How to Apply Fastlane to Farming

[MJ DeMarco]

I've pay nearly 8 dollars for a dozen eggs that come from humanely raised, free range chickens. Mass produced eggs are a buck a dozen. That's an 800% price increase -- there has to be something there.

The industry is rife with overcapitalism so my guess, is there are a lot of opps there.

 

[SteveO]

Yuma, AZ. is a farming community. The wealthiest people in town are farmers. Many of them play golf with us. Those guys are always trying to tell me how to do things. I tell them to buy their own damn golf course.

 

[AgainstAllOdds]

Hey Guys,

I've long wanted to become a farmer and I was wondering how could I apply the Fastlane philosophy into farming?

Particularly with livestock and such.

I think the Agriculture industry is open for innovation and forward-thinkers, most farmers are getting old and the youth generally stay away from entering the field.

The easiest way to innovate is to get into the industry and then identify inefficiencies. Most people here can offer little of value because they're not familiar with the industry.

So: Get into the industry, or speak with people in the industry.

 

[TonyStark]

 

[BeefCattle]

Here's an interesting statistic I read today; The median age for farmers in the US is 55 years old, and the population of younger farmers is getting smaller and smaller.

There's literally an industry that has a generation retiring and dying out, and there's no where near enough people to fill the voids.

Plus, many of the older farmers failed to keep up with technology and adapt to the current times.

And with technology continuing to progress at astounding levels, there's a whole industry waiting for bright minds to come and help change the world.

There is, of course, the Big corporate farms you have to compete and deal with, but hey that comes with everything.

It'll be interesting to see how the Agriculture industry plays out

 

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[JSM]

I grew up on a farm and now help my dad run our grain farm on a daily basis.

Background:
We farm around 700 acres and grow corn and soybeans. We grow some non-gmo beans and gmo beans and corn. Our non-gmo beans go to a place called Bluegrass where they clean them and export them (BIG OPPORTUNITY). I farm 12 acres myself with the help of my dad. I don't know much about the livestock side of things but farming is farming and it is similar all around.

My Experience: I farm 12 acres of soybeans and own no land, equipment, etc. I pay my dad to run the equipment to plant, harvest, and spray. I also pay my own rent and buy all of my own chemicals, seed, and fertilizer. This also translates to me investing zero time other than communication, research, and looking at the crops.
Total expenditures: $3,676.35
Total Revenue: $3,956.5
Profit: $280.15
This is for 12 acres and my beans yielded only 32 bushels/acre. A good crop would be 50+ bushels/acre but the rent would also be more expensive. Rent for the best farmland can be over $200/acre and the same land can sell for over $10,000/acre. Farming is expensive to SCALE regardless of if it is livestock or grain.

My Recommendation:
DON'T FARM. Build a product, software, business, chemical, anything that can help farmers if you really want to be in this industry. Scale and Magnitude are on your side. Just as an example, we use a chemical that costs $690 per GALLON. You could build a business that is similar to Bluegrass ( bluegrassfarmsohio.com ). There is a ton of money to be made in exporting ag products and I would like to figure out how to do it for ourselves and cut out Bluegrass (The middleman). My plan personally is to build a business and have a money system and then use the F U money that MJ talks about to farm. Farming does allow quite a bit of freedom and I think that it's a great way to live. I do know of a grain farmer from Illinois that lives in Colorado from January 1 to April 1 every year.

Also, to the video of the pheasants above there is a pheasant farm in my county and I would say that their family is one of the top three wealthiest families in my county. They own thousands of acres of farmland and have the pheasant farm. They may be number 2 to the owners of R&L Carriers. They were able to scale both their pheasant operation and grain operation and are doing pretty well.

Hopefully I didn't miss anything and if you have any questions ask away.

Edit: A forum you would want to check out is https://talk.newagtalk.com
Many farmers are on there every day and I'm sure you could find a need to solve rather easily.

Edit 2: DroneDeploy is an SaaS that is making big money helping farmers map their fields with Drones. Here's the forward thinking and innovation coming into play.

 

[Denim Chicken]

Two bucks a dozen from a lady here in Yuma. Raised on her farm!

FREE here from my family's chickens!!

 

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[BeefCattle]

Hey Guys,

I've long wanted to become a farmer and I was wondering how could I apply the Fastlane philosophy into farming?

Particularly with livestock and such.

