Hacker News Books

Would love to learn more about what you're doing. I just read The Market Gardener and am getting a little bit of land, but still very new.

The Market Gardener is incredible. It's so information dense I need to read it 5 more times though. I'm going to some of the principles on my small suburban lot and scale up someday

Yes, JM Fortier (who I and another mention elsewhere in this post - the author of The Market Gardener), says that Coleman was one of his main inspirations.

If you’re interested in a recipe for running a profitable, small farm I recommend the book The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier.

There are a lot of other examples around of similar farmers, e.g Curtis Stone, Ridgedale Permaculture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knn7ZH4Tiw)

> I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct

Check out “The Market Gardener”[0] if you need help learning how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our planet.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251

I have lately been exploring agricultural technology as I plan to start farming myself. Here is what I have learnt so far.

1. Yes, its possible but its not as simple as ordering stuff off Amazon. The farmhack.org community is a great place to start. Most of them are existing tools which have been redesigned by farm hackers. http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1446 is an interesting proposition too. But in my interviews with farmers from rural India they said, cost/benefit isn't much for the such aerial reports.

2. One Million Dollars!!! Thats what Jean-Martin Fortier says in his book; The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming. Its a great read as its not just about tech but also market.

Yes, I like no-till gardening, especially where it’s combined with other techniques like mulching, cover crops etc.

In traditional agriculture no-till is associated with increased use of herbicides but in regenerative agriculture and permaculture there are other ways to deal with weeds that don’t require the use of chemicals.

The book “The Market Gardener” by Jean-Martin Fortier is a good resource about those topics.

>The book “The Market Gardener” by Jean-Martin Fortier is a good resource about those topics.

It is? He doesn't do no-till, doesn't do regenerative ag or permaculture. He just grows lettuce conventionally and sells it at high prices to a couple of hipster restaurants in Montreal. I never read the book, but it seems weird he would advocate stuff he won't actually do himself.

There appears to be at least one counterexample, if you count "supporting one's family" as commercially meaningful.

Currently reading The Market Gardener and it's surprisingly fascinating for a guide to intensively cultivating on about 1.5 acres - about 140k CAD gross, 60k revenue on 1.5 acres - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251-the-market-gard...

(the author)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Fortier

I'm curious as well. I currently work as a designer in tech and feel somewhat unsatisfied with it. The "problems" being solved pale in comparison to the ones that exist and are in need of being tackled in agriculture. Would love to continue to work in the start-up space but working on real problems like FarmLogs does.

Recently picked up "The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-scale Organic Farming" off Amazon and seems like a great framework for starting a small farm.

At an estimated initial cost of $60,000 per farm plot, I wonder what the effect of an agriculture/tech-incubator would be. Seems silly to throw $30m at an app like Secret (not to pick one out, but you know what I mean), when there are real tangible problems being solved in the food industry by FL and others.

>I just read The Market Gardener

What's your impression of that book? Asking because interested in that area, have done some on it (organic gardening in general, though not the intensive kind like in that book), and have read a similar book by John Jeavons:

http://www.johnjeavons.info/

Excerpt from this page on his site:

http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html

[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]

The Market Gardener - a guide to profitable high-end vegetable growing on 1.5 acres (organic, niche, supplying CSA's, farmer's markets, and restaurants). Seriously considering doing it myself.

The Autumn of the Middle Ages - A discussion of the mindset of peoples as the medieval period ended and the renaissance begain. Bit dense, translated from Dutch. But really interesting to focus on what was going on inside people's heads and how they viewed the world instead of simply historical events.

More importantly:

Llama Llama shopping Drama

Goodnight Moon

All aboard for the Bobo road