#crop models agriculture

[projectchampionz]

Evaluating Crop Farming Practices and Agri-Education to Enhance the Quality and Relevance of Agricultural Education and Training Programs

Evaluating Crop Farming Practices and Agri-Education to Enhance the Quality and Relevance of Agricultural Education and Training Programs Abstract: This research project aims to assess the current state of crop farming practices and agricultural education programs to identify opportunities for improving the quality and relevance of agricultural education and training. The study will employ a…

[jcmarchi]

Valeria Kogan, PhD, Founder and CEO of Fermata – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/valeria-kogan-phd-founder-and-ceo-of-fermata-interview-series/

Valeria Kogan, PhD, Founder and CEO of Fermata – Interview Series

Valeria Kogan, PhD, Founder and CEO of Fermata has been recognized as one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30” in 2022, Valeria is a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record in biotechnology and innovation. As the founder of Fermata and the biotech firm Smartomica, Valeria combines her scientific expertise with a visionary approach to transforming industries.

Fermata is a data science company revolutionizing agriculture with cutting-edge computer vision solutions. Its flagship platform, Croptimus™, provides 24/7 automated detection of pests and diseases, helping growers identify issues like powdery mildew, bud rot, and mosaic before they escalate. By reducing scouting time and minimizing crop loss, Fermata empowers farmers to focus on solutions and maximize yield, whether in controlled environments or outdoor settings.

What inspired you to transition from bioinformatics and cancer research to agriculture technology? How did your experience with Smartomica influence the founding of Fermata?

My transition from biotech to agriculture was pretty accidental. Friends of friends of mine who were tomato producers were looking for someone with experience in AI to brainstorm together on its applications in farming. It was the time when deep learning has just started and created a lot of buzz in the tech space – it also found immediate applications in the medical domain through computer vision in radiology. Everyone in my circle was talking about it, so when I saw what the farming guys showed me – plant health issues that can be detected visually and that need to be identified in real time – it immediately clicked. I had an idea to bring the knowledge from the medical space to agriculture which was a much less popular and digitized industry back then.

With a background in AI and biotech, what challenges did you face in adapting those technologies to agriculture?

I think in general anyone who comes with a digital product to a conservative industry faces the same level of resistance. However, it’s harder if you are an outsider. My approach was and is being humble and driven by the willingness to apply my company’s knowledge to help people, not to tell them what they are doing wrong and how we can help them do it in the right way. Through every conversation with growers, we learn and try to stay open-minded and not too attached to our technology while prioritizing the needs of the grower and adjusting our product accordingly.

Fermata focuses on reducing crop losses and pesticide use. What was the initial reception of this idea in the agricultural community, and how did you convince stakeholders to adopt AI-driven solutions?

The initial reception was that it was not possible. I can’t say that much has changed over the past 5 years! We see great support from the early adopters and a lot of concerns from the broader audience. We are lucky to have customers who believe in the technology and don’t just pay us money but become the showcases for the rest of the market. The best and only thing we can really do is let the product speak for itself.

How does Croptimus™ integrate multiple data sources, such as satellite imagery, sensors, and AI models, to provide actionable insights for growers?

Currently, we use only visual data from the cameras to analyze plant health and identify pests, diseases, nutrient problems, and other issues. However, with the new developments in the AI sector, we understand the benefits that additional data sources can bring to us both for higher detection quality and also for enabling predictive analytics. Currently, we only use climate data in some projects, but plan to expand beyond that in 2025.

What makes Fermata’s early pest and disease detection capabilities unique compared to other AgTech solutions?

There are several things that make us unique. First of all, over the past 5 years, we have collected an insane database of plant images both through our customers and with our own R&D facility where we infest the plants to collect additional data. We also used an internal labeling team which we very carefully trained. In combination with a broad network of agronomy experts from across the globe, this helped us to build a very high-quality dataset. A deep understanding of machine learning in combination with the product vision helped us create a useful and simple product on top of that.

AI and computer vision are advancing rapidly. How does Fermata ensure its technology stays ahead of the curve in this competitive landscape?

At Fermata, we follow a data-centric approach, ensuring high-quality and flexible data labeling by bringing together agronomists and data scientists. We invest in diverse datasets to keep our technology competitive and we also focus on solving specific problems and collaborate with partners when needed to remain the best at what we do.

You’ve emphasized sustainability as a key goal. How do you see Fermata’s technology impacting global efforts to reduce food waste and minimize environmental harm?

By helping farmers identify pests and diseases in time we help them prevent losses, minimize food waste, and reduce pesticide use. This is especially important in the current environment when the climate is changing. Many growers suffer from new pests or diseases that they have never seen in their regions before. Because of that, early detection and assistance in tuning the mitigation strategies is essential for them.

Raising $10 million in Series A funding is a significant milestone. How will this funding accelerate Fermata’s vision, and what are your immediate priorities for growth?

We plan to use this money to grow from “The Eyes of Ag” to “The Brain of Ag” by integrating more data sources into our platform and broadening the list of products we offer beyond pests and diseases. Our immediate priorities include focusing on certain markets – Canada and the Netherlands, and tomato crops to get significant market share for the segment and then replicate it for the other regions and crops.

What role do you see emerging technologies, like robotics or IoT, playing in Fermata’s future innovations?

I believe that advancements in robotics and IoT will bring huge value to Fermata, because all these companies are our potential partners. We are looking forward to seeing both new ways to collect data as well as automated solutions to move through the facility and use fewer sensors and cameras to achieve the same goals.

