I learned about permaculture from books in my native language (eg Louis De jager from food forest institute in Belgium). I'm no expert though. I did find docu like "The Biggest Little Farm" very inspirational.
My parents had a highly computerized feeding system on our farm. In the summers I worked student jobs in highly technological green houses picking tomatoes and pig slaughter houses besides the work on the farm. I've grown some form of scepticism from experience of the high degree of automation in food production systems from a consumer or operator side. Do mind I work in automation but it needs to bring more value than just playing with toys. Permaculture systems are designed to reduce or optimize usage of all resources also labor. You set up an ecosystem where pests are kept under controle by other organisms instead of relying chemical or mechanical controls. This is even more puritanical than classic organic farming where you rely on natural pesticides. I am from Belgium where we have the belgium blue white cow which is very highly yielding in meat because of a genetic mutation but you are very dependent on vets for giving birth via caesarians because of the high degree of muscularity. There is a trend towards other races like limousin for meat production. In biological systems theory of constraint applies very much were you are very dependent on limiting factors like micronutrients, vitamins or in this case microchips. Humans and hamsters are both the only animals that can't produce vitamin C which makes fresh fruit a limiting factor for us or we get scurvy. The reliance on natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer via the born haber proces is already a handicap in a polarizing world. Imagine being reliant for operation of your food production system on a geopolitical hotbed like Taiwanese computerchips. I do think technology can also help with the design of robust food systems. I know the food forest institute in Belgium has a course on using drones for surveyance.
Well this does go back to traditional high yield techniques like terra preta which besides making superfertile soil has the added benefit of being a carbon capture and soil preservation solution or the three sisters system where you get yields from three crops on one field and even get nitrogen capture from legumes. What does high yield mean in the short term when you are destroying your most valuable resource. Even if you have high yield one dimension, how efficient is this when you have multiple inputs and outputs and you end up in a pareto efficient situation. The highest yielding farms do not necessarily have the best scale efficiency. Permaculture and food forest systems can have very high yields if designed correctly. California is losing thousands of acres of land to salinization because of bad irrigation practices. Permaculture means to improve and protect to soil and increase water retention with the help of carbon content in the soil. I'm not from the US so I would'nt know about Indiana.
Nice project indeed, been following it for some time. I grew up on a farm, have agricultural and IT degrees and also worked in automation in farming, factories, cities and warehouses.
This project focusses on a technological solution to societal, economical and agronomical problems. You could try to make a cheap robot that does traditional farming like tillage, fertilizer and pesticide spraying, irrigation on a monoculture. Or you could design your farm with permaculture and foodforest principles which makes it like a self sustaining ecosystem that reduces a resource usage of water, labour, nutrients, pest control etc. Society leads people into bullshit desk jobs where they have to spend their free time in the gym to not become morbidly obese. I think society could benefit if people could enjoy at least part time doing manual labour growing food instead.
The farm commodity hedge markets are dominated by players who leverage private access and knowledge to make massive margins. I think decentralizing this market (by anyone and their brother) would certainly benefit producers and end consumers by increasing transparency and thus lowering these transaction costs and providing liquidity. What you are talking about are auctions (like for pigs, fish or flowers) and this is already invented, centralized and corrupted and they set prices for producers and consumers in secret meetings and calls (before that wasnt even outlawed). For distribution, how easy is it to set up an ecommerce shop and for distribution you have a lot of thurd party logistics service providers. By increasing competition between these service providers of distribution etc you would again lower costs for producers and prices for consumer instead of relying on massively vertically or horizontally integrated supply chain players. Few benefits from massive monoculture productions (certainly not producers, consumers or the environment). Do you really think there are no scandals in centralized quality control systems?
Talking about price volatility. Costs for producers and prices for consumers are increasing dramatically because central banks in the western world decided to print massive amounts of currency and buying zombie companies on the stock exchange. How are these currencies considered stable in any way? Look what is happening in is happening in Turkey or Lebanon. Even worse what the US is doing to the people of afghanistan.
Well I do know the specifics, I've worked on our farm. I've worked in and for processing plants and at food retailers. I did an engineering degree in agriculture with a minor in economics (plus some post grads in IT). We produced and sold our farm products at local farmers markets. I now work at the agricultural government agency of my local region. And I can tell you that the margins that those gatekeepers take are not proportional the service of marketing and distribution they provide. I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about mathematics and logic in the form of proof systems that have the authority that would otherwise be relegated to central enforcers. There is distributed ledger technology that already uses proof of stake like cardano or polkadot. As for high transaction cost and scalability of pos you should look into zero knowledge proofs which allows to package a massive amount of transactions into one proof that hides a lot knowledge and still allows for checking transactions: https://starkware.co/
if you ever worked at the bottom of a supply chain you would understand that there are currently major issues with gatekeepers levying high margins (note I grew up on a industrial farm). If a farmer could sell his product under a smart contract that garantueed a percentage of the transaction costs flowed back to him and end consumers would have greater transparency into the origin of its product their would be a nett societal benefit. Minig farms blablabla, you can use other proofs for verification (proof of stake) or scale it with zero knowledge proofs
I do think NFTs are a bubble now. By investors that think that one NFT is worth the same as the next one minted while it is just the exact pointe that they are not interchangeable. You don't get a piece unique with significant history attached. Mondriaan, Van Gogh and Monet were innovators now it is just a deep learning gan style trick. I do see the value of NFT in asset tracking of unique pieces to provide transparency, fairness and safety in supply chains.