Research is what we are all about!
Research will be able to help the most people with limited resources, and maybe help create the farming future that will help us make hunger and lack of food something for history books to explain to children.
We have a simple formula to score the quality of what we grow that will tell us what is a winner vs. what did not work out. High quality crops are our primary goal. The formula goes like this:
space available / (time + materials) = input cost per area
yield / input cost per area = value of yield
value of yield / remaining soil quality = quality of yield
You also have to consider the effect non-primary crops have on the potential of primaries, which can be simply considered as a material + time cost for the product you are growing. So if you have to plant a cover crop after planting a primary to replenish the soils nitrogen, this should be considered as part of the cost, and time you cannot grow your primary crops, which can affect what crops are considered as primary. This is the general meaning of the “remaining soil quality” and why it has to affect the value of the yield.
Research to us is only as good as the data collected. Just by judging yields and raw costs is really adding luck or magic to the formula that we would prefer to avoid. While you can’t track everything (solar winds, Mercury in retrograde… just kidding) we can track a large number of elements and store them. Things like soil PH, light provided, water density of the soil, position, time of year, days to harvest, distance from other crops, soil amendments, types of amendments including brands all in an automated way. We will also want to track tillage, depth and type, companion planting dates and distance, The relationships may or may not be apparent but having the data will allow us to eventually noodle the relationships out.
Of course, assumptions on data collection can throw a wrench in the data as well. For example we had a bed this year that was on a western slope which after heavy rains ended up with our originally finely defined planting areas for Broccoli, Red Leaf lettuce, Spinach, and Carrots being turned into a giant slush pit with everything moved around because it flooded! Some of this leads to further data collection such as “needs cover fabric from seed”. But there is no doubt this is a journey, not a finished plan. This is why it is so important to collect the data so we can determine very simply what works and what does not.
Collection will start simple, with logbooks to start. We will be building strategies and identifying software solutions to help us collect our metrics so we can learn to be as efficient as possible while improving our soil quality.
Lets make hunger a thing of the past!