You’re Not Thinking Big Enough: Rebuilding Food Systems with AI Agents — Cody Menefee, Firecrawl

Cody Menefee once drove three hours to a processor with ten turkeys strapped to the roof of his Tesla, and reports that a windbreak of birds up top does real damage to your range. He raised them in a Nashville backyard where that is not allowed, nearly quit engineering to farm, and learned how hard it is to make money at it. Instead he asks why only three percent of cattle finish on pasture when it is better for animal, consumer, and land. The answer is labor. Grazing done right means splitting pasture into paddocks with one day of feed and moving the herd, fences, and water every day so the grass rests. GPS collars with virtual fences handle the moving but not the deciding: grass grows differently after drought, rain, or trampling, and today a farmer walks out to look. His proposal is to replace those eyes and drop a language model in the loop. Drones give the best imagery but no jurisdiction allows autonomous flights; satellites are too far away; a trail cam pointed at a measuring stick is the cheap version. Feed the model animal locations, drought conditions, and grass height, and let it suggest the next paddock for a human to confirm. Three blockers remain: a knowledge base he is scraping out of farmer YouTube channels and research papers with Firecrawl into his Open Pasture project, a vision layer that reads biomass and biodiversity, and collar makers who lock out outside software. His ask to the room is an open collar, and his closing argument is that this industry builds too much software for people who build software while problems like this wait. Speaker info: - https://x.com/cbmenefee - https://linkedin.com/in/codybmenefee - https://openpasture.dev Timestamps: 0:00 - The jacket, the stolen title, and a talk about farming 1:20 - No credentials, ten backyard turkeys, and a Tesla roof 3:34 - Why not just become a farmer 4:41 - Livestock belongs on pasture, and labor is why it isn't 5:49 - Rotational grazing and the daily move 6:28 - GPS collars solve the fence, not the decision 7:50 - Reading the grass: drones, satellites, trail cams 10:04 - An LLM in the grazing loop 11:12 - Three blockers: knowledge base, biomass vision, open collars 14:20 - Stacking species: chickens behind the cows 15:57 - Takeaways and a hiring pitch