Posts Tagged ‘artificial intelligence’
“Where grows?–where grows it not? If vain our toil, / We ought to blame the culture, not the soil.”*…
Even as agricultural land is becoming a coveted investment (as manifest in the purchases of billionaires like Stan Kroenke, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and by institutions like Nuveen and the Canadian Pension Investment Board and by publicly-traded REITs like Farmland Partners and Gladstone Land Corp), there’s another class of investor– with a very different use case– on the hunt. Joy Shin and Ryan Duffy report…
Last year, a datacenter developer started working the phones along Green Hill Road in Silver Spring Township, PA, outside Harrisburg. Mervin Raudabaugh got the call: a mystery buyer wanted to buy his 261 acres of farmland. The developer offered him $60,000 an acre for the land the 86-year-old had farmed for six decades. Mervin turned it down, selling to Lancaster Farmland Trust for <$2M instead, thereby locking the soil into agricultural use. “I was not interested in destroying my farms,” he told a local Fox affiliate.
Two things about this story might have been unthinkable a generation ago: that anyone would offer a farmer nearly $16M for that land, and that it’d be worth more dead (paved over) than alive (producing food).
The Supermarket of the World
For the better part of a century, that’s what America was. From 1959 through 2018, the country ran an agricultural trade surplus every single year, peaking near $27B in 1981, when soybeans, corn, wheat, and rice flowed out of the heartland in volumes that functioned as soft power and hard trade leverage. (When the Soviet harvest failed in 1963, Khrushchev had to buy American wheat through private US grain companies: at market rate, without credit, shipped on American vessels, which was a humiliation leveraged by his enemies to oust him the following year.)
Then, in 2019, the curves crossed. The U.S. has since run a deficit in four of the last six fiscal years. Last year, we imported $43.7B more in agricultural products than we sold.
Washington has started saying the right words. Last month, the USDA and Department of War signed a memorandum designating agriculture as a national security priority. Multiple bills linking food security to national security percolated through the last Congress. If you talk to the right folks in Washington, you’ll hear agriculture now being discussed the way semiconductors were in 2021 — as a sovereign capacity that a serious country cannot offshore.
All of which sounds right, none of which changes what is happening on the ground. Because the ground is the problem.
In real estate, you think in square feet, in proximity, in comps. Farmland trades in acreage, water tables, growing seasons, and soil composition. And right now, profitably farming that acre is just about the hardest it’s ever been.
Since 2020, seed costs have climbed 18%, fertilizer 37%, fuel 32%, and interest on operating loans 73%. Labor is up 50%. These costs never came back down after the 2021-22 supply chain shock, but crop prices did, creating a double squeeze on farmers. Farmland has appreciated nearly four-fold from ~$1,090/acre in 2000 to $4,170 in 2024.
Some 40% of U.S. farmers are over 65. The American Farmland Trust estimates nearly 300M acres will change hands through inheritance in the next two decades. When it does, the math facing each heir will look a lot like Mervin’s. What would you do: keep farming a business with collapsing margins, or if one was offered, take the check?
A Collision of Old & New Economies
Datacenters, chip fabs, and other megaprojects need what farms need: flat land, abundant water, reliable power, and access to transport.
In Loudoun County, VA, ground zero of America’s datacenter buildout, farmland already lists at $55,000–$79,000/acre, a significant premium over the statewide average because markets are pricing in the possibility the land will convert from farmland to computerland.
Conversions are large and getting larger. Meta’s $10B compute cluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana, sits on 2,250 acres of former soybean fields. Samsung’s new $17B fab occupies 1,200 acres outside Taylor, Texas, a town that once called itself the largest inland cotton market in the world. Micron’s $100B megafab is going up on 1,400 acres of former agricultural land and wetlands in Clay, New York. These are some of the largest private investments in American history, and among the most economically and strategically consequential bets we’re making as a country. You can’t help but notice the symbolism of it all: each is being built on rural land that was growing something one or two generations ago.
Datacenter developers, who already need some PR help, have seen local opposition to these projects emerge as a real planning risk, with farming families showing up at county meetings to argue that once the land converts, it will never come back.
Nobody should pretend this is irrational. A fab generates more economic value per acre than any soybean field ever will, the jobs pay better, and the strategic logic of onshoring chips is sound. But the math that makes each individual conversion obvious is the same math that, in the aggregate, leaves you structurally short on food. The country is losing about 2,000 acres a day, with 18M more projected to convert by 2040.