What’s next for Fermata? Are there specific crops, regions, or technologies you are particularly excited to explore in the coming years?

In 2025 we will be focused on tomato producers mainly in Canada and the Netherlands, but following that we aim to expand our services to other vegetables like cucumbers and peppers, then strawberries and grapes. I hope that we will enter global markets with the new crops at the end of this year and in 2026. Regarding technologies, our plan is to go beyond pests and diseases into predicting the yield, assessing the efficiency of pollination, and many other exciting tasks where farmers will appreciate the help of AI.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Fermata.

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts (factory labor, poverty, etc., increase), the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 establishes full-time police institution(s) in London. The "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The Irish Constabulary of 1837 sets up a national policing force and the County Police Act of 1839 allows justices of the peace across England to establish policing institutions in their counties (New York City gets a police department in 1844). The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

---

"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

---

"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to the land dispossession, poverty, and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion" (Scramble for Africa, US "American West", nation-building, conquering "frontiers"), as agricultural "revolutions" of imperial monoculture cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation, and as major imperial infrastructure building projects required a lot of vulnerable "mobile" labor. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroad networks and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, the racist expulsion of the "Tacoma riot".

Punished for being Algerian in France. Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

Mobility and confinement, the empire manipulates each.

---

"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.), you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.

Too ill, too poor, too exhausted, too indebted to move, you are trapped. Physical barriers (borders), legal barriers (identity documents), financial barriers (debt). "Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. "Vagrancy" since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place, extracting their wealth and labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[tanadrin]

Can you explain in what what you think eugenics doesn't work? Does this basically boil down to skepticism about the accuracy of GWAS studies? My understanding is that academic consensus is "G probably exists, disentangling direct genetic inheritance vs genetic cultural inheritance is complicated but possible, we can identify a number of alleles which we're reasonably confident are directly causally involved in having a higher G factor"

when it comes to intelligence, its heritability, and its variation at the population level, my understanding of the science is:

highly adaptive traits don't, in fact, vary much at the genetic level between populations of a species because they are strongly selected for. in an environment where a trait is being strongly selected for, a population that failed to express that trait strongly will be rapidly outcompeted.

intelligence is probably the quintessential such trait for humans. we have sacrificed a great deal of other kinds of specialization in favor of our big brains. we spend an enormous amount of calories supporting those brains. tool use, the ability to plan for the future, the ability to navigate complex social situations and hierarchies in order to secure status, the ability to model the minds of others for the purposes of cooperation and deception means that we should expect intelligence to be strongly selected for for as long as our lineage has been social and tool-using, which is at least the last three million years or so.

so, at least as a matter of a priori assumptions, we should expect human populations not to vary greatly in their genetic predisposition to intelligence. it may nonetheless, but we'd need pretty strong evidence. i think i read this argument on PZ Myers' blog a million years ago, so credit where that's due.

complicating the picture is that we just don't have good evidence for how IQ does vary across populations, even before we get into the question of "how much of this variation is genetic and how much of it is not." the cross-national data on which a lot of IQ arguments have been based is really bad. and that would be assuming IQ tests are in fact good at capturing a notion of IQ that is independent of cultural context, which historically they're pretty bad at

this screed by nassim nicholas taleb (not a diss; AFAICT the guy only writes in screeds) makes a number of arguments, but one argument I find persuasive is that IQ is really only predictive of achievement in the sense that it does usefully discriminate between people with obvious intellectual disabilities and those without--but you do not actually need an IQ test for that sort of thing, any more than you need to use a height chart to figure out who is missing both their legs. in that sense, sure, IQ is predictive of a lot of things. but once you remove this group, the much-vaunted correlations between IQ and stuff like wealth just straight-up vanishes

heritability studies are a useful tool, but a tool which must be wielded carefully; they were developed for studying traits which were relatively easy to isolate in very specific populations, like a crop under study at an agricultural research site, and are more precarious when applied to, e.g., human populations

my understanding based on jonathan kaplan articles like this one is that twin studies are not actually that good at distinguishing heritable factors from environmental ones--they have serious limitations compared to heritability studies where you actually can rigorously control for environmental effects, like you can with plants or livestock.

as this post also points out, heritability studies also only examine heritability within groups, and are not really suited to examining large-scale population differences, *especially* in the realm of intelligence where there is a huge raft of confounding factors, and a lack of a really robust measurement tool.

(if we are worried about intelligence at the population level, it seems to me there are interventions we know are going to be effective and do not rely on deeply dubious scientific speculation, e.g., around nutrition and healthcare and serious wealth inequality and ofc education; and if what people actually want is to raise the average intelligence of the population rather than justify discrimination against minorities, then they might focus on those much more empirically grounded interventions. even if population differences in IQ are real and significant and point to big differences in intelligence, we know those things are worth a fair few IQ points. but most people who are or historically have been the biggest advocates for eugenics are, in my estimation, mostly interested in justifying discrimination.)

i think the claims/application of eugenics extend well beyond just intelligence, ftr. eugenics as an ideology is complex and historically pretty interesting, and many eugenicists have made much broader claims than just "population-level differences in intelligence exist due to genetic factors, and we should try to influence them with policy," but that is a useful point for them to fall back onto when pressed on those other claims. but i don't think even that claim is at all well-supported.

[trb752]

Ceres, Goddess of Grain, Chicago Board of Trade Building, Illinois, USA

The female figure standing 45 stories above LaSalle Street is an iconic image for most Chicagoans. It depicts Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility, and motherly relationships, in honor of the commodities exchanged in the Chicago Board of Trade building below.

