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Google of Food

Google is often considered a benchmark in the tech industry for some epitome of a field. It is pretty clear that Google is at the top of their game when it comes to search. One of the technical reasons for this status is due to their infrastructure. Much has been said about how they are able to use standard PC hardware and Linux to create highly distributed systems. The other day it occurred to me that someone should really do the same with food.

When we were driving up to San Francisco, we went by a slaughter house. It occurred to me that it must take quite a bit of fuel to move around so many animals. It was also a pretty disgusting place. It used up a ton of space and generally seemed like an unhealthy place to be producing massive amounts of food. When we saw Food Inc., there was an organic natural farmer that had a wealth of crops and livestock for sale it seemed really efficient. Normally, people look for ways to build bigger and bigger assembly lines. After all, that is what the food industry really is, a huge assembly line for growing, processing and packaging food.

The problem is that you can really only scale one large system so far. At some point you'll have to consider the implications of using a single system that has many single points of failure. For example, when gas prices rise, it effects almost every factor of food production on a number of levels. If farmers could more easily raise their own livestock using local food sources and do the slaughtering and packaging on site, you end up cutting out massive amounts of fuel shipping thousands of pounds of food.

It seems like someone should do something similar using local smaller farms. A distributed network of self sustaining farms could very easily help reduce the costs of transportation and improve the quality of the food. There would be a different kind of problem organizing these small farms, but the issues, while complex, would be orthogonal to problems of creating food at a large scale. This is the same problem companies like Wal-Mart and Target have had to deal with, so applying similar techniques to food seems not only plausible, but very profitable.

The big unknown is how the government could facilitate this movement. It already is primarily responsible for the current state of the food industry because of its subsidies and attention to storable food. Smaller farmers can make the cycle of production simpler which means if one farmer fails or there is a small shortage, you are dealing with a smaller scope that is most likey limited and easy to contain. With this in mind perishable foods can be given attention and small farmers would have a means to participating in the market as a whole. The big necessities from government would be to try and improve the patent situation for seeds, fix the subsidy laws that fund the major food corporations flawed practices and make an effort to reward those farmers who are able to be profitable without relying on government subsidies.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but it seems like the principles might very well apply. My guess is that as organic foods continue to become more important, companies like Wal-Mart will have to find a way to give customers healthy food on a large scale and faciliate the creation of orginizational tools necessary to feed a nation on the spoils of many small distrubuted farms.