The Flow of Capital
As Washington works to subsidize the farming, to the tune of $10–$15B in federal support each year, Wall Street is betting on the land underneath it leaving farming.
Nuveen Natural Capital, a subsidiary of TIAA, manages $13.1B in farmland across 3M acres globally and recently launched a REIT targeting $3B in new capital. Those holdings have appreciated far beyond what crop income would justify, because it follows the pattern of a conversion optionality play: buy well-located agricultural land at agricultural tax rates and wait for rezoning.
Nearly 95% of American farms are still family-run, but most are modest operations. The 6% of farms generating $1M+ in sales produce 78% of everything, up from 69% just five years ago. Farming has developed the power-law distribution of a winner-take-most industry, except the winners don’t get to set their own prices. The family farm persists in name, but the economics (and economies of scale) increasingly push it to operate like a corporation or exit.
And institutional investors have some strange bedfellows on their side of the orderbook. Foreign investors held an interest in nearly 46M acres as of 2023 – 3.6% of all privately held farmland – up 85% since 2010. Canada alone holds 15M acres. China, which cannot feed its population from its own soil, built COFCO International into a state-backed grain trader that does $38.5B a year and accumulated millions of acres globally. Saudi Arabia was pumping Arizona’s groundwater through Fondomonte, a state-linked operation growing alfalfa for export, until Arizona killed the leases in 2023. Those countries treat productive soil as something worth a sovereign premium, and something you want to physically control…
[The authors recount the history of “Agro-Doomerism” and consider the (largely technological) potential solutions to the conundrum: “This is a hard problem, but it is a solvable one, as shown by the long history of technological revolutions in agriculture. Today, a set of technologies that were each too expensive or immature a decade ago have converged to the point where the raw inputs for a farm, ex land, can get radically cheaper, all at once.” They enumerate some of those potential saviors, and conclude…}
… The long arc of agro-doomerism and technological revolutions say there’s reasons for optimism. Many times before, the “math” said we’d run out of food; many times before, new science, systems, and processes came along that changed the denominator and proved the doomers wrong. Hoping and praying for AGI or another Norman Borlaug [the father of the Green Revolution] to save our bacon is not a strategy, but abundance-oriented technology stacks that don’t force a zero-sum choice between preservation and productivity might be. We should look at systems that help unfallow and uplift acres, making farmland competitive enough that we don’t pave over too much and one day realize we want the topsoil back – or our ag trade deficit erased.
The bet worth making is 1) to never bet against America, of course, and 2) that something similar will happen here: that productivity, not preservation alone, will close the gap. This is a generational opportunity, a category deeply in the national interest, and a sector wanting more capital, technology, engineers, and founders to show up. Those who get there first will be serving a gigantic market, and attacking a problem that Washington has acknowledged is existential but has no idea how to productively solve.
The supermarket of the world was built on cheap land and cheap water. Neither are cheap anymore, and both are being bid up by us – via population growth – as well as the industrial renaissance that we care so deeply about. But that doesn’t mean we can forget foundational inputs – literally – to our way of life…
Farming vs. fabs (and data centers)… American agriculture is caught in a collision between old and new economies: “The Supermarket of the World.”
* Alexander Pope
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As we contemplate cultivation, we might note that this, the third week in March, is National Agriculture Week.
“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics”*…
Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human ‘wow’ that is becoming redundant in an AI age? Rita Ahmadi explores…
It is a hot July day in London and I take the bus to Bloomsbury. I often come here for the British Library, the British Museum or the London Review Bookshop. More than a location, Bloomsbury feels like stepping into a work of art – maybe one of Virginia Woolf’s stories, or Duncan Grant’s paintings.
This time, I am here for mathematics: the Hardy Lecture at the London Mathematical Society (LMS), named after G H Hardy, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a president of the LMS. You may know him from the film The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), in which he’s played by Jeremy Irons.
The 2025 lecture is by Emily Riehl of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who is talking about a complex mathematical ‘language’ known as infinity category theory: could we teach it to computers so that they could understand it? If successful, computer programs could verify proofs and construct complex structures in this area.