The figure was sculpted by artist John H. Storrs, and though he employed a model with a very pretty face, the statue itself is faceless. Storrs reportedly thought that the building was so tall that no one would be able to see the statue's face; when the building was constructed in 1930, he couldn’t even imagine soaring structures such as the nearby 110-story Willis Tower.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bankruptcy is very, very good

On THURSDAY (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On FRIDAY (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

There's a truly comforting sociopathy snuggled inside capitalism ideology: if markets are systems for identifying and rewarding virtue, ability and value, then anyone who's failing in the system is actually unworthy, not unlucky; and that means the winners are not just lucky (and certainly not merely selfish), but actually the best and they owe nothing to their social inferiors apart from what their own charitable impulses dictate.

It's an economic wrapper around the old theological doctrine of providence, whereby God shows you whom he favors by giving them wealth and station, and marks out the wicked by miring them in poverty. And like the religious belief in providence, the capitalist belief in meritocracy is essential to resolving cognitive dissonance: it lets the fed winners feel morally justified in stepping over the starving losers.

The debate over merit and luck has been with us for millennia, and even the hereditary absolute monarchs of the Bronze Age had to find a way to resolve it. For the rulers of antiquity, the way to square that circle was jubilee.

Bronze Age jubilees were periodic celebrations in which all debts were canceled. Different kingdoms had different schedules for jubilees, but imagine some mix of "every x years" and "every time a new ruler takes the throne" and "every time something really portentous happens." To modern sensibilities, the idea that we would simply wipe away all debts every now and again is almost inconceivable. Why would any society practice jubilee? More importantly, how could a ruler get the wealthy creditor class to countenance a jubilee, rather than seeking a revolutionary overthrow?

The best answers to this question can be found in the scholarship of historian Michael Hudson, who has written extensively on the subject. Hudson doesn't just write for a scholarly audience, he's also a fantastic communicator with a real commitment to bringing his research to lay audiences:

https://michael-hudson.com/

Hudson's most famous saying is "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." It's in this dense little nugget that we can find the answer the the riddle of jubilee:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#debt

Let's start with a simple model of debt and credit in an agricultural society. In agricultural societies, everything exists downstream of farming, which is the core activity of the civilization. If the farmers succeed, everyone can eat, and that means they can do all the other things, all the not-farming work of your society.

To farm successfully, you need credit. Farmers enter the growing season in need of inputs: seed, fertilizer, labor; they need still more labor during the harvest. Without some way to acquire these inputs before the farmer has a crop that can pay for them, there can be no crop.

No wonder, then, that the earliest "money" we have a record of is ancient Babylonian credit ledgers that record the debts of farmers who borrow against the next crop to pay for the materials and labor they'll need to grow it. Debt, not barter, is the true origin of money. The fairy tale that coin money arose spontaneously to help bartering marketgoers facilitate trade has no historical evidence, while Babylonian ledgers can be seen in person in museums all over the world.

Farming requires an enormous amount of skill, but even the most skillful farmer is a prisoner of luck. No matter how good you are at farming, no matter how hard you work, no matter how carefully you plan, you can still lose a harvest to blight, drought, storms or vermin.

So over time, every farmer loses a crop. When that happens, the farmer can't pay off their debts and must roll them over and pay them off with future harvests. That means that over time, the share of each harvest the farmer has claim to goes down. Thanks to compounding interest, no bumper crop can erase the debts of the bad harvests.

That means that, over time, "farmer" becomes a synonym for "debtor." Farmers' productive output is increasingly claimed by the rich and powerful. No matter how badly everyone needs food, the whims of the hereditary creditor class come to dictate the country's agricultural priorities. More ornamental flowers for the tables of the wealthy, fewer staple crops for the masses. "Creditor" and "debtor" no longer describe economic relations – they become hereditary castes.

That's where jubilee comes in. Without some way to interrupt this cycle of spiraling debt, society becomes so destabilized that the system collapses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

In other words: debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. Either you wipe away the farmers' debts to the creditor class, or your society collapses, and with it, the political relations that made those debts payable.

Jubilee is long gone, but that doesn't mean that debts that can't be paid will get paid. Modern society has filled the jubilee gap with bankruptcy, a legal process for shriving a debtor of their debts.

Bankruptcy takes many forms. The most important split in bankruptcy types is between elite bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of the common person. The limited liability company was created to allow people with money to pool their funds to back corporations without being responsible for their debts. This "capital formation" is considered "efficient" by economists because it creates the backing for big, ambitious projects, from colonizing and extracting the wealth of distant lands (Hudson's Bay Company) to spinning up global manufacturing supply chains (Apple).

Limited liability means that companies can take on debt without exposing their investors to risks beyond their capital stake. If you buy $1,000 worth of Apple stock, that's all you stand to lose if Apple makes bad decisions. Apple may rack up billions in liabilities – say, by abusing its subcontractor workforce – but Apple's owners aren't on the hook for it.

Economists like this because it means that you can invest in Apple without having to be privy to its daily management decisions, which means that Apple can accumulate huge pools of capital, "lever them up" by borrowing even more, and then put all that money to work on R&D, product development, marketing, and, of course, "incentives" for key employees and managers.

