Growing food is easy, selling it is hard. This is one of many reasons why there are no small farmers any more. As the food processing industry and retail buys only huge quantities. The only thing left to a large extend are big industrial farmers that sell huge amounts. In order to make profits, economies … Read more
Food will get expensive, inflation is coming! At least this is the major concern due to rising fertiliser and pesticides prices. Both in Europe and the US fertiliser costs make one third of total expenditures in agricultural produce (e.g. nitrogen costs are about 30 percent for grain production). And prices are still rising. Compared to … Read more
Agriculture sucks, at least at the moment. Over the last 150 years we have depleted agricultural soils of soil organic carbon (SOC)(Lal, 2009), leading to a food production system heavily dependent on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. This depletion of carbon from the soils together with the burning of fossil fuels leads to the rising CO2 … Read more
Founding your own company is one one of the most interesting and satisfying things you can do in your life. It’s a way to change your environment and maybe change the whole world. But there are a number of downsides to being an entrepreneur. We rarely see the high number of failures of companies, although … Read more
Many things in life we do not finish, hopefully for good reason. In economics we speak about sunken costs. A concept that basically states, that money and effort spent in the past should not affect your decisions today, as each decision is a new one. This is already hard and painful to apply in a … Read more
I got to know Ruth, the founder of ForTomorrow at the Future Forest Initiative in Blankenburg. Right from the start I liked the idea of compensating CO2, by planting trees and purchasing emission rights here in Germany enabling everybody to live a carbon neutral life. As a data scientist I first of all was interested … Read more
The day is the only natural unit of time that everybody can master. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, easy to get your head around. All other units of time, hours, weeks or months are man made. Season on the other hand change. One year represents a very long amount of time, hard … Read more
I definitely had problems and second thoughts on publishing my thoughts and my work, until yesterday. Yesterday i finished reading “Show your work” by Austin Kleon.Although I already published a number of articles when working in science earlier in my career I still worry about what people might think of the work, especially when it … Read more