[aj_icracked]

Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc.

We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com

[explorigin]

> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network

Years ago I worked on Farmforce that is basically this. In America we have centralized agriculture. Over the ocean, small-holder farmers in Africa provide lots of food to lots of markets. Keeping track of all of these farms, their herbicide and pesticide usage and weather-based yield projections is already a solved problem.

[xyzzyz]

We should not model our food supply chain on Africa. In fact, it is beyond absurd to suggest it. African small holders run very unproductive farms, with horrible yields despite high labor intensive practices. Most countries have been on the brink of starvation up until very recently (some still are), and this only improved via adoption of modern farming practices.

[tfourb]

This is ignorance at its worst.

Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition). They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture) that is often incredibly wasteful (except when it comes to paying their laborers a living wage).

"Modern farming practices" mostly translates to "use a tremendous amount of energy and really bad wages to produce a respectable surplus in calories and large profits for a few actors within the supply chain".

And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving. In 100% of cases lack of food is due to it not being made available by choice, i.e. because nobody is willing to pay for it, or it is actively withheld in war, etc.

Source: degree in development studies and more hours on African (and European) smallholder farms than I can count.

[xyzzyz]

> Smallholder farms across Africa are quite productive if you measure inputs (labor, energy, capital, fertilizer, water, land use) against outputs (calories, nutrition).

This sounds intelligent, but is extremely wrong perspective.

For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high). This severe under capitalization is already a reason why we shouldn’t imitate their example. Anyway, all the development agencies run very active program to promote use of fertilizer, with very limited effect.

If you consider insufficient fertilizer use, then yeah, maybe they get good yields in the context. But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.

> They are certainly comparable with industrialized agriculture (large-scale monoculture)

No. Their yields are horrible, and in no way comparable to modern industrialized agriculture.

> And for the last 150 years or so no "starvation" anywhere in the world has been due to a lack of calories that could have reasonably been made available for the people starving.

This is true if you define “starvation” as “literal famine involving mass death”, but if you are trying to say that there has been no severe, persistent, widespread malnutrition due to insufficient caloric intake, then you are extremely wrong. Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector. It was only alleviated (and only in some places) by modern, western style development.

[navane]

Seeing like a state (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State) is quite a famous book that has a whole chapter on this, and it does argue that the small holders of Africa have a lot to teach to us. Many have tried western style agriculture in Africa, and many have failed.

[tfourb]

Nowhere did I say that we should just transplant African smallholder farms and their underlying (and often deficient) systems worldwide. That would obviously be stupid. Just as stupid as arguing that there is nothing to learn from people who have mostly succeeded (because most of them are still alive and their populations are growing) feeding themselves from their own land despite having the worst starting position imaginable.

> For example, most of these farms are well known to underuse fertilizer. There is no good reason for it, except in some relatively snall amount of cases where extreme poverty doesn’t leave farmers with enough capital to buy fertilizer (even though ROI is ridiculously high).

Capital constraints are an extremely common problem for African farmers, not "a small amount of cases". It could easily be remedied with the right support. Or simply by regulating international trade in a way that does not allow excessive subsidies in the E.U., U.S. and elsewhere completely destroy the local market for agricultural products on the continent.

At the same time, fertilizer overuse is extremely well documented in "modern agriculture" across the world. It has extremely bad externalities, from CO2 emissions to over saturating local water reserves, which of course Big Ag usually does not have to pick up the tap for.

If you internalize the costs of fertilizer use, "modern" agriculture quickly becomes uncompetitive. You can see this in many European countries (i.e. Netherlands, Ireland), where the enforcement of nitrate regulations has basically put whole sectors of the agricultural industry out of business.

> But that’s like saying “sure I got very meager crop because I didn’t water my crops in the drought even though I could, but if you consider my inputs (very little water and energy spent on watering), I actually did pretty well”, which is ridiculous: we shouldn’t imitate that.

No, but we should learn from it what we can. Especially with climate change rapidly leading to less availability of water and restrictions on using fertilizers.

> Up until last couple of decades, overwhelming majority of Africans have been seriously malnourished, and this was caused by the inefficiency of their agricultural sector.

Again: both the calories and the nutrition to adequately feed the entire population of the world is easily available, including in most cases locally or regionally. If it doesn't reach specific people, it is not an availability problem, but a distribution problem.

Most emergency aid organizations have long since started sourcing both calories and nutrition for disaster relief regionally because they can.

Is Africa's agricultural sector terribly inefficient? Yes, of course. Is there nothing to learn from African smallholders? Hell no!. Will "modern agriculture" have to change radically, including by incorporating lessons and practices from smallholders from around the world if we want agriculture to stop messing up the climate and literally killing the lion's share of natural diversity? You bet!

[blast]

You just want to work on things that crack easily.

[TylerE]

Seems interesting a bit but surely the economics are rather brutal? Even a traditional coop has an ROI of years and years and years.

[aj_icracked]

It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories.

Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!).

Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.

[bombcar]

From an absolute financial standpoint it might be hard to justify eggs from backyard chickens, though once you realize that they can eat something like 25% of their feed can be grass or clippings, and that some percentage can be redirected household waste (think: peels, food waste, etc) it becomes much more favorable.

As you mentioned, most treat them like pets which means they get to learn how long-lived chickens can be, and how egg production levels off in the later years.

But even then, if you're buying less than half the feed needed, you can probably break even for quite awhile (especially now).