But limited liability also does a lot of work in the political sphere. Once an individual crosses a certain wealth threshold, they become an LLC. Accountants and wealth managers and financial planners insist on this. For freelancers and other sole practitioners, the benefits of forming an LLC are modest – a few more tax write-offs and the ability to get a business credit-card with slightly superior perks.

But for the truly wealthy, transforming yourself into the "natural person" at the center of a vast pool of LLCs is essential because it allows you to accumulate and shed debts. You can secretly own rental properties and abuse your tenants, accumulate vast liabilities as local authorities pile fine upon fine, and then simply dispose of the LLC and its debts. Plan this gambit carefully enough and the debtor LLC will have no assets in its bankruptcy estate apart from the crumbling apartment building, and its most senior secured creditor will be another of your LLCs. This lets the slumlord move an apartment block from one pocket to another, leaving the debt behind.

For the corporate person, shedding debts through bankruptcy is an honorable practice. Far from being a source of shame, the well-timed, well-structured bankruptcy is just evidence of financial acumen. Think of the private equity looters who buy a company by borrowing against it, pay themselves a huge "special dividend," then wipe away the debt by taking the company bankrupt (which also lets them shed obligations to suppliers, workers, and especially, retirees and their pensions). As Trump (a serial bankrupt who has stiffed legions of contractors and creditors) would say, "That makes me smart."

The apotheosis of elite bankruptcy is found in massive corporate bankruptcies, in which a corporation kills and maims huge numbers of people, then maneuvers to get its case heard in one of three US federal courtrooms where specialist judges rubber-stamp "involuntary third-party releases" that wipe out the company's obligations to it victims for pennies on the dollar, while the company gets to keep billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#morally-bankrupt

This process was so flagrantly abused by companies like Johnson & Johnson (which spent years knowingly advising women to dust their vulvas with asbestos-tainted talc, creating an epidemic of grotesque and lethal genital cancers) that it is finally generating some scrutiny and pushback:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

But the precarious state of elite bankruptcies has more to do with the personal corruption of the small cabal of judges who run the system than public outrage over their rulings; like that one judge in Texas who was secretly fucking the lawyer whose clients he was also handing hundreds of millions of dollars to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

Certainly, we don't hear much about the "moral hazard" of allowing the Sackler opioid family to keep as much as ten billion dollars in the family's offshore accounts while walking away from the victims of their drug-pushing empire, no matter what bizarre tricks they deploy in pulling off the stunt:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

But when it comes to canceling the debts of normal people, the "moral hazard" is front and center. If you're a person who borrowed $79k in student loans, paid back $190k and still owe $236k, we can't cancel your debt, because of the message that would send to other people who want to (checks notes) get an education:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

The anti-jubilee side also wants us to think of the poor creditors: who would loan money to the next generation of students if student debt cancellation was a possibility? Of course, these are federally guaranteed loans, risk-free, free money for people who already have money, a kind of UBI for the people who need it least. The idea that this credit pool would dry up if you were limited to only collecting the debts that can be paid – rather than insisting that debts that can't be paid still be paid – elevates the hereditary creditor class to a kind of fragile, easily frightened, endangered species.

But the most powerful arguments against bankruptcy are rooted in the idea of providence. In an efficient market, anyone who goes bankrupt was necessarily reckless. They were entrusted with credit they weren't entitled to, because they lacked the intrinsic merit that would let them manage that credit wisely. Letting them walk away from their debts means that they will never learn from their mistakes, and that their fellow born-to-be-poors will learn the wrong thing from those debts: that there's an easy life in borrowing, spending, and discharging your debts in bankruptcy.

As it happens, this is an empirically testable proposition. If this view of personal bankruptcy as a personal failure is correct, then people who go bankrupt and live to borrow again should end up bankrupt again, too. On the other hand, if we accept the jubilee view – that debt is the result of accumulated misfortunes, often including the misfortune of birth into poor station – then bankruptcy represents a second chance with an opportunity to dodge misfortune.

In a new study from IZA Institute of Labor Economics's Gustaf Bruze, Alexander Kjær Hilsløv and Jonas Maibom, we get just such an empirical analysis. It's called "The Long-Run Effects of Individual Debt Relief," and it examines the lives of people for a full quarter-century after a bankruptcy:

https://docs.iza.org/dp17047.pdf

The study follows Danish bankruptcies following the introduction of continental Europe's first modern bankruptcy system, which Denmark instituted in 1984. Prior to that, the Danes – like most of Europe – did not allow for a discharge of personal debt through bankruptcy. Instead, a debtor who went bankrupt would be expected to have about 20% of their lifetime wages garnished to pay back their creditors, until the debts were repaid or they died (whichever came first).

After 1984, Denmark bankruptcy system imported features of US/UK/Commonwealth bankruptcy, including the ability to restructure and discharge your debts. Not everyone is eligible for this kind of bankruptcy: there's a bureaucratic system that verifies that people seeking bankruptcy discharge don't have a lot of assets that could go to their creditors.

But for the (un)lucky people who qualify for bankruptcy discharges, there's a fascinating natural experiment in which the fortunes of people who see debt relief can be compared to bankrupt people who couldn't get their debts wiped out.

It turns out that the Bronze Age has a thing or two to teach us. Here's the headline finding: people who discharge their debts in bankruptcy experience "a large increase in earned income, employment, assets, real estate, secured debt, home ownership, and wealth that persists for more than 25 years after a court ruling."

After people are given the benefits of bankruptcy, they are less likely to rely on public benefits. They get better jobs. Their families live better lives. Their creditors get some of their money back (which is all they can realistically expect, since "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid").

