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Using technology to create a network of local food and expertise

Once you learn enough about healthcare it's inevitable that you look for the down stream cause of a lot of the problems. One is clearly at the government level. However, the government is likely to be more of a problem than the solution. The other is that the food we eat and how we get it is a huge source of our health problems (i.e. obesity, cancer, etc.). This is why I began learning about healthy eating and more importantly the need for each of us to grow our own food (at least some of it). In an age of consumerism, I agree with the wise words of Charles Hughes Smith, "a garden and a home cooked meal become revolutionary acts".

We as a country have lost touch with what we eat and as a result rely heavily on eating what we're told. You can't find a bargain in nature, you can't grew corn because it's cheap, then subsidize the industry to grow even more and then find new ways to shove it into our stomachs (when those are full, then our gas tanks) but the true costs always show up, and often end up costing much more than going to natural way (obesity, sickness, overuse of antibiotics in animals, etc.). The way to embrace technology is to make us better as using nature in the way it evolved to work, not to try bend it to our will.

The goverment and existing policies move too slow, and have been coopted up by too many wealthy and powerful interests/lobbyists/Monsanto/Etc. Such a venture needs money, vision and ability to develop outside of the food-industrial complex. We need to bring crowdsourcing and internet capabilities into the real world - Networked, social SaaS (Software as a Service).

How do we get started? How to connect the thousands of isolated garden initiatives/coops/websites/community gardens etc.? How do we build the technology to create an easy path of adoption and engagement with a population that might not even recognize a tomato? How do we create Farmville but in real life, with real food and provide real value? There needs to be an app for that, but how do we build it?

We need to be clear that we are not creating hippy communes. The revolution will be crowdsourced and driven by cutting edge technology. This isn't the 70s, no flower power needed, just the cloud. We are looking to use and create the most advanced farming techniques, visual recognition, data analysis tools, human behavioral psychology/economic understanding.

Tags: garden, network, resilience

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