Hello beautiful people,
Last week we launched another set of resources to help you guys get some land, move off-grid, and start producing you’re own food. The response was heartwarmingly positive!
If you haven’t already, check out our e-book “The 12 Month Farm Method” if you’re not sure how to start building a life outside the mainstream system, OR if you specifically need help raising funding, check out our free guide.
Yesterday, I learned about yet another example of the inifinite brilliance of the Natural world.
Through answering an important quesetion, you’ll find out how living in accordance with Nature leads to the best outcome over time.
So, starting with a given flock of chicken, how would you create the ultimate population of chickens for your food security? This applies to any crop or livestock but we’ll use chickens because they have quick breeding cycles.
You’d start off by deciding your objectives. What are your most desirable traits? 4 come to mind:
- Large amounts of meat
- Large quantity of eggs
- High quality of eggs (based on yolk colour and viscocity of the egg white)
- Resilience (ideally they don’t die)
So how would you create a flock that maximises these 4 attributes without compromising the others.
In a nutshell:
From the current flock, select the chickens that maximise these traits.
Sort them into ranks, rank 1 would be the best chickens (according to our objectives), rank 2 would be the chickens that are only beaten by rank 1, rank 3 only beaten by rank 1 and 2, and so on…
Pretty straightforward right?
Now you need to breed them, but you can’t just breed the ones that are ‘best’ because they may be closely related (inbreeding).
So in addition to rank, how should we decide which ones to breed?
We need to see how genetically different they are.
So now we have a criteria, rank and genetic difference, we sort them based on lowest rank (highest quality) and genetic difference to maximise postive attributes and diversity.
Now we breed them to create a new flock that combine all the best traits from their parents. This new herd will naturally have some mutations that introduces more diversity.
So that gives us 4 steps:
- Sort chickens into ranks based on attributes and our objectives
- Select chickens that maximise these attributes and are the most genetically different.
- Breed them to create a new flock with that maximise the objectives and has some diversity from mutations.
- Rinse and repeat…
Every repetition will improve the quality of the flock, and eventually you end up with the ultimate chicken.
How beautifully simple?
This is the fundamental process that the whole of the natural world is built on, Nature just chose a different objective – survival over food quality.
You just got a lesson about Computer Science in your newsletter. about regenerative farming and off-grid living. Surpise, bet you weren’t expecting that!
This is an example of the most fascinating (and relevant) branches of Computer Science called “Genetic Algirithms“. It’s the study of a group of algorithms (computer-speak for ‘process’) that look for solutions that maximise multiple objectives – like egg quality and resilience in our example.
These algorithms can be applied to problems in virtually every industry and business, from brick manufacturing to advertising.
As clever as we humans like to think we are, often, Nature has already presented us with the best answer (it’s been solving problems a lot longer than we have).
Hopefully you found that useful, because it’s already influenced the way I think about solving problems.
Until next time.
To your freedom and independence,