A few seats to my left, I recognise Kevin Buzzard, wearing the multi-coloured, patterned trousers he’s known for among mathematicians. Based at Imperial College London, Buzzard is working on a computer proof assistant called Lean. His interest is personal: after long disputes with a colleague over a flawed proof, he lost trust, as he often puts it, in ‘human mathematicians’. His mission now is to convince all mathematicians to write their proofs in Lean. In the Q&A after one of his talks, he said of the debate between truth and beauty in mathematics: ‘I reject beauty, I want rigour’ – though his vibrant sense of fashion suggests otherwise.
Interest in an AI-driven approach to mathematics has been exponential, and many mathematicians have left traditional academic research to explore its potential. Recently, one group of distinguished mathematicians designed 10 active, research-level questions for AI to tackle. At the time of writing, various AI companies and researchers had claimed to find solutions, which were under evaluation by the community.
Sitting in the room in Bloomsbury, I stared at the Hardy plaque and wondered: would Hardy find proofs generated by AI beautiful? I wasn’t sure. He believed there should be a strong aesthetic judgment in mathematics, drawing parallels with poetry, and argued that beauty is the first test of good mathematics. He went as far as to say that there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
If asked, many mathematicians today still talk about the aesthetic appeal of one approach over another.
Yet we live in a different century to Hardy and his Bloomsbury peers, with different technologies and techniques, so perhaps we need a clearer definition of what mathematical beauty actually is. Over the history of mathematics, we can find examples where both rigour and the pursuit of beauty have shaped mathematics itself. So, if we’re completely replacing this with a computer-assisted quest for truth and rigour, we ought to know what we’d be abandoning, if anything. Is mathematical beauty like the beauty in literature and art – or is it something else?…
[Ahmadi explores the idea of “beauty,” generally and in mathematics; traces the rise of AI as a tool, and concludes…]
… my own definition of beauty in mathematics would be as follows:
“Asimplemathematical structure that surprises even the most experienced mathematicians and transfers a sense of vitality.”
But is an AI-assisted proof simple or surprising? How do we define vitality in a machine? On these questions, the jury is out. Myself, I am torn. Maybe models just need more training to match our creativity. But I also wonder whether our limbic system is required. Can we write proofs without emotional kicks? I am also unsure if perfectly efficient brains can come up with novel revolutionary ideas.
Ultimately, this debate is about more than aesthetics; it is closely tied to the development of AI-assisted mathematics. If AI models can produce novel mathematical structures, how should we direct them? Is it a search for beautiful or truthful structures? A question that possibly guides the years to come.
Some mathematicians say they prefer the ‘truth’ and only the ‘truth’. However, my recent discussions with mathematicians showed me that most immediately recognise, enjoy, and even wholeheartedly smile at a beautiful piece of maths. In fact, they spend their whole lives in search of one…
Fascinating: “The eye of the mathematician,” from @ritaahmadi.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
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As we embrace elegance, we might send garcefully-calculated birthday greetings to Eduard Heine; he was born on this date in 1821. A mathematician, he is best remembered for his introduction of the concept of uniform continuity, for the Mehler–Heine formula, and for the Heine–Cantor theorem… all of them, quite beautiful.
“To-day I think / Only with scents”*…
We’ve considered before smell, the unsung hero of the senses. Today, Kaja Šeruga explains how scientists using chemistry, archival records, and AI are reviving the aromas of old libraries, mummies and battlefields…
We often learn about the past visually — through oil paintings and sepia photographs, books and buildings, artifacts displayed behind glass. And sometimes we get to touch historical objects or listen to recordings. But rarely do we use our sense of smell — our oldest, most primal way of learning about the environment — to experience the distant past.
Without access to odor, “you lose that intimacy that smell brings to the interaction between us and objects,” saysanalytical chemist Matija Strlič. As lead scientist of the Heritage Science Laboratory at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and previously deputy director of the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, Strlič has devoted his career to interdisciplinary research in the field of heritage science. Much of his work focused on the preservation and reconstruction of culturally significant scents.
Reconstructed scents can enhance museum and gallery exhibits, says Inger Leemans, a cultural historian at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Smell can provide a more inviting entry point, especially for uninitiated visitors, because there’s far less formalized language for describing smell than for interpreting visual art or displays. Since there’s no “right way” of talking about scent, she says, “your own knowledge is as good as the others’.”
Despite their potential to enrich our understanding of history and art, smells are rarely conserved with the same care as buildings or archaeological artifacts. But a small group of researchers, including Strlič and Leemans, