On the Horizons of a New Ag Tech — GOAT Gathering 2024
We convened just before the US presidential election, most of us arriving at the storied Paicines Ranch the evening of November 3rd.
Our mission was simple, to gather around and exchange information on what was happening in the landscape of open agriculture technologies. Our squad was geek-strong, from maker farmers and casual robotics tinkerers, to computer scientists with passions for permaculture, and everyone in between. In one week, we coalesced into the GOAT (Gathering for Open Ag Tech) discussing the realities and our hopes for the future of food. This gathering was writ participatory, open and in most visions, decentralized.
Since we entered back into the world a few days later, and just after the most divisive American election in history, with wildfire smoke in the air, I’ll start from the end.
A truck passed as I sat in a van being driven by Farmer Dave — a man famous for his hand tractor prototype — the truck had two Trump flags blazing at the back of its bed. Conversations of interoperability, of open tech in agriculture continued with no audible commentary while the embellished truck peeled along our left. Some of the women shifted, while the men truly seemed not to notice. We maintained our thematic bubble while the existing world came into view.
Similarly, as the van doors opened and our bubble burst into the atmosphere of the busy San Francisco airport, we became a part of it all.
The deeper we explore into the future of food we come up into a swirl of complexity, one where atmosphere and shared air is always at issue. Kicked up by our collective treads and our existing agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuels in the field, this complexity has been going ever higher, mingling into the upper levels of every aspect of our very human world.
Our deep explorations couldn’t help but kick up against the winds of class and labor, into the horizons of economic leanings, market demands and other patterns that decide who gets funded, certified and how much it all costs.
As election night went from two possibilities to a final decision, GOATs turned devotedly towards visions beyond parties, beyond the existing dualities. Some people drank to cheer themselves while some toasted their winner, but by morning, there was only one GOAT camp.
Since most Ag Tech doesn’t serve that iconic small farmer America likes to imagine it still loves and supports — a farmer that barely manages to exist, the clouds of our growing atmosphere did become even more complex. Vocabularies grew instead of contracting. More stakeholders, not fewer were noted in emerging supply chains. Bioregions took hold on our maps, shifting prominence away from the much more arbitrary lines of states and countries.
At GOAT no one for a minute thought of words like liberal and conservative stakeholders, since nobody thought for a second that these two words had relevance in the actual work to be done to improve our food system. GOATs talked about the actual workers who need to move with their reputations from farm to farm. They talked about data harvested from farmers in ways that would qualify as theft if we were talking hay or wheat production. Ecosystems of need and desire, of freshwater for farming and for fishing, for swimming in lakes with children, all came up in conversation. Words like relationship came up again and again.
All our lives and health depend on decentralization, transparency and freedom of movement, and the future of our food does too. From micro to macro, from natural and biological to the AI integrations and new types of biology; there is no way to imagine the future of food without imagining an ecosystem that is inherently agile, open and transparent.
There is no way to imagine the future of food without more justice and liberty for each worker, grower, and for each consumer. Whatever this means for your politics, well that’s up to you. What it meant for the GOATs was to simply get on with the work of keeping the small farmer viable now and for a long while.
Small scale growers can indeed be the most nimble members of a new food system, at least with the right tools they can be. From panels with local farmer advocates from CAFF and PASA I was reminded how crucial support networks are to today’s food producers. Hearing how many of the farmers attending are leveraged with grants and loans, I remembered that a tiny slip can cost a farmer just about everything plus a little more.
Conscious, creative farming can cut the chaos of intensely dynamic conditions by applying the right tools. But what makes the right tools? Who gets to say? And who gets to develop them with their input and when? This is why the gathering matters.
From opening circle to closing fire, the Gathering for Open Ag Technology, calls forth the minds and hearts of a particular kind of creative community. Food systems will not repair in a day, but without true creativity and artistry, they will never repair in time to feed our next generations. Politically our vocabularies may have collapsed into two sides and two views, into something resembling a rather predictable movie script. Inside the world where technology and nature co-exist the opposite is true, since in reality the expansion of language, of roles and networks, is necessary and growing.
The Paicines Ranch experience was a leap into inhabiting a future where food systems are beautiful and healthy in every way. Challenges will arise and can be addressed with ease and the interconnection of tools and data sharing. In the GOAT vision that emerged data will no longer exploited or hoarded by the agencies and big buyers. Instead the data will run clear and transparent as wind and rain, accumulating into pools of value at the feet of today’s beleaguered farmers. In this vision people will also be free to move, to work and caretake, to swim in the waters their farms no longer pollute, to breathe in air no longer thick with pesticides. For a week we imagined our spots in these emergent systems, and connected our dots to what we desire and what we can do. We busied ourselves with breakout groups considering ways to increase the harmony between these needs and these communities. We imagined the path, and truth be told, new governance models never sounded so sweet.
During the 2024 GOAT, politics took a backseat to creativity. The dumpster fire of division ebbed as the gathering stayed focused. It lasted until we reached that highway and burst into the general population. When a bubble bursts, all we have is shared air.
Note: I’ll be taking a deeper dive into some of the tech and the farmers who attended GOAT 2024 throughout this year. Stay tuned!
