wonder that our species, as adept at survival, has chosen to build this kind of world, one where people starve while others throw away upwards of 40 percent of their food supply and block humanitarian shipments to relief efforts.

The fact is that whether you like to admit it or not, you’re either contributing to the solution or to the problem. Paying taxes that get literally (not figuratively) wasted on food is not as ultimate an insult to Americans as it is to those who go hungry every day because elected policy-makers can’t agree that intentional starvation is a crime. In my journey through life, there’s only one type of entity that delights in the suffering of people and that is a malevolent god. Nations with leaders who think of themselves as gods must then be held accountable for the malevolent state of the modern world they create.

So while I picked many pecks of peppers today because that’s what nature’s system said we must do, I thought of how many ways the next wave of agricultural businesses and operators can act in sedition against these regimes through economic independence of choice, philanthropic giving, and local initiatives. In my mind, the closest version of a sustainable business community model that does this is through co-ops. Because the IRS (a government agency easily swayed by political administrations) grants tax exemption status, ‘non-profit’ can’t be relied on as a sustainable way to accomplish independence. Similarly, donations of money can’t be driven by personal desire for tax write-offs…they must be non-monetary and hard to quantify. Local ‘natural consequences’ should be driven by locals acting together for the common good, so relying on government subsidies and exemptions can’t be a significant part of any business solution.

As I scurried like a little human on the face of the earth, I schemed. In short, I thought of how co-op models can be used to create a more sustainable and equitable food system, one that puts power in the hands of growers and their communities instead of in the pockets of corporations and governments.

A New Trajectory, not a Tragedy

My prior career in technology exposed me to how warped and twisted the world can be when people are driven by greed and power. Though I was making good money, I wasn’t feeling good about the work much of the time. The trajectory of a career like that leads to unhealthy sadness. This would have been a real tragedy if I had not found a new path. And this is not to say that I won’t every work in tech again, just definitely not the way I did before.

This past year, getting plenty of exercise and new learning on the farm has been a refreshing change of pace. The work is physically demanding, but it’s also rewarding to see the fruits of our labor. The team that Jamie has built is truly something special, despite farming getting increasingly more difficult nationally.

I don’t know what my future will hold, but that doesn’t stop me from having a clear trajectory. A few tenets of my future work are:

• Continue to listen to my conscience and follow my ethical code
• Stop wasting time on fruitless, one-sided relationships just because I’m ‘nice’
• Invest more in my community, my education, and family
• Continually update my best, worst, and median career scenarios

One commitment that will act as evidence of the above is to share my course work on the Farm Business Planning course I’m taking using subsequent posts on this blog. If I want to talk about an ideal model for a co-op, I can start by demonstrating rigor and egalitarian principles such as sharing information wealth and vision.

AI Summary from Field Notes

I may get to the RAG prototype this weekend, but tomorrow on my day off I will most certainly be looking to add observability to my LLMBO service in a few ways:

1. Totals metrics (time-taken per long-running process, resource usage, etc.)
2. Traces across multi-step processes and subprocesses
3. Specific telemetry for early-warning on things like LLM over-thinking loops

Today’s summary only had one occurrence of ‘Wait, …’ but all the other blog posts have some better examples that I can re-run to try to elicit the over-thinking telemetry. For now, it’s another AI summary as usual:

Summary