
Bloomberg on why farmers can’t work in information technology - jelliclesfarm
https://twitter.com/petermentes/status/1228518467776761856
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rs23296008n1
Done both. Farming is harder.

Bloomberg has no clue whatsoever. Farming is not just gardening. That would be
like saying programming is just typing. Wrong.

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salawat
To expand on this, Agriculture is so god-blessed complicated when it comes to
doing it in a way that gets you worthwhile returns.

Off the top of my head: Plant Ag: Soil quality is an art form of it's own.
Figure out what your soil is, and ameliorate the he'll out of it to get it
fertile again.

Plant/crop choice: Guess what? Now you get to learn the biology of every crop
you're familiar with, their cultivars, and the effect they have on soils/the
local fauna. Decide whether you are going mono-culture, or companion planting.
If monoculture, Note your lifecycle (for harvest times and other necessary
processing ) then proceed to equipment maintenance, operation, and financials.
If companion planting, get ready for making your jigsaw of a planting space,
and figure out your crop rotation for the next few seasons; then jump to
equipment operation, maintenance, and financial buggery. Oh yeah, make sure
your choice properly reflects what your environment can support, and decide
whether or not you're going no-till or not, pesticide/herbicide free and
adjust accordingly.

Did you remember pollination? Them Bees hardly ever just grow on trees
anymore! Better make friends with a bee keeper!

Animal Ag: Welcome to fence and belligerent animal hell. Make sure you have
your herd culled of any children of the last sure, or you've rotated out last
season's males, as inbreeding is a big fat nono. Keep your males spread out if
you don't want injuries and be ready when your carefully orchestrated
separation fails because somebody got randy.

Farmers could make fantastic frigging programmers, I have no doubt; what I
doubt they'll be is the most accommodating or tolerant of the typical code or
feature mill environment; and for that God bless 'em. Besides which, I'm
fairly sure you'd have some serious tech culture shock as the other side of
the intellectual landscape filtered in. These are people who have become
optimized in figuring out how to do things without creating extra work.

If the man truly had the gall to suggest IT is somehow harder than farming, I
hate to bust bubbles, but he needs a reality check. It often only looks easy
because years of hard work have gone into the land and processes to keep it
productive.

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jelliclesfarm
There is a general derisiveness towards farmers because we produce a lot of
value and give it away for so very little. It became worse with govt subsidies
and market forces because it further devalued what we do.

Tech does not help farming and ag. Whatever ‘Agtech’ is happening now is a
data play. Every technology out there that has gotten funding is because they
collect data and that data is a commodity that can be sold for more than the
value of the food produced by farmers who are at the bottom most rung of the
supply chain.

I do say this with a touch of bitterness because I applied for YC twice and
won’t again because I was told that there is no money. (Without serving the
data gods) I get the logic of it, but that doesn’t stop me from being bitter.

It is particularly nauseating that Bloomberg should say this because the most
invested Agtech is for commodity crops that get traded on Wall Street and the
kind of crops like corn and soy and input companies and land surveys etc. and
it’s business.

I will never vote for Bloomberg even though he was in my shortlist. Something
has been triggered that bought forth all that I have witnessed and
subconsciously recorded about the devaluation of farming by tech and business
communities since 2011 when I first started looking into at ways to improve ag
with tech. The bubble just burst when I read that. This quote was from 2016.

~~~
rs23296008n1
I remotely occasionally support a bunch of farmers with fleets of raspberry
pi, arduino and psoc. Those guys probably directly look after more computers
than a lot of webguys. Writing C/python seems the most common.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Farmers can learn anything. Still laughing over Mike Bloomberg’s instructions
for growing corn “1. Dig a hole..”

Show me a guy who digs a hole to grow corn..and I will show you someone who
has never farmed before.

Don’t need gray matter for that..

~~~
rs23296008n1
Programming is just typing fast after all. Don't need to think either. Just
need a dark room, a hoodie and the light of green text reflecting on your
face.

Or something.

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aaron695
He clearly is talking pre the information age (500 years ago) farming was not
complex.

Which it wasn't.

Now farmers have to use robots, and machinery and data services and chemicals,
breeding patterns.

It is far more complex.

Fake News FTW.

On Twitter even. The clip is specifically cut to be bad, but actually is in
context if you have ears, but it seems people are really really stupid.

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jelliclesfarm
Not Fake News

[https://www.theblaze.com/news/bloomberg-triggers-
bipartisan-...](https://www.theblaze.com/news/bloomberg-triggers-bipartisan-
backlash-for-condescending-remarks-about-farmers)

[..]While speaking at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School in 2016,
Bloomberg was asked if Americans living on the coasts — who are generally more
liberal — could be unified with those who live in middle America, who are
generally more conservative.

In response, Bloomberg implied that anyone could be a farmer because it
requires a low-level of intelligence to be successful.

I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a
farmer.

It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add
water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then we had 300 years of the
industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the
crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a
lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture;
today it's 2 percent in the United States.

Now comes the information economy. And the information economy is
fundamentally different because it's built around replacing people with
technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and
analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a
different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.[..]

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jelliclesfarm
[..] Bloomberg on why farmers can’t work in information technology

MB: “I can teach anyone how to be a farmer 1 dig a hole 2 put a seed in 3 put
dirt on top 4 add water 5 up comes the corn”

The skill 4information technology is completely different you need more grey
matter[..]

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consultutah
What an idiot. We deserve better leadership

