How tech firms are building their own farm service agencies
A new startup is turning the internet of things into a fully-fledged service industry, promising to help farmworkers and ranchers keep their livestock, and to help them find affordable housing in the rapidly gentrifying region.
Farm Service Agency, founded in New York by former NASA engineer and now CEO Jeff Grosse, uses a blockchain to manage and store farm inventory.
Its service, which is being built in partnership with several startups, promises to help people in a way that traditional farms don’t.
“It’s like a new kind of company,” Grosse told Recode.
“The way we do business is by being flexible and not limiting our service to a certain number of customers.”
The technology that powers the Farm Service Agency is a combination of machine learning and deep learning, according to the company’s website.
That means the software is able to analyze data from sensors on farms and determine if there are any problems with the farm.
If there are, it will be able to automatically update its system to correct those problems and start running new operations.
It also means that farm owners can control when their animals need to go to the vet, or even when they can get a new one, Grosse said.
He expects the Farm Services Agency to be a popular service for the growing number of farm workers who have lost their jobs, or are now facing eviction due to climate change.
“A lot of people have lost jobs because of climate change,” Gross said.
“We want to bring them back into agriculture and help them keep their families fed and provide them with a living wage.””
Grosse also said Farm Service will be helping the local communities by connecting with farmers and rancher groups to create programs for farmers to sell their produce. “
We want to bring them back into agriculture and help them keep their families fed and provide them with a living wage.”
Grosse also said Farm Service will be helping the local communities by connecting with farmers and rancher groups to create programs for farmers to sell their produce.
“Our mission is to provide these farmers with the tools to be able be productive,” he said.
As for the future, the Farm Servants is planning to expand to more rural communities, so it’s planning to hire more employees to help out.
It’s also partnering with tech companies, like Amazon, to build its own apps to allow people to sell and buy farm products, and it’s launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund new farm services for farmers in remote locations.
Grosse said Farm Services is currently looking for “very passionate” business owners, who will be paid $15 an hour, and will be given access to the software that powers their farm.
It will also offer financial incentives for companies to expand.
“If we get enough people willing to pay for this service, we could potentially grow to hundreds of thousands of farmers,” he told Recosode.
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