Regenerating Food & Agriculture with Software

We begin with Michael Olson’s First Law of the Food Chain:  Agriculture is the foundation upon which we build all our sand castles.

Without the food made available by a successful agriculture, we all become hunters and gatherers – turning over logs looking for things to eat. We become hunters and gatherers with insufficient time to build the sand castles in which we now live.

It is easy for us city people to forget this elemental fact.  Most of our food, after all, comes from an average of 1200 miles away – in plastic packages affixed with colorful and promising labels.

Given how easy it is to eat, it is also easy to forget about how important that distant agriculture is to our day to day lives.  It is easy to forget that farmland and farmers must be sustained, and even regenerated.  We must find a way to support our future farmers to grow food so future people can build sandcastles.

There are some who say that, given the world’s exploding population, sustaining and even attempting to regenerating farmland sufficient to feed everyone is an impossibility.  For example, 1968’s The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich began with, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Ehrlich’s prediction of doom did not come true, largely because technology, specifically that of The Green Revolution, increased the production of agriculture – thereby also making it possible to more than double the world’s population.

The Population Bomb did accurately point out the world’s population explosion.  And so, it follows – for agriculture to continue to sustain feeding the expanding populations,  agriculture must continue regenerating with technology. And so we ask: Can software help regenerate and sustain farms and farmers?

Leave a comment below: Will software open the door to another Green Revolution?

Tune in here, for the syndicated Michael Olson Food Chain Radio Show #1393 May  10, 2025 Saturday 9AM Pacific