
Farmizen lets urbanites grow fresh food on a remote farm (2017) - troydavis
https://www.vccircle.com/this-startup-lets-urbanites-play-farmville-on-real-agricultural-land/
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jerkstate
The product is a sense of connection to the food and it sounds like some
customers are willing to pay a high premium.

It sounds like farmhands employed by Farmizen do all of the planting,
maintenance, and harvesting, and the customer is able to view the crops from
afar, probably by video feed with a personalized blog about how their tomatoes
are doing.

As someone who grew up on a farm it seems very silly and inefficient but also
as someone who now lives in a city and hears fellow yuppies complain about how
"disconnected from nature" they feel, it makes sense that they could get some
customers, but I don't see customers staying customers because the yields will
be low and the prices will be high and the quality won't be as good compared
to the farmers market or organic grocery.

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fhood
Exactly. If you actually let said "urbanites" make the decisions they would
all end up with a bunch of dead vegetables....except for okra and zucchini. As
far as I can tell nothing can stop those two from growing.

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mistermann
I killed an incredibly healthy zuchini plant once with some fish based
fertilizer lol, so it can be done!

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phyzome
> A farmer with, say, 3 acres of land usually grows only 2-3 crops at a time.
> With Farmizen, the company claims, he can grow up to 20 crops using natural
> methods. This also improves the quality of the soil. Multiple crops also
> help from the risk management perspective. If there are 30 crops growing on
> a farm and three fail, the rest compensate for the loss.

While heterogeneous plantings can reduce herbivore pressure, I feel like this
could result in higher soil pest load by removing the opportunity for crop
rotation. For instance, with some crops it's important to _not_ plant them in
any given area for more than a couple years in a row, otherwise the infectious
nematode population (or whatever) builds up in the soil. Intercropping with a
solid field of brassicas can help break up the pest population cycles.

But maybe this would work if they keep rotatating _where_ the Farmizen plots
are.

In any case, an interesting twist on Community Supported Agriculture.

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shameekc
Hi all ! I am from the farmizen team. Let me answer some of the questions
raised so far 1. Crop rotation happens in individual beds - when a user is
choosing crops to plant in a particular bed - the app provides recommendations
based on what was growing in that bed previously, as well as the season. We do
see some consumers override the recommendations, and that affects the yield in
most cases. 2. Photos of individual beds are drone images stitched and then
sliced up in some cases and farmer clicked in some cases 3. Farmhands may be
employed by our partner farmer, not by us. 4. This is actually kinda reverse
share-cropping - most of partner farmers are small land holding farmers with a
couple of acres - who would otherwise earn about $120 per month per acre. Now
they make approx 7x of that. Consumers do pay a premium of about 10-20 percent
over organic prices - but given the fact that a majority of consumers don’t
trust organic labels in case of fresh produce in India (with good reason) -
many are willing to pay the premium.

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twoquestions
If this works, more power to them, but on it's surface I don't see how this
has anything to do with the game FarmVille other than it taking place on a
farm. I'd also encourage anyone who takes part in a scheme like this to go
over their contracts with a fine-toothed comb, as arrangements like this have
been used to awful effect here in the United States:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping)

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shameekc
CSA models - farmer does everything, focus on the end output. Community
garden/allotment garden - consumer does everything as DIY, focus on the
experience. Farmizen is kind of in the middle - you can do as much as you
want, and you have more control over what you want to grow than in the case of
CSA. At the same time, you can also just sit on a couch and participate in the
experience, unlike in the case of a community garden.

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seltzered_
How does this model compare to a CSA or csa-like subscription businesses (e.g.
Full Circle, Farmigo, Good Eggs, etc.)?

So there’s an aspect that one ‘rents’ a portion of farm to choose what grows,
but I’m having a hard time understanding why one would want that over a fully
managed service where one trusts the farmer to grow the appropriate food.

This feels like more of a ‘control your farmer’ idea over ‘know your farmer’

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seltzered_
It’s really worth noting that this is a Bangalore based startup. The dynamics
may be different out there. This could help spur investment outside of cash
crops (e.g sugar cane).

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hackerews
How much do you actually "do" as the remote farmer? Are there a lot of digital
tasks you need to accomplish from the app?

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XalvinX
This kind of thing is kind of common in Korea.