As Jason Kilborn writes for Credit Slips, "the benefits of debt relief are not only substantial but robust, as debtors learn their lesson (if there was one to learn) about managing their finances, and they capitalize (literally) on their fresh start."

Score one for the luck-based theory of wealth, and minus one for the providential meritocracy hypothesis.

Americans should take note of these findings. After all, Danes are insulated from the leading American cause of bankruptcy: medical debts. In America, breaking a bone or getting cancer or even kidney stone can wipe out a lifetime of hard work, careful planning and prudential spending. The US refuses to seriously grapple with this problem. The best we can come up with is the (welcome, but tiny) step of banning credit bureaux from trashing your credit score because of your medical debt:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/06/11/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-proposal-to-prohibit-medical-bills-from-being-included-on-credit-reports-and-calls-on-states-and-localities-to-take-further-actions-to-reduce-medical-debt/

Millennia ago, everyone understood that debts that can't be paid, won't be paid, and they created a system for discharging debts and freeing productive people from the tyranny of accumulated liabilities, to the benefit of all. Dismantling that system required us to invent an elaborate theological system and dress it up in economic language.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/17/lovilee-jubilee/#debts-that-cant-be-paid-wont-be-paid

[keepingitneutral]

Agri-Cultural Oasis,

The heart of Agri-Cultural Oasis is the integration of off-grid farming, tropical leisure, and cultural exploration. Inspired by the Dominican spirit of dance, music, and community, we envisioned a space that not only fosters sustainable living but also celebrates the region's rich cultural heritage. The project offers visitors a unique opportunity to experience local traditions alongside sustainable agricultural production and eco-tourism.

The design dedicates 20% of the farm’s land to photovoltaic panels, which provide renewable energy to power the entire estate. This energy source supports both farming and daily operations, while the remaining land is cultivated with crops, ensuring a self-sustaining system. By harnessing renewable energy, we’ve created a model for sustainable living that can serve as a blueprint for remote communities around the world.

Loma Atravesada, Las Galeras, Samana, Dominican Republic,

Courtesy: Xueqi Zhang

[elbiotipo]

By the way, I don't oppose genetic modification at all, I just want it to be done with an ecological perspective. You can't just introduce GMOs in an ecosystem like nothing. At the same time, they are incredibly powerful tools and to deprive ourselves from them is nonsense.

However, at least here in Argentina, the process for genetic modification and commercialization is incredibly strict with strong checks in every step of the process. The more you learn about the processes and research of genetic modification the more confident you are on it. The damage is actually done not by the crops themselves but by the agricultural practices of the great agrobusiness (a system here in South America of national and international factors) that enforce extractivist models of agriculture. The fact that there's drought-resistant wheat or corn that resists insects isn't the problem here, it's how the land are used and how it affects the natural enviroment and the people.

This is of course a general panorama, I encourage you to research it on your own.

[goodstuffhappenedtoday]

Millions of U.S. apples were almost left to rot. Now, they'll go to hungry families

NOVEMBER 27, 2023 By Alan Jinich

It's getting late in the harvest season in Berkeley County, West Virginia and Carla Kitchen's team is in the process of hand-picking nearly half a million pounds of apples. In a normal year, Kitchen would sell to processors like Andros that make applesauce, concentrate, and other products. But this year they turned her away. ... Across the country, growers were left without a market. Due to an oversupply carried over from last year's harvest, growers were faced with a game-time economic decision: Should they pay the labor to harvest, crossing their fingers for a buyer to come along, or simply leave the apples to rot?

Bumper crops, export declines and the weather have contributed to the apple crisis

... While many growers in neighboring states like Maryland and Virginia left their apples to drop. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was able to convince the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to pay for the apples produced by growers in his state, which only makes up 1% of the national market.

A relief program in West Virginia donated its surplus apples to hunger-fighting charities

This apple relief program, covered under Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935, purchased $10 million worth of apples from a dozen West Virginia growers. Those apples were then donated to hunger-fighting charities across the country from South Carolina and Michigan all the way out to The Navajo Nation.

Mike Meyer, head of advocacy at The Farmlink Project, says it's the largest food rescue they've ever done and they hope it can serve as a model for their future missions. "There's over 100 billion pounds of produce waste in this country every year; we only need seven billion to drive food insecurity to zero," Meyer says. "We're very happy to have this opportunity. We get to support farmers, we get to fight hunger with an apple. It's one of the most nutritional items we can get into the hands of the food insecure."

At Timber Ridge Fruit Farm in Virginia, owners Cordell and Kim Watt watch a truck from The Farmlink Project load up on their apples before driving out to a food pantry in Bethesda, Md. Despite being headquartered in Virginia, Timber Ridge was able to participate in the apple rescue since they own orchards in West Virginia as well. Cordell is a third-generation grower here and he says they've never had to deal with a surplus this large.

At the So What Else food pantry in Bethesda, Md., apple pallets from Timber Ridge fill the warehouse up to the ceiling. Emanuel Ibanez and other volunteers are picking through the crates, bagging fresh apples into family-sized loads. "I'm just bewildered," Ibanez says. "We have a warehouse full of apples and I can barely walk through it." "People in need got nutritious food out of this program. And that's the most important thing" Executive director Megan Joe says this is the largest shipment of produce they've ever distributed – 10 truckloads over the span of three weeks. The food pantry typically serves 6,000 families, but this shipment has reached a much wider circle. "My coworkers are like, 'Megan, do we really need this many?' And I'm like, yes!" Joe says. "The growing prices in the grocery stores are really tough for a lot of families. And it's honestly gotten worse since COVID."

