Following your fact finding quest you could then post a detailed blog about your analysis for other HN'ers to read. I would be glad to read such a review with facts and figures explaining objectively what is wrong (or right!) about the proposed product.

Keep us posted!

This product wouldn't be all that useful. The hard part of running a farm is knowing the local growing conditions, crops which work in these conditions, and then, the harrowing amount of work involved in getting the thing productive.

Drip irrigation is cool once set up, but it's not durable and you need to replace it frequently as it gets damaged, breaks down due to weather, some animal chews it, whatever. Their solar driven pump is indeed a labor saving device, but it's a low power low volume pump useful for drip irrigation. I can guarantee you that nobody's going to be supplying affordable drip irrigation gear in a poor area. However, given a well, a powerful irrigation pump would be a huge help, particularly if it can move enough volume to fill traditional irrigation ditches for the times drip tubing is unattainable.

The IoT metrics stuff isn't very useful. The sort of person who farms in the places targeted by this isn't very tech savvy, and what's more important than temperature and water delivery statistics is walking the field and inspecting for weeds and pests.

The shipping container could make a usable shed, but so would a traditional shed, usually made from scrounged, cheap, local materials.

If you want to help poor farmers, I would suggest the following - A powerful irrigation pump, after helping to drill a well, solar driven is cool. - A small ride-on type tractor built to be dead simple to fix and reliable with plowing, seeding, and harvesting attachments. This is the major work of running a farm. Bonus points if this thing doesn't require gasoline, but that would be prohibitively expensive in terms of solar and batteries, since duty cycle would be very high. - Some kind of good, watertight and pest resistant grain storage containers, enough to store a few tons. - A bunch of lessons in the local language teaching people how to maximize food production from minimal resources in a given part of the world. What crops, how to plant, weed, and harvest them, how to store the harvest. - A bunch of fertilizer and pesticide. This will run out one day, so perhaps lessons on how to farm without it, but that drops production to like 1/4 of what's possible for a given unit of land. Modern high density farming requires a permanent supply of modern chemicals.

Now, A farm in a box is a cool idea, and the market may be affluent hobbyists, but this won't fix food shortage problems because the gear in it isn't particularly useful to a small farm, but also because food shortage problems are primarily political.

Except, they're not, and some basic knowledge means their claims don't pass the sniff test. Hence the nalegativity, which seems warranted.

Who hasn't thought of farming at some point? As a farmer myself, all I see is people falling over each other for a chance to do it.

The problem is that by the properties of supply and demand, that intense interest results in high costs and small profits, so in the end only a relative few can make it work.

Talking about farming on a developer website is like demoing salon tools to a group of plumbers. You may get opinions, but they probably won't be the most informed or helpful.