Numanac

Given the recent string of pitch-related posts, I’d like to cautiously introduce the project our team has been working on: Numanac. Numanac is a modern, AI-enabled iteration of the farmer's almanac: a one-stop platform for farmers to acquire, share, and accumulate knowledge. There is an age-old knowledge transfer inefficiency in modern agriculture. Despite a negative median income for small farms in the U.S. after colossal upheaval by government programs (between -$125 to -$2,370 in annual median income for farms earning >$350,000, which is 88% of U.S. farms), most agricultural knowledge infrastructure in the U.S. is hyper-aligned with much larger, consolidated operations. We are witnessing data, information, knowledge, and wisdom that can increase farmer revenue being carved up, gatekept, and sold inefficiently, contributing to the negative bottom line that makes farming alone barely, if at all, financially sustainable for most farmers. Smallholders rely on off-farm jobs from which their annual household income is actually generated (between $73,304 ~ $112,794 according to the USDA), and any time we can save farmers on knowledge management is: 1. More efficient access to knowledge-enabled revenue opportunities; 2. More time to spend on higher-margin off-farm jobs. Numanac is tapping into the rapidly iterating capabilities of LLMs to power a knowledge-sharing forum where farmers can have access to grounded responses, as well as a consensus mechanism for farmers to determine the rejection, reinforcement, or re-ingestion of content into our knowledge base. We are not daring to become experts in agriculture, but rather alleviating a significant pain point associated with ~1.7M U.S. and 500M+ global smallholder farmers’ honorable contributions toward food security. Daniel Kelly, James FitzGerald and I have been guided by our incredible agriculture advisors Beth Hoffman, Mike Webster, Brett Reinford, and Sean Stokes who have informed our alignment with smallholder interests, as well as our technical advisor Vicki Tardif, whose insights into grounded AI deployment have been foundational to our progress. Sincere thanks to MITdesignX’s Svafa Gronfeldt and Gilad Rosenzweig for their continued support, and to Practical Farmers of Iowa’s Sally Worley for the invaluable insights that have informed our development. Please follow Numanac for more updates moving forward!