Autonomous Transportation and “Crowd Sourced Agriculture”

Now that we have the Internet letting me choose, and the Autonomous Transportation System delivering my food, let’s explore what else might change with these new tools.

It takes time and money and energy to run a CSA, in addition to growing the food. What if you like to grow things, but don’t want to do all the other things needed to operate a CSA? Or a farm stand? 

My cousin Bobby started growing tomatoes in his back yard. He gave the surplus away to friends and neighbors. Then people wanted more and were willing to pay for them. Gradually Bobby started a stand in his front yard, now it has turned into quite a business.

In addition to sharing with friends and family, what if you could easily sell your surplus? The Internet makes that easy for lots of other items, witness the success of eBay. I predict similar Internet markets will develop for food. Today this works especially well in a community where you know people, and distances are short, so the food stays fresh.

43 million, or 37%, US households had food gardens in 2009. Their investment of $2.5 billion yielded a $21 billion return.

86% of food gardeners grow tomatoes, and in a good year you either preserve them like crazy or share them with friends because you are overflowing with tomatoes.

The mother of one of my daughter’s friends in school started sending surplus tomatoes with her husband to colleagues at his undertaker establishment in Brooklyn. That gradually transformed to people paying for more produce – New Jersey is the “Garden State” for a reason (and you thought it was just the oil refineries near Newark's Liberty Airport). This grew into taking a van full of produce to sell in the markets in New York City. Then she rented a small field and grew her own vegetables to sell. Finally the whole family moved to a farm and grows food full-time.

You might think this only works in rural areas, but suburban farmers can do it too. My wife used to grow almost all our vegetables and the freezer kept us eating until the next crop came in. If you have ever had a cantaloupe fresh from the vine, you know how luscious it is, and it bears almost no relationship to the things called cantaloup in the grocery store J.

Perhaps even more surprising, it is happening in cities too. Here’s an exciting view of students growing gardens in the South Bronx. If you want to read more, here is a NY Times collection on Urban Agriculture.

So people who like to garden can help feed everyone using a combination of the Internet and Autonomous Transportation.

Super Storm Sandy Spells Disaster

My wife and I were up in the Adirondacks, preparing for a Halloween celebration with our kayaking friends, when the rapidly emerging threat of Super Storm Sandy forced us to drive back to Long Branch, NJ to prepare our home for the flood. We moved everything portable from the ground floor upstairs, and put the furniture and exercise equipment up on blocks because they were too heavy to get up the stairs:  we anticipated the loss of our carpet, our upright piano (which we couldn’t move off the first floor), and our 19-year-old Camry – we thought we were well prepared. Then we left for 3 days of mandatory evacuation; fortunately we could be near our daughters in Pennsylvania.

We returned to find there had been 19” of water on our first floor, but we were shocked to discover how unprepared we really were! 

• We spent a week ripping out the bottom 4’ of sheetrock, molding, and insulation throughout the first floor.
• Our furnace and hot water heater had to be replaced, along with all the electrical outlets.
• We had to buy a new washer and dryer. 
• Doors had split and had to be replaced. 
• And of course everything had to be cleaned and disinfected to prevent mold, the scourge of flooding. 
• We were without power for 11 days, but fortunately we had a fireplace, a gas grill, and our daughter lent us plenty of candles so we camped in our own house. 

We had planned to do all the carpentry ourselves, but by the time we finished ripping out the sheetrock and insulation, it was clear this was too big a job for the two of us. Fortunately, there were contractors working with our neighbors and they agreed to take over.  I can’t possibly convey how much we appreciate these excellent workers who were diverted from their normal commercial work to help us, and so many others.

This is how I came to have a Chevy Volt, which we love, and a new Yamaha Clavinova, an electric piano that sounds like a concert grand, that can be taken apart and moved upstairs if that becomes necessary again (heaven forbid).

All of this took 2 ½ months, so have just started to get out lives back.

Please don’t take this as complaining – we are incredibly lucky! Many of our neighbors didn’t take the warnings seriously (Irene didn’t flood us after all, although it was close, and those early warnings were just as dire) and so they lost everything on their first floors. Many people only had one floor, so they lost everything in their houses. You would not believe the enormous piles of refuse created by just one house when you have to throw out everything on your first floor! Fortunately, the town of Long Branch hired huge front loaders and trucks to haul away the 8’ high mountains.

And only 2 miles from here by the ocean, entire homes and businesses were washed away, covered with sand, and generally ruined. So people lost not only their houses and their belongings, but their jobs, and in some cases they can’t return to the disaster area even now, 2 ½ months later. So that’s part of why we feel so lucky!

Super Storm Sandy proved that our current system of infrastructure and architecture is obsolete. As you will see, my proposals cover opportunities to dramatically improve both the infrastructure and architecture.

Thousands of workers came in from around the country to get power back. They complained about the obsolete equipment and the lack of computer support essential for restoration – but they did a great job in the face of a very challenging disaster, even living in a tent city erected quickly after Sandy. Many of the power wires are on poles, and thus subject to wind, and the buried wires are subject to flooding. Each repair requires a team of people and equipment to find the problem and go there to fix it, a time-consuming and expensive task.

What if the wires and equipment were in a protected environment, and what if there were a robust grid so that one failure didn’t cut off power to a whole neighborhood, and what if failures could be located automatically, and what if many failures could be fixed remotely?  This may sound like science fiction, but it’s what we designed into the telephone network decades ago, so the technology has been available for a long time! By the way, one of the cellular networks continued to work, but not the other one – fortunately my wife’s iPhone was on the working cell network, as was the iPad I bought just 2 weeks before the storm, so we stayed connected. The water, natural gas, and sewer systems didn’t go down after Sandy, so you see it is possible.

What if the buildings weren’t as subject to flooding, and what if the damage could be quickly and inexpensively repaired?

What if the transportation system wasn’t as vulnerable to flooding, and what if the vehicles could have gone off to higher ground by themselves instead of staying to be ruined – after Sandy, all 3 of the parking spots by us had drowned cars in them waiting for the insurance companies to tow them away.

As my ideas unfold in blog posts to come, you will see how this sort of resilient infrastructure is an integral, and natural, part of my overall system proposals.