"It's the first time we've done this type of program, but we believe it can set the stage for the region," Kent Leonhardt, West Virginia's commissioner of agriculture says. "People in need got nutritious food out of this program. And that's the most important thing." Following West Virginia's rescue program, the USDA announced an additional $100 million purchase to relieve the apple surplus in other states around the country. This is the largest government buy of apples and apple products to date. But with the harvest window coming to an end, many growers have already left their apples to drop and rot.

[probablyasocialecologist]

If Ugandans have a social safety net, it is woven from banana fibers, and if there is a clear path to socialism, it will be lined with banana leaves. The lusuku model, premised on intercropping and smallholder farming, could be the basis for national agrarian reform that improves the lives of Uganda’s agricultural workers without accelerating the destruction of the natural environment. Uganda faces increasing difficulty feeding itself because of climate extremes and land degradation, and this affects farmers more significantly than anyone else. Moreover, since the 1990s, the ruling National Resistance Movement regime sold off and dismantled most of the coffee, tea, and cotton growers cooperatives, leaving smallholder farmers in the hands of the predatory middlemen which cooperatives had been established to protect them against. Unable to collectively bargain and exposed to dramatic fluctuations in the market prices for cash crops, many people left rural areas to search for employment in cities. This has been a driving force behind the massive inequality between rural and urban workers. Ugandans now produce more food than they consume, even exporting to other countries in the region, yet 41% of people are undernourished, and agricultural production has decreased over the last 20 years. For the most part, the strategy pursued by Uganda’s government has been to encourage the development of ecologically disastrous intensive agriculture for export, privileging foreign investors rather than developing the infrastructure that would benefit peasants. Indeed, while more than 70% of Ugandans are employed in agriculture, the sector only receives around 4% of public investment, and projects aimed at helping smallholder farmers have had very little success, even by their own standards. Many of the government’s investments in agriculture very clearly advantage larger landowners, to the detriment of the poorest farmers. For example, most of the government’s investment in labor-saving technologies has been spent on tractors, which are great for large plots but largely unaffordable or unsuitable for the average farmer, whose plot is usually between 1-3 acres large. However, a socialist transition premised on agroecological reforms could make use of the existing lusuku model to create the kind of growth that actually improves poor farmers’ lives without destroying their environment. This could begin with reestablishing cooperatives and engineering agricultural prices around social needs and goals, like guaranteeing access to food. Research from around the world has shown that while large, monocrop plantations are good at producing huge volumes of one crop, smallholder farms are more productive when evaluated on a per-unit area and are capable of securing national food sovereignty. Why, for example, should Ugandans buy rice imported from Pakistan or Vietnam when banana intercropping yields more calories per hectare than rice? Lusukus could feed the nation without relying on foreign experts, development aid, or the capital-intensive inputs now being imported to grow for export. Because lusukus are far better for the soil, they also improve the nation’s capacity to resist severe floods and drought, effects of climate change that hit poor farmers hardest. In these ways, the lusuku model could provide a sustainable path to socialist development.

[mindblowingscience]

Water scarcity and the high cost of energy represent the main problems for irrigation communities, which manage water for this end, making it available to agriculture. In a context of drought, with a deregulated and changing electricity market, knowing when and how much water crops are going to be irrigated with would allow those who manage them to overcome uncertainty when making decisions and, therefore, guide them towards objectives like economic savings, environmental sustainability, and efficiency. For this, data science and Artificial Intelligence are important resources.

Continue Reading.

[jcmarchi]

Harvesting Intelligence: How Generative AI is Transforming Agriculture

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/harvesting-intelligence-how-generative-ai-is-transforming-agriculture/

Harvesting Intelligence: How Generative AI is Transforming Agriculture

In the age of digital transformation, agriculture is no longer just about soil, water, and sunlight. With the advent of generative AI, agriculture is becoming smarter, more efficient, and increasingly data driven. From predicting crop yields with unprecedented accuracy to developing disease-resistant plant varieties, generative AI enables farmers to make precise decisions that optimize yields and resource use. This article examines how generative AI is changing agriculture, looking at its impact on traditional farming practices and its potential for the future.

Understanding Generative AI

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence designed to produce new content—whether it’s text, images, or predictive models—based on patterns and examples it has learned from existing data. Unlike traditional AI, which focuses on recognizing patterns or making predictions, generative AI creates original outputs that closely mimic the data it was trained on. This makes it a powerful tool for enhancing decision-making and driving innovation. A key feature of generative AI is to facilitate building AI applications without much labelled training data. This feature is particularly beneficial in fields like agriculture, where acquiring labeled training data can be challenging and costly.

The development of generative AI models involves two main steps: pre-training and fine-tuning. In the pre-training phase, the model is trained on extensive amounts of data to learn general patterns. This process establishes a “foundation” model with broad and versatile knowledge. In the second phase, the pre-trained model is fine-tuned for specific tasks by training it on a smaller, more focused dataset relevant to the intended application, such as detecting crop diseases. These targeted uses of generative AI are referred to as downstream applications. This approach allows the model to perform specialized tasks effectively while leveraging the broad understanding gained during pre-training.

How Generative AI is Transforming Agriculture

In this section, we explore various downstream applications of generative AI in agriculture.

