One side of my family comes from a farming background, and I've been around working farms half my life, the impoverished near-subsistence type.
This product wouldn't be all that useful. The hard part of running a farm is knowing the local growing conditions, crops which work in these conditions, and then, the harrowing amount of work involved in getting the thing productive.
Drip irrigation is cool once set up, but it's not durable and you need to replace it frequently as it gets damaged, breaks down due to weather, some animal chews it, whatever. Their solar driven pump is indeed a labor saving device, but it's a low power low volume pump useful for drip irrigation. I can guarantee you that nobody's going to be supplying affordable drip irrigation gear in a poor area. However, given a well, a powerful irrigation pump would be a huge help, particularly if it can move enough volume to fill traditional irrigation ditches for the times drip tubing is unattainable.
The IoT metrics stuff isn't very useful. The sort of person who farms in the places targeted by this isn't very tech savvy, and what's more important than temperature and water delivery statistics is walking the field and inspecting for weeds and pests.
The shipping container could make a usable shed, but so would a traditional shed, usually made from scrounged, cheap, local materials.
If you want to help poor farmers, I would suggest the following
- A powerful irrigation pump, after helping to drill a well, solar driven is cool.
- A small ride-on type tractor built to be dead simple to fix and reliable with plowing, seeding, and harvesting attachments. This is the major work of running a farm. Bonus points if this thing doesn't require gasoline, but that would be prohibitively expensive in terms of solar and batteries, since duty cycle would be very high.
- Some kind of good, watertight and pest resistant grain storage containers, enough to store a few tons.
- A bunch of lessons in the local language teaching people how to maximize food production from minimal resources in a given part of the world. What crops, how to plant, weed, and harvest them, how to store the harvest.
- A bunch of fertilizer and pesticide. This will run out one day, so perhaps lessons on how to farm without it, but that drops production to like 1/4 of what's possible for a given unit of land. Modern high density farming requires a permanent supply of modern chemicals.
Now, A farm in a box is a cool idea, and the market may be affluent hobbyists, but this won't fix food shortage problems because the gear in it isn't particularly useful to a small farm, but also because food shortage problems are primarily political.
This product wouldn't be all that useful. The hard part of running a farm is knowing the local growing conditions, crops which work in these conditions, and then, the harrowing amount of work involved in getting the thing productive.
Drip irrigation is cool once set up, but it's not durable and you need to replace it frequently as it gets damaged, breaks down due to weather, some animal chews it, whatever. Their solar driven pump is indeed a labor saving device, but it's a low power low volume pump useful for drip irrigation. I can guarantee you that nobody's going to be supplying affordable drip irrigation gear in a poor area. However, given a well, a powerful irrigation pump would be a huge help, particularly if it can move enough volume to fill traditional irrigation ditches for the times drip tubing is unattainable.
The IoT metrics stuff isn't very useful. The sort of person who farms in the places targeted by this isn't very tech savvy, and what's more important than temperature and water delivery statistics is walking the field and inspecting for weeds and pests.
The shipping container could make a usable shed, but so would a traditional shed, usually made from scrounged, cheap, local materials.
If you want to help poor farmers, I would suggest the following - A powerful irrigation pump, after helping to drill a well, solar driven is cool. - A small ride-on type tractor built to be dead simple to fix and reliable with plowing, seeding, and harvesting attachments. This is the major work of running a farm. Bonus points if this thing doesn't require gasoline, but that would be prohibitively expensive in terms of solar and batteries, since duty cycle would be very high. - Some kind of good, watertight and pest resistant grain storage containers, enough to store a few tons. - A bunch of lessons in the local language teaching people how to maximize food production from minimal resources in a given part of the world. What crops, how to plant, weed, and harvest them, how to store the harvest. - A bunch of fertilizer and pesticide. This will run out one day, so perhaps lessons on how to farm without it, but that drops production to like 1/4 of what's possible for a given unit of land. Modern high density farming requires a permanent supply of modern chemicals.
Now, A farm in a box is a cool idea, and the market may be affluent hobbyists, but this won't fix food shortage problems because the gear in it isn't particularly useful to a small farm, but also because food shortage problems are primarily political.