Polk County Iowa is where Des Moines is - the largest city in Iowa. (I live the next county over, but I bike to Polk county all the time) This is not a good location to run this because the farm land is owned by farmer/investors or farmer/developers - either way everybody knows the farm will become a suburb in the next 20 years and has priced accordingly (and if the timeline is is less than 5 years they have switched to mining mode - strip out the last fertility before the development destroys the land anyway). Which is to say you can get much better land deals elsewhere (and by making your search wider) - sometimes the price might be higher but that is because the land/soil is better.

Overall I don't think this is useful. They might or might not get good results. However it is really hard to beat the farmer/laborer who lives close to the farm and thus sees things happen and can react quickly. There is also great value in knowing your land, though they should get records of what has happened in the past (this is all in a computer, but you won't always get access to it when you buy/lease land). Farmers are already using computers to guide decisions.

My prediction: they lose money. Not because the AI does stupid things (though that might happen), but because last year harvests were really good and so supply and demand means many farms will lose money no matter what you do. But if the weather is just right he could make a lot of money when other farmers have a really bad harvest (that is he has a large harvest but everyone else has a terrible harvest).

Iowa has strong farm ownership laws. There is real risk he will get shutdown somehow because what he is doing is somehow illegal. I'm not sure what the laws are, check with a real lawyer. (This is why Bill Gates doesn't own Iowa farm land - he legally can't do what he wants with Iowa farm land)

▲ Yeroc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!

▲ bluGill 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal made over the internet, they are made in person with a handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case - worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate truck and needs to be attached). You need to clean the machine out after every field and put new seed in... It isn't worth planting 5 acres of corn. You need volume - and in turn a lot of land - to make corn work.

▲ Yeroc an hour ago | parent [-]

Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring farmer to take pity on him.

	▲	LeifCarrotson 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!) from farmerfred@proofofcorn.com reading generally: > I'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you} and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to work that land for me, are you interested? I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm sure that being an out-of-state investor who doesn't have any physical hands to finalize the deal with a handshake is an impediment, but with enough tokens, Farmer Fred could make 100,000 phone calls and send out 100,000 emails to every landowner and work-for-hire equipment operator in Iowa, Texas, and Argentina by this afternoon. If there exists a human who would make that deal, Fred can eventually find them. Seth would be limited in his chance to succeed in these efforts because he can only make one 1-minute phone call per minute, Fred can become as many callers as Anthropic owns GPUs. I do find it amusing that Fred currently shows the following dashboard: `Iowa HOLD 0°F Unknown (API error) Fred's Thinking: “Iowa is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.” Fred is here South Texas HOLD 0°F Unknown (API error) Fred's Thinking: “South Texas is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.” Argentina HOLD 0°F Unknown (API error) Fred's Thinking: “Argentina is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”` Any human Fred might call in the Argentinian summer or 70F South Texas winter weather is not going to gain confidence when Fred tries to build rapport through some small talk about the unseasonably cold weather...
	▲	rappatic 18 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I love the variety of people that come to HN. There are real farmers weighing on on the plausibility of this.

▲ bjt 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It reminds me of when I worked at an ag tech startup for a few years. We visited farms up and down the central valley of California, and the general tone toward Silicon Valley is an intense dislike of overconfident 20-somethings with a prototype who think they're going to revolutionize agriculture in some way, but are far, far away from having enough context to see the constraints they're operating under and the tradeoffs being made.

Replacing the farm manager with an AI multiplies that problem by a hundred. A thousand? A million? A lot. AI may get some sensor data but it's not going to stick its hand in the dirt and say "this feels too dry". It won't hear the weird pinging noise that the tractor's been making and describe it to the mechanic. It may try to hire underlings but, how will it know which employees are working hard and which ones are stealing from it? (Compare Anthropic's experiments with having AI run a little retail store, and get tricked into selling tungsten cubes at a steep discount.)

I got excited when I opened the website and at first had the impression that they'd actually gotten AI to grow something. Instead it's built a website and sent some emails. Not worth our attention, yet.

▲ knowitnone3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?

	▲	bluGill 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bill gates is one of the largest farmland owners in the world (or at least was - I last checked about 10 years ago...) He hires people to work on his farm, and managers to manage it. Food is the most important thing for modern society and the reports I have suggest he is trying to raise food in the most sustainable fashion possible (organic is often not sustainable)
	▲	malfist an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Same as any other big real estate investor: speculate.
	▲	mrguyorama an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Collect rent. That's all rich people do. The premise of capitalism is that the people best at collecting rent should also be in total control of resource allocation.