Generative AI as Agronomist Assistant: One of the ongoing issues in agriculture is the lack of qualified agronomists who can offer expert advice on crop production and protection. Addressing this challenge, generative AI can serve as an agronomist assistant by offering farmers immediate expert advice through chatbots. In this context, a recent Microsoft study evaluated how generative AI models, like GPT-4, performed on agriculture-related questions from certification exams in Brazil, India, and the USA. The results were encouraging, showing GPT-4’s ability to handle domain-specific knowledge effectively. However, adapting these models to local, specialized data remains a challenge. Microsoft Research tested two approaches—fine-tuning, which trains models on specific data, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enhances responses by retrieving relevant documents, reporting these relative advantages.

Generative AI for Addressing Data Scarcity in Agriculture: Another key challenge in applying AI to agriculture is the shortage of labeled training data, which is crucial for building effective models. In agriculture, where labeling data can be labor-intensive and costly, generative AI offers a promising way forward. Generative AI stands out for its ability to work with large amounts of unlabeled historical data, learning general patterns that allow it to make accurate predictions with only a small number of labeled examples. Additionally, it can create synthetic training data, helping to fill gaps where data is scarce. By addressing these data challenges, generative AI improves the performance of AI in agriculture.

Precision Farming: Generative AI is changing precision farming by analyzing data from sources such as satellite imagery, soil sensors, and weather forecasts. It helps with predicting crop yields, automating fruit harvesting, managing livestock, and optimizing irrigation. These insights enable farmers to make better decisions, improving crop health and yields while using resources more efficiently. This approach not only increases productivity but also supports sustainable farming by reducing waste and environmental impact.

Generative AI for Disease Detection: Timely detection of pests, diseases, and nutrient deficiencies is crucial for protecting crops and reducing losses. Generative AI uses advanced image recognition and pattern analysis to identify early signs of these issues. By detecting problems early, farmers can take targeted actions, reduce the need for broad-spectrum pesticides, and minimize environmental impact. This integration of AI in agriculture enhances both sustainability and productivity.

How to Maximize the Impact of Generative AI in Agriculture

While current applications show that generative AI has potential in agriculture, getting the most out of this technology requires developing specialized generative AI models for the field. These models can better understand the nuances of farming, leading to more accurate and useful results compared to general-purpose models. They also adapt more effectively to different farming practices and conditions. The creation of these models, however, involves gathering large amounts of diverse agricultural data—such as crop and pest images, weather data, and insect sounds—and experimenting with different pretraining methods. Although progress is being made, there’s still a lot of work needed to build effective generative AI models for agriculture. Some of the potential use cases of generative AI for agriculture are mentioned below.

Potential Use Cases

A specialized generative AI model for agriculture could open several new opportunities in the field. Some key use cases include:

Smart Crop Management: In agriculture, smart crop management is a growing field that integrates AI, IoT, and big data to enhance tasks like plant growth monitoring, disease detection, yield monitoring, and harvesting. Developing precision crop management algorithms is challenging due to diverse crop types, environmental variables, and limited datasets, often requiring integration of varied data sources such as satellite imagery, soil sensors, and market trends. Generative AI models trained on extensive, multi-domain datasets offer a promising solution, as they can be fine-tuned with minimal examples for various applications. Additionally, multimodal generative AI integrates visual, textual, and sometimes auditory data, providing a comprehensive analytical approach that is invaluable for understanding complex agricultural situations, especially in precision crop management.

Automated Creation of Crop Varieties: Specialized generative AI can transform crop breeding by creating new plant varieties through exploring genetic combinations. By analyzing data on traits like drought resistance and growth rates, the AI generates innovative genetic blueprints and predicts their performance in different environments. This helps identify promising genetic combinations quickly, guiding breeding programs and accelerating the development of optimized crops. This approach aids farmers in adapting to changing conditions and market demands more effectively.

Smart Livestock Farming: Smart livestock farming leverages IoT, AI, and advanced control technologies to automate essential tasks like food and water supply, egg collection, activity monitoring, and environmental management. This approach aims to boost efficiency and cut costs in labor, maintenance, and materials. The field faces challenges due to the need for expertise across multiple fields and labor-intensive job. Generative AI could address these challenges by integrating extensive multimodal data and cross-domain knowledge, helping to streamline decision-making and automate livestock management.

Agricultural robots: Agricultural robots are transforming modern farming by automating tasks such as planting, weeding, harvesting, and monitoring crop health. AI-guided robots can precisely remove weeds and drones with advanced sensors can detect diseases and pests early, reducing yield losses. Developing these robots requires expertise in robotics, AI, plant science, environmental science, and data analytics, handling complex data from various sources. Generative AI offers a promising solution for automating various tasks of agricultural robots by providing advanced vision, predictive, and control capabilities.

 The Bottom Line

Generative AI is reshaping agriculture with smarter, data-driven solutions that improve efficiency and sustainability. By enhancing crop yield predictions, disease detection, and crop breeding, this technology is transforming traditional farming practices. While current applications are promising, the real potential lies in developing specialized AI models tailored to the unique needs of agriculture. As we refine these models and integrate diverse data, we can unlock new opportunities to help farmers optimize their practices and better navigate the challenges of modern farming.

[cognitivejustice]

Hundreds of people, and a handful of grassroots cooperatives, collectives and networks, are trying to figure out how to build an alternative to capitalist industrial agriculture, and not a moment too soon. 

