AgMonitor Inc. (AgMonitor.com) | San Mateo or Santa Barbara CA | ONSITE
AgMonitor is working to address one of the big world challenges: agricultural use of water and energy. Our proven platform applies AI and crop science to help farmers optimize their water and energy use while improving profits.
We are hiring a full stack developer (React+Django/Python) to help build the next generation of our platform. A few of the upcoming projects include integrating satellite-derived data and expanding our energy optimization tools.
PowWow.io helps farmers manage their crops more efficiently using data science and the latest agronomic methods. We have backing by many large farmers in California and have won awards for our product and its innovations that save water and energy while improving yields.
We are hiring a full stack developer (React+Django/Python) to help build the next generation of our platform.
PowWow Energy, San Mateo CA, ONSITE. Geo-Spatial Data Scientist
Are you interested in helping the world grow more food with less water and energy? PowWow Energy applies AI & Machine Learning to help farms optimize profit and yield so they can grow more with 10% less water.
We are hiring a data scientist with Geospatial/GIS experience to help us design and build the next generation of our platform. You'd be part of the core team architecting and building a system focused on delivering answers, not just data visualizations. GIS knowledge and Python experience is required. Image processing experience is a plus. The ideal candidate has either worked with agricultural data or grown up on or around farming.
Part of this work is research funded by California Energy Commission and part of the work will be building production code.
Our team includes experienced and successful entrepreneurs from MIT and UCSB and our science advisors are well known known agronomists and industry experts.
You must have a learning mindset and open to helping bridge the cultural gap between Silicon Valley and farmers.
You can reach me directly via stan@powwowenergy.com
Are you interested in helping the world grow more food with less water and energy? PowWow Energy applies AI & Machine Learning to help farms optimize profit and yield so they can grow more with 10% less water.
We are hiring an experienced front-end developer to us design and build the next generation of our platform. You'd be part of the core team architecting and building a system focused on delivering answers, not just data visualizations. We'd like 3 years javascript experience, ideally with some experience using React/Redux. It will help if you've worked with GIS or Mapping systems or Python/Django on the server.
Our team includes experienced and successful entrepreneurs from MIT and UCSB and our science advisors are well known known agronomists.
You must have a learning mindset and open to helping bridge the cultural gap between Silicon Valley and farmers.
You can reach me directly via stan -at- powwowenergy.com
What are your goals for you research or project? Many ideas stumble not on the technology, but on the people aspects of the project.
If your goal is a single family sustainable farm, I've read reports of 2 or 3 acres being plenty for a family of four if you are in an area with enough rainfall (Ohio, for example). However, they needed to have outside income since their land did not produce everything the needed.
If you are thinking of a larger group like commune of 25 people, or a town like you mention, you will to look into the issues present in those communities, and getting food is usually not the biggest issue. For example, several co-housing projects fail due to the families involved not being able to raise enough money to purchase the land the need. Other small groups buy farmland but don't have the capital or expertise to actually farm and produce enough to be economically viable. Useful farmland is not cheap, and the economics get in the way quickly.
Farming is a complex business. It won't be "fully automated" anytime soon, particularly for the variety of crops people like to have. For example, my parent's potato farm also had a vegetable garden for carrots and onions, and they raised chickens. They ate a lot of soup, since that is what they grew without needing to spend money, meat was expensive. Economically they sold potatoes to have money to buy everything things they needed (gas for tractor, salt, tools, etc.).
Note: I am a cofounder at www.powwowenergy.com, a data mining company based in San Mateo CA where we help farmers be more efficient. If you are a data scientist or developer looking to help the world feed more people, drop me a note, we are hiring.
This is just a tiny part of a much broader goal, which is to create a completely self sustaining town of 100 to 1000 people within my lifetime. My intention is with 100k that could get you 10 acres. 1 acre for food, 5 for solar/energy production and 4 for housing/community. Of course, with the comments in this thread, I'd need more land, haha.
As far as the economics goes: I've been doing reading but haven't formed a good conclusion yet. Initially I thought a communalist approach would work. I thought of too many ways that would fail and then opted more for a centralized, socialist approach, but that seems like it would fail as well. Capitalism, of course, would just result in what we have now, defeating the purpose. Personally I think communities where each person knows everyone else have unique advantages not present in large cities.
Disclaimer: I haven't done a ton of due diligence on these things yet. When I get closer to actually doing this I'll start doing more serious research.
The keyword here is "intentional community", and there's a long history of people trying to make it work and sometimes succeeding nicely.
But neither farming nor technology is key to making it work. The challenges in decreasing order of size are: interpersonal (requires a lot more collaborative effort and management of drama than you'd expect); legal/administrative (you still need to pay e.g. property tax & comply with building codes & farming law); cashflow (you still need to buy from outside, especially if you're hightech); and only then the day to day of growing food (which may be more labour than you or the community is used to).
On the <100 people scale it's like having roommates who are also co-workers. Hence the tendency for intentional communities to come with some level of cultishness to ensure the community sticks together without being pulled apart by individuality.
This may be exactly the opposite way to look at it, but have a peek at [1] the One Straw Revolution. TL;DR: Masanobu Fukuoka was a scientist with an idea of using existing biological systems to reduce the amount of labour involved in farming. He created a very nearly zero-input farming system with the hope of enabling people to grow enough food to sustain themselves in their spare time.
Unfortunately, lots and lots of hype surrounded the project and reliable numbers of yield, etc, etc are probably not to be found. Still there have been lots and lots of similar initiatives with interesting results. I think you would need quite a lot of land for 100 people, but land is cheaper than robots (and is self repairing, and adds to your quality of life). I have a friend who grows all his rice and vegetables for the year in his spare time using Fukuoka's methods (he studied with him for a while). I helped him harvest once and I was quite surprised how well he was doing (easily as much yield as his neighbour's commercial farm). Farm land is trivial to get in Japan and you can often borrow enough to live off of in exchange for a bottle of whiskey or so per year.
How will this town get medicine and technologies like replacement solar panels? Will people pay with USD into a general fund that would be used to buy from the outside world? What happens if people can't pay?
Sorry about all the questions, but a community that small can hardly be self sustaining in a real sense without lots of imports or a massive step down in quality of life.
Indeed. Ideally (need to do more research) the community would self sustaining with a low quality of life, however, all of the usual amenities would be provided. The difficulty is setting it up so that they don't necessarily become entitled or dependent on the advanced amenities.
We are looking for a passionate full stack developer to help farming communities to make their life easier and enable them to grow more with less. We integrate sensors, weather, imagery and other data to produce answers we send to farmers in the field. We are one of the leading agricultural technology companies in California.
The developer joining us will be in the driver’s seat to design and build new key modules across the product and help us grow. You'll be collaborating in a team that includes startup veterans, data science experts and world class image processing experts.
PowWow Energy, Redwood City CA | ONSITE | Python, Django, jQuery
One of California’s leading agricultural technology companies is in search of a passionate developer to bring technology to the farming communities to make their life easier and enable them to grow more with less. You’ll be in the driver’s seat to design and build new key modules such as irrigation scheduling.
We are looking for an experienced full stack developer that can take charge of a module to design and build both the client side javascript and the required server side and backend code. You'll be joining a team that includes startup veterans, data science experts and world class image processing experts.
PowWow Energy - Redwood City CA - full stack or backend developer
Join our team and help ease the drought by helping farmers!
We are looking for a talented full stack or backend developer to join an award winning early-stage start-up. You'd be joining an experienced entrepreneurial team in creating software that delivers answers to farmers in the field to assist them in their daily operation, and as a by-product save significant water and energy.
You should be a team player with demonstrated ability to build applications. As a member of the software development team, you must be self-starting with the ability to help figure out what we need to do, then do it with a positive attitude. Our current software stack is JQuery and Google Maps on the client side, with Python / Django on the server side, using PostGIS as the database.
Required skills:
* Minimum 5 years working professionally as a software developer, preferably with a SaaS product
* Relational database and SQL experience, ideally with Postgres
* Some Javascript/CSS3/HTML5 experience, preferably with JQuery and Bootstrap
* B.S. in software engineering or computer science
Highly desired skills:
* Operational experience with AWS
* M.S. in computer science or experience as software lead in a VC-backed start-up
What's in it for you?
* Join an award winning start-up at an early-stage
* Have an impact on agriculture and water sector
* Room for growth and ability to help define the culture of the company
About PowWow Energy
PowWow Energy, Inc. (http://www.powwowenergy.com) is a leading innovator in the Agriculture & Food sectors. Based in California, our team leverages Big Data and emerging Internet of Things technologies to provide simple answers to farmers in the field. By helping them manage risks in their daily operations, we help them save water and energy while improving their bottom line. Our first SaaS application, the Pump Monitor with smart leak detection™, was a Cleantech Open 2013 winner. We have since extended our capabilities using the same no-hardware, Software-as-a-Service business model to ease farming operations, and further improve water use efficiency and energy efficiency.
PowWow Energy needs a UI Developer for the core team.
We are in San Francisco and will be moving to Redwood City in July.
PowWow Energy delivers answers to farmers using our analytics platform. We focus on helping growers save energy and water while also improving their crops and their profitability.
We won the national CleanTech Open in 2013 against 400 companies and have recently been award a state grant to bring some new technology to market.
If you want to help solve the big problems in agriculture, please email jobs@powwowenergy.com with your resume to apply.
AgMonitor is working to address one of the big world challenges: agricultural use of water and energy. Our proven platform applies AI and crop science to help farmers optimize their water and energy use while improving profits.
We are hiring a full stack developer (React+Django/Python) to help build the next generation of our platform. A few of the upcoming projects include integrating satellite-derived data and expanding our energy optimization tools.
The job description is at https://angel.co/company/agmonitor-inc/jobs/1454945-software...
To apply, send your resume to jobs@agmonitor.com