I think the Agriculture industry is open for innovation and forward-thinkers, most farmers are getting old and the youth generally stay away from entering the field.

 

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[Michał Kóska]

The thing I'm figuring out now is how biotech can help agriculture- better crops, no pesticides, vertical farms, etc. I think that the biggest leap would be a total automation- self driving machinery, drones monitoring how well the crops are rising, amount of water in soil, etc. Having a lot of cattles is a great start for biogas plant. Literally you can turn shit into gold

 

[SteveO]

I've pay nearly 8 dollars for a dozen eggs that come from humanely raised, free range chickens. Mass produced eggs are a buck a dozen. That's an 800% price increase -- there has to be something there.

The industry is rife with overcapitalism so my guess, is there are a lot of opps there.

Two bucks a dozen from a lady here in Yuma. Raised on her farm!

 

[Aetherwolf]

You don't need advanced biogas plant to create a heat and move the electric turbine. This is the easiest way to make electricity. You can use it either for yourself or for community. A lot of homes around the world are powered by such cheap installations.

My educational background is electrical engineering. My specialty is renewable energy technology. I have decades of actual working experience in this field.

Yes, you can use "unclean" biogas to burn it in an atmospheric burner and produce heat to cook a meal. Just have a needle ready to clean out the burner every so often. You probably also could use it to power a steam engine, although the pipes of your heat-exchanger would corrode/encrust phenominally fast. Use it in a turbine or gas-motor and you will be out looking for a new engine every month or so.

The homes you speak of are almost exclusively very small farms in rural asia. They use human and animal waste in very small, "primitive" installations to produce just enough gas for a little gas-lamp and a stove. You can easily do that for yourself. There is even a very good book by two chinese engineers about their developments in that field. But anything bigger is high-tech, with millions of euros/dollars in upfront investment. Btw, do you really think any industrialized nation will let you produce literally thousands of cubic meters of flammable, toxic gas without very strict regulation and the need for qualified personal?

You are more than welcome to your opinion of course. I am just trying to save you time and money. Normally people pay me quite substantial fees for that service. Take it or leave it, but my final advice would be to look a little bit deeper than wikipedia and glitter-sprinkled articles in "green" magazines. Do yourself a favor and talk to someone who actually runs a biogas plant bigger than the "enthusiast with a plastic barrel full of shit in the garden" variety.

 

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[ExaltedLife]

Farming is naturally FASTLANE if you can scale it. Check this out, for example:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zACrIUJLRU


Actually there are a bunch you ought to watch:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj75FbpcvUA

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVNdl_1ti-s

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT6IQx26eHk


You get the idea. Get a subscription to How It's Made on Youtube. Probably everybody should. Also it's free, so....

 

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[DaveC]

Hey Guys,

I've long wanted to become a farmer and I was wondering how could I apply the Fastlane philosophy into farming?

Particularly with livestock and such.

I think the Agriculture industry is open for innovation and forward-thinkers, most farmers are getting old and the youth generally stay away from entering the field.

Specialty and niche foods are going to continue to grow (organic, gluten free, etc....) along with farmers markets. Urban farming mixed with green energy is going to be a way that a lot of Rust belt cities (Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, even Chicago to an extent) are going to need to reinvent some of the abandoned space and economic downturn long term IMO. Zoning is a problem right now but that will change I think in the near future.

 

[OldFaithful]

I live in the midwest and know many people involved in agriculture at various levels. All are in corn, bean or mint production. They all echo @DronePilot's comments here:

My Recommendation:
DON'T FARM. Build a product, software, business, chemical, anything that can help farmers if you really want to be in this industry.

In today's regulatory environment, "big ag" is literally eating the small small producer alive. Here in the midwest, small farms are still going under while "big ag" is growing. Hmmm...there must be some sort of system in place that enables large corporate farms to prevent competition, but what might that system be?

GMO is the way to go

I don't think the public would agree with you there. I know that I don't. Labeling of GMO components has been proposed repeatedly. The public wants the info to make their own choice...and some of the public would choose to pay more for non-GMO food. As you said, that demographic is

yuuuuuugggggeeeeeee

Now we're on to a viable small business though. Specialized food production that meets the NEEDS of the growing "anti GMO" and "anti chemical" market. That has much more potential for the newcomer.

 

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[jmomcc]

Young farmers are dying out but that is also due to economies of scale in cash crop farming. My in laws farm a 1000 acres in ontario and that is the bare minimum to be viable in that field. Farms are expanding constantly and buying out people with 200 acres/300 acres or renting from them. If ypu wanted to buy 1000 acres in southern ontario, you are looking at around $22,000,000.

If you can figure out to add value to these massive farms, then you are on to a winner. They already spend literally 100,000s of dollars on combines. They will spend money on making their lives more efficient.

I have seen some cool stuff around here. One family imported a special turf for soccer fields and is the only supplier in the province.. or so they said. They started as a cash crop farm. Another thing is seeing trends and getting on them. Ginseng is a massive money maker right now.

 

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[Aetherwolf]

Good read -> Biogas - Wikipedia

The good thing is that you don't need very advanced machinery (comparing to gas derived during oil processing) to make it.

Not to mention it is more eco-friendly.

Uhm... actually, you need quite a lot of machinery to make GOOD biogas, as in "for use in anything but an atmospheric burner". Sure, if you just want to heat your wok once a day, its low-tech. But running gas motors to produce electricity or getting gas companies to accept your product in their pipelines? Not so easy. Stuff needs to be dried, cleaned of sulphur and other unwanted by products,...

Biogas was a very huge trend with german farmers in the 70s and 80s. Most of them failed, the successful survivors have very low turnaround due to recurring investments. Basically the only reason biogas plants are still beeing built are eco-enthusiasm and state subsidies.

There is one exception though: Communal biogas production as an extension to large sewage plants (big cities). Their biomatter is extremely well suited for gas production and the gas is mostly just burned to feed heat into district heating systems. Meaning they dont have to go and search for a market.

 

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[Kid]

Build farmers-client marketplace. Bypassing Walmart in middle

 

[Michael Burgess]

I think agriculture has massive potential as a business; everybody has to eat to stay alive. If 7+ billion people (and growing) potentially need what you can offer... you could do alright.

I plan to own an organic and sustainable farm business in the future. Just a few ideas to dig into that you could potentially apply to a farming business:

• Permaculture
• Aquaponics
  
• Automation (eg. arduino, robotics)
• Waste material conversion
• Mycology
• CSA's

Having Control in your business model, as much as possible, is worthwhile to strive for. Also, a business doesn't need to start out as a perfect fastlane model to eventually morph into one.

 

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[Aetherwolf]

Screwed as in millions (billions?) of people would have died in the third world. There were legitimate fears of mass starvation before GMO crops.

That is complete propaganda. Pretty simple to disprove though. Just try to find out exactly which GMO-Crops "saved" us from this "mass starvation". Where are they planted and (most important) try to find figures about how much higher their yield actually was, compared to regions without the use of GMOs. Such data does not exist, because all actual scientific research points out that GMO-Crops have failed to increase yields or reduce the use of pesticides/herbicides. What actually DID change yields a lot, was the global proliferation of artificial fertilizers.

I only know of one example for exactly the opposite: The widespread adaption of GMO cotton in India lead to massive problems in drought years, because the new plants needed more water and where therefore dependent on irrigation, which the millions of very small farmers could not afford. In good years the GMO plants would bring higher yields, but in bad years the farmers would end up with nothing but dust. Living year to year that meant facing starvation. This was and still is a major contributing factor to the suicide waves of indian farmers, which have occured since 2002.

 

[Michał Kóska]

Check out Memhpis Meat too- they are producing meat from cells, no animal is killed in the process, the meat is just growing

 

[SquatchMan]

Buy/inherit a large ranch with unexplored mineral rights in Texas, Oklahoma, California, Kansas, Pennsylvania, or West Virgnia.

Make terrible money and work long hours, but don't sell it for five generations.

Discover oil.

Pretty sure that's how most US farmers became millionaires.

Forreal though:

I've had an idea with distributing honey for awhile. Not really farming. More a private label/distribution thing.

Lots of homemade honey people in my area that have zero clue how to sell it.
Get exclusive rights to distribute with the largest one, some of these guys make a lot of honey.

Brand it.
Make sure the label says "MADE IN MY CITY" maybe even have some thing that says the bees are "MY CITY BEES", each hive has their own unique taste, etc.

Sell it to boutique stores around the area.
Wholesale it to farmer's market vendors.
Try and enter smaller local retailers

Like I said it's not really farming it's more of a food distribution thing, which has lots of regs and the scale is low. Margin is probably terrible too.