[ljf]

I grew up on a (very) small farm - I still go to throw apple cores out of the window, as when I was younger the was always /something/ that would be happy for the treat. All dinner scraps were saved (or rather taken straight out), and all the windfall and rotten apples were happily eaten by the sheep, cow, geese and chickens.

I really hate throwing food away now, really pains me!

[aj_icracked]

One of the things that we've been thinking about is when we're at scale (I would say scale is 50,000+ Coops in the field) I would love to build a circular food waste system where we use food expiring / thrown out from grocery stores to feed our Coop member's chickens. Then we'll do partnerships where our members can sell excess backyard-to-table eggs back to the grocery stores.

Most people don't get that eggs usually are 30-60 days old when you buy them at the grocery store and they have to travel up to 1000 miles to get there in cold storage.

Want to know how old your eggs are? On every egg carton there's a 3 digit number from 1 to 365. That is the day of the year the producer of eggs handed them off to the distributor. Producers have up to 30 days to hand it off to distributor and the distributor has an additional 30 days to hand off to retailer. Kinda wild!

[lsaferite]

The crazy part that I learned when we started keeping chickens is that the eggs last so long unrefrigerated. In the US we have to wash commercial eggs, but we don't wash ours until use. We can keep eggs in our countertop spiral holder for weeks, easily, and they are perfect. Once I learned how old eggs in stores were, I bought more chickens.

[nsbk]

Throwing away the core is throwing away both food and the most beneficial part of the apple for your gut. Of the ~100 million bacteria in an apple, the core and seeds contain around 60%, while the pulp only contains around 20%, the skin 10%, the stem 10%. Numbers are from the top of my head, they could be off

[hattmall]

Are you saying you eat Apple Cores?

[bombcar]

Yeah, the amount of food waste that can easily be "reprocessed" on even a small farm is tremendous.

Not only do you have reduced waste, you have reduced packaging (no need to put the eggs in cartons if you're just carrying them to the kitchen).

People usually thing you need pigs to eat waste, but most farm animals will take some or all (the biggest risk is accidentally giving an animal something it shouldn't have).

[Perenti]

I grew up on a small poultry farm. Most farmers I know are very very good at recycling and reprocessing. There's very little "rubbish" if you are clever about it. If it can't be fed to an animal, and it doesn't rot (compost), it's probably something you can build with, either a machine or a structure. Meanwhile you use animal waste to improve the garden, producing more food, the scraps of which go back to the animals.

The biggest exception was in the case of disease, which we managed with fire. Burning diseased bird coops along with the corpses of dead birds was very cost effective on our small scale.

[iancmceachern]

It's a good thing we don't make every decision in our lives from an absolute financial standpoint. We'd all be eating gruel and porrage.

[DiscourseFan]

We in fact do make most decisions in our lives based on finances, you're just not aware of most of them.

[iancmceachern]

Try living your life the other way around for a while.

[ahoka]

We do, but people are maximizing utility and not minimizing costs.

[username135]

Almost all our food waste goes into a small metal bowl that gets dumped in the coop every night. I used to bury it in the compost pile, but since the hens have picked through it all, theres not much left. They happily eat the scraps and I happily collect their eggs.

[hattmall]

Financially speaking the biggest way to break even is having some way to get value from excess eggs. Selling them or trading for feed is ideal.

[bee_rider]

I think they also eat ticks, right?

[jacobr1]

We've had good success with Black Soldier Flies[1] too. They compost pretty much anything - you can toss in meat/cheese and similar scraps not just veggies. And you get a very high quality protein to feed the chickens.

[1] https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-har...

[hosh]

Pasture-raised backyard chickens are also great pest control.

[aimanbenbaha]

Amazing project! I always get excited when I hear new innovative ideas to improve ecosystems/businesses that are taught of as "traditional". There's this My First Million podcast episode with Justin Mares (DTC Food entrepreneur) where they talk about boostrapping alternative food biz ideas and are very bullish on these verticals and they also talk about various types of birds breeds and how cornish cross became the predominantly type of chicken raised.

Regarding this smart poultry startup, where I'm from I often hear from poulty farmers chicken should be able to roam free and have a wide space to lay around eggs and reproduce. I'm curious how this limitation is addressed to backyard herders?

[aj_icracked]

Most of our customers have decent sized backyards - I would say on average from clips people have shared, most yards are about the size of a tennis court or more (which is more than enough for 4-6 hens). Basically we look at it as, if you have a backyard, you have enough space for 4-6 chickens. Also, It's funny you mention My First Million - Sam Parr is a good friend of mine and I've been trying to get him to invest in Coop, lol.

[iancmceachern]

Very cool, let me know if you need and hardware or design support. I've done a lot of agtech stuff

[KennyBlanken]

> We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback.

Nobody is going to pay you anywhere near the amount of money you'll need for the energy and equipment to do this.

"Well shit, coyotes got one of the chickens" and then...just go get another chicken for...about $5 each. There's no data you could possibly collect that would interest people enough to buy your company.

The whole point behind chickens is that there are some manageable startup costs but then they're cheap to "run" - if you have a big enough property and free range 'em or use a 'tractor', even your feed costs are cut.

> I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables.

It's not decentralized if everyone has to use your app (I'm guessing your plan is to get a cut...) This stuff already exists. They're called "farmers markets."

It's also called "talking to your neighbors." That's been going on for hundreds of years.

> build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture

Hammer, meet nail that does not exist.