25% of children in London face hunger during the school holidays. A total of 3.2 million adults in the UK reported not eating for a whole day because they couldn’t afford or access food. 70% of our wildlife has been obliterated in the last 50 years, 64% of our insects in the last 20. Crops contain 40% fewer nutrients than they did 100 years ago. 99% of London’s food comes from outside the city, while almost one third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, one fifth being from transporting it alone.

Where do you even start when the industrial model has wrecked so much? As the Zapatistas say, there are many yeses and one no. Twenty years ago, a group of young growers persuaded Waltham Forest Council to lease them 12 acres on the edge of the city, to start a cooperative farm. Today, OrganicLea distributes hundreds of veg boxes each week at tiered solidarity prices and has trained hundreds of new growers. This is a flagship `Yes’, but there are others. Several food cooperatives redistribute surplus food and buy produce in bulk to cut costs. At least three community cafes sell high-quality food at variable rates people can afford, providing vital refuges in a gentrifying, hostile city. And dozens of community gardens practice regenerative ways of caring for the land, reclaiming small pockets of the city and tending the otherwise eroded agency of its inhabitants. 

From the food forest started in an abandoned church garden by XR activists, to the healing herb gardens cultivated by the Community Apothecary (a collective offering affordable herbal medicine) to Time To Grow! (TTG) a project helping people grow food for the community in unused private gardens, there’s an endless appetite here for experimenting with localised alternatives to capitalist agriculture. And in these times of worsening climate unravelling, of desperate isolation, of profound (however artificial) resource scarcity, growing food with each other feels like a wise move. 

The youth-led collective Climate Vanguard explains how growing food in the community can be part of building a transformative mass movement by thinking of them as “climate survival programmes”. Just as the Black Panther Party’s breakfast programs were key to building popular power, growing can be a way to ameliorate the worse effects of climate breakdown and build the power we need to transform the economic system causing it. 

[rjzimmerman]

How to Repair the Planet? One Answer Might Be Hiding in Plain Sight. (New York Times)

Yes, yes and another triple yes to this premise of this article: we can address the various global crises facing us by looking at them "holistically" rather than as separate silos. I've been harping on this since I started this blog: deal with the "traditional" environmental issues, such as the collapse of biodiversity, properly, and simultaneously we might also be dealing with the newer and evolving climate crisis issues. All part of one, instead of separate kingdoms that benefit academia rather than the rest of us.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Sometimes, human needs can make problems like climate change and biodiversity collapse seem insurmountable. The world still relies on fossil fuels that are dangerously heating the planet. People need to eat, but agriculture is a top driver of biodiversity loss.

But what if we’re looking at those problems the wrong way? What if we tackled them as a whole, instead of individually?

A landmark assessment, commissioned by 147 countries and made public on Tuesday, offers the most comprehensive answer to date, examining the sometimes dizzying interconnections among biodiversity, climate change, food, water and health.

“Our current approaches to dealing with these crises have tended to be fragmented or siloed,” said Paula Harrison, a co-chair of the assessment and an environmental scientist who focuses on land and water modeling at the UK Center for Ecology & Hydrology, a research organization. “That’s led to inefficiencies and has often been counterproductive.”

The report, by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, an independent panel that advises governments on biodiversity issues, focuses heavily on solutions. It includes scores of potential interventions along with their cascading effects. For example, the authors note that efforts like incorporating prairie strips, areas of native vegetation amid crop rows, or strategically locating trees on farmland can help with biodiversity, food production, human well-being, water quality and climate change all at once.

Not all situations will have multiple wins. Often, negative consequences are unavoidable. But people should be aware of the trade-offs and make them deliberately, from national governments all the way to local communities, the authors said.

“Right now, we don’t take account of a lot of the trade-offs,” said Pamela McElwee, also a co-chair of the assessment and a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. “And so, they get passed on to somebody else.”

Overlooked costs to biodiversity, climate, water and health from the fossil fuel, agriculture and fisheries sectors were estimated at $10 trillion to $25 trillion per year. Negative health consequences were especially costly, Dr. McElwee said. For instance, she pointed to the nine million people a year who die from air pollution, and the rise in obesity and diabetes because of unhealthy diets that also harm biodiversity and contribute to climate change.

[tzifron]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a major influencer and funder of agricultural development in Africa, with little accountability or transparency. Leading experts in food security and many groups in Africa and around the world have critiqued the foundation’s push to expand high-cost, high-input, chemical-dependent agriculture in Africa. Critics say this approach is exacerbating hunger, worsening inequality and entrenching corporate power in the world’s hungriest region.

This fact sheet links to reports and news articles documenting these concerns.

[...]

What are the main critiques of Gates Foundation’s agricultural program?

The Gates Foundation’s flagship agricultural program, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA, which recently rebranded to remove the term “green revolution” from its name), works to transition farmers away from traditional seeds and crops to patented seeds, fossil-fuel based fertilizers and other inputs to grow commodity crops for the global market. The foundation says its goal is to “boost the yields and incomes of millions of small farmers in Africa… so they can lift themselves and their families out of hunger and poverty.” The strategy is modeled on the Indian “green revolution” that boosted production of staple crops but also left a legacy of structural inequity and escalating debt for farmers that contributed to massive mobilizations of peasant farmers in India.

Critics have said the green revolution is a failed approach for poverty reduction that has created more problems than it has solved; these include environmental degradation, growing pesticide use, reduced diversity of food crops, and increased corporate control over food systems. Several recent research reports provide evidence that Gates-led agricultural interventions in Africa have failed to help small farmers. Critics say the programs may even be worsening hunger and malnutrition in Southern Africa.