 

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[Michał Kóska]

Biogas? Never heard of it, what's it used for?

Good read -> Biogas - Wikipedia

The good thing is that you don't need very advanced machinery (comparing to gas derived during oil processing) to make it.

Not to mention it is more eco-friendly.

 

[GoranS]

Build farmers-client marketplace. Bypassing Walmart in middle

That's what I'm currently doing. It satisfies all CENTS commandments and there's lots of potential.

 

[GoranS]

That's what I'm currently doing. It satisfies all CENTS commandments and there's lots of potential.

NEED - Most farmers don't know how to market their produce to wholesalers and customers. An online marketplace solves that problem by connecting them with buyers, it eliminates the middlemen and thus gives them a better prices, and provides them with information about supply/demand and current prices. It also makes it easier for companies to look for suppliers of produce.

ENTRY - Putting up a website isn't enough. You need to solve the "chicken/egg" problem - if you don't have buyers how to attract sellers and if you don't have sellers how to attract buyers. This takes time and hard work.

CONTROL - You have complete control over your website.

SCALE - Like with any other web business, scale is not a problem and the industry is huge.

TIME - It is not hard to automate the business. The website exist and makes money even when you sleep.

 

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[Owner2Millions]

This thread is filled with ideas! I want to thank everyone for their thoughts. This just got the juices flowing! [emoji2]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[jmomcc]

"Screwed"??? That sounds like the "big ag" propaganda I hear all the time from the industry.

Why not allow people the freedom to choose by being honest them about what is being put into their food?

Screwed as in millions (billions?) of people would have died in the third world. There were legitimate fears of mass starvation before GMO crops.

 

[Lucky Chevy]

I think agriculture is ripe for innovation. I'm an engineer working in northern VA and worked a bit with the local farms. Corn, wheat, and soy are the main commercial crops. There is some chicken/turkey farming . These seem to be slowlane strategies that will work if you inherited a lot of land, or have money to construct chicken barns and a couple of bad weather years can rack up a lot of debt.

Here are some ideas that come to mind:

Smaller farms (<1,000 acres) often hire out the tilling/planting/harvesting because the machines are very expensive and rarely used. A website to match equipment owners with farmers may make inroads with the new generation of farmers. (Their dad's will probably use the grange or 4H to setup deals)

Some farms use crop dusters for chemical spraying. If you're technically minded you may be able to develop a drone to perform the same task albeit more slowly. Kind of like a big flying roomba. Or maybe the drone could monitor the growth of the crop and feedback into the planting or fertilizing process.

It might be possible to set aside some acreage for stabling horses and opening a riding school. Plenty of disposable income around here as a rule and the area just to the south of us is historically been a horse country.

A couple of farms within an hour have created agriculture "amusement" parks where kids can run, and slide, and climb on stuff while learning about farming. The farms also grow corn, pumpkins, watermelon, and apples. It's creates a destination. The DC market and to a lesser extent Richmond can use places to re-experience the country.

The federal government is under a mandate to purchase green energy. You may be able to construct a photovoltic power plant.

There is no shortage of opportunities,

Dan

 

[Kid]

If you're technically minded you may be able to develop a drone to perform the same task albeit more slowly. Kind of like a big flying roomba.

Just a note.
I've read that use of drones for purpose of agriculture has battery problem. That is, drone with heavy load can't go more then 20 minutes of flight without recharging.

 

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[BeefCattle]

The thing I'm figuring out now is how biotech can help agriculture- better crops, no pesticides, vertical farms, etc. I think that the biggest leap would be a total automation- self driving machinery, drones monitoring how well the crops are rising, amount of water in soil, etc. Having a lot of cattles is a great start for biogas plant. Literally you can turn shit into gold

Biogas? Never heard of it, what's it used for?

 

[Michał Kóska]

I've pay nearly 8 dollars for a dozen eggs that come from humanely raised, free range chickens. Mass produced eggs are a buck a dozen. That's an 800% price increase -- there has to be something there.

The industry is rife with overcapitalism so my guess, is there are a lot of opps there.

Yup, here in EU bio-food is a yuuuuuugggggeeeeeee biz. People are eager to pay hundreds of % more for bananas that were not touched by any chemical or potatoes raised with no artificial fertilizers, etc.