> Interestingly, farmers view water usage as a trade secret

I wonder why. Do slight changes in irrigation patterns have a significant effect on crops?

Definitely! If someone is able to figure out how to use less water to grow the same amount of crops they could totally outcompete and undercut other producers.

There's an interesting Planet Money episode about it: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/12/732147345/the-water-marketpla...

>If someone is able to figure out how to use less water to grow the same amount of crops

We've already had that for years. Farmers don't want to make the structural investments required to get there. Water for farming needs to become prohibitively expensive for them to even consider moving away from their wasteful large fields. Tax the hell out of the land, too.

What takes an acre of land and 100,000 gallons of water (a crop of wheat grass) can be done in a building 1/8 of an acre, 90% lower water requirements if not more, and produce 6x more than what the open plot of land does, on a yearly basis, on average.

I did and proved that almost a decade ago. Looks like nobody still wants to listen.

Water usage combined with weather information likely gives competitive advantage is futures markets.

I'm sure it could but why would the farmers care about the futures market, unless they are using futures to hedge against their own crops?

That's exactly what the commodity futures markets are for. There's a reason why the big commodity trading floor was in Chicago (it's essentially all electronic now of course).

But wouldn't they want the futures market to have perfect information? So that the futures could be priced exactly right, which would mean the lowest possible price that counterbalances a down market perfectly?

I assume the farmers aren't trying to make money from the futures, they're just trying to not lose money. Their profits come from actually growing food. The futures are just there in case something bad happens. Right?

I'd venture farmers make half or more more of their money on futures markets. Argi-business is a global market and optimal prices for your commodities don't necessarily conform to your local conditions/crops/etc.

I can't speak for all farmers, but my family owns a farm and the futures market is huge in it generating money.

You can use the futures markets to hedge against bad crop yields, lock in profits for accounting and cash flow purposes, inform what crops you are going to grow. It's immensely valuable.

Do you know of any good articles on this. I.E. futures for the small family-run farm?

There's magazines like this one (https://www.agweb.com/farmjournal); however it sounds like we'd have different ideas of small though. Outside of direct to consumer farmers market type opperations, "small" farms in the US are still measured in thousands of acres (just, 4 figures instead of 6).

The meta markets in how and when you sell crops (pre sale on the futures market vs sale at harvest, vs store and wait for commodities prices to be ideal) is, honestly fascinating and so different from the image of the "farmer" in popular culture.

That's still useful, thanks!

What does it use _“block-chain”_ for?

Anonymity, presumably. That said, you'd think there would be no reason that whatever real-world authority is ensuring no one extracts more than their purchased credits allow would already have all the secret information and could just be the clearing house for the transactions.

Truly, one would think you’d still need an authority to connect the water supply usage to the blockchain per se.

Farmers are on large plots, and there is only so much watertable. Why do they need to be anonymous?

Sounds like more blockchain hype + the hidden potential for Nestle or whoever to buy up all the water rights discretely. Utilities should not be anonymous.

hype