Where can I find or get in contact with farmers specifically in the US?
I would love to gain deeper context as to farming, regulation issues and further context relating to it. If it’s possible to get in contact with a farmer or be pointed to a community if it exists, it would be really helpful.
Were I interested in such a thing, I'd probably approach local farmers' markets and CSAs with an eye toward pivoting that contact in to generational or institutional farmers if that were the interest given that the smaller folks are both more approachable (many have websites with contact info) and likely to have contacts with their big shot neighbors.
If you're not a big enough entity to garner interest/respect to get over the suspiscion your likely to need an introduction to speak to anyone managing more than maybe 100 acres because it is a massively competitive industry with wildly low margins that lead to a sort of "what's in it for me" kind of paranoia at the higher end.
That said, talking to locals at a local farmers' market, I've never run in to any kind of push back, but that's largely due to my making it clear that I am a hobbyist who presents zero risk to their operation. The moment they get any whiff of "this person might be researching optimizations for their own pepper/pumpkin/mushroom operations" the trail goes cold.
Not necessarily averse as much as wary. Like right now, I'm having trouble making in roads on specific techniques for growing this particular thing I'd like to grow because there are very few companies that have cracked it and spent hundreds of thousands or millions in R&D in order to figure it out, so they are understandably not overly enthusiastic about disclosing the entire setup.
But you'll see protection mindsets at the local level too. Neighbors will lie about which seed they used, how much fertilizer, yield, etc, but not always. Like, someone who does cattle might be more free with their information when talking to a corn/soy farmer. Or take someone like a pepper farmer: a competing greenhouse is more likely to get stonewalled than a hobbyist who's just trying to understand why their fruits are small.
That's all I'm saying, I guess, is it's all in the approach. You'll get more traction from genuine curiosity than "I am building/selling this thing"
If you're looking for farmers who aren't averse to tech, there are a number with YouTube channels. They're also the sort who love to talk to people. That may skew their opinions from the norm, of course.
If you're not a big enough entity to garner interest/respect to get over the suspiscion your likely to need an introduction to speak to anyone managing more than maybe 100 acres because it is a massively competitive industry with wildly low margins that lead to a sort of "what's in it for me" kind of paranoia at the higher end.
That said, talking to locals at a local farmers' market, I've never run in to any kind of push back, but that's largely due to my making it clear that I am a hobbyist who presents zero risk to their operation. The moment they get any whiff of "this person might be researching optimizations for their own pepper/pumpkin/mushroom operations" the trail goes cold.
But you'll see protection mindsets at the local level too. Neighbors will lie about which seed they used, how much fertilizer, yield, etc, but not always. Like, someone who does cattle might be more free with their information when talking to a corn/soy farmer. Or take someone like a pepper farmer: a competing greenhouse is more likely to get stonewalled than a hobbyist who's just trying to understand why their fruits are small.
That's all I'm saying, I guess, is it's all in the approach. You'll get more traction from genuine curiosity than "I am building/selling this thing"
For economics, university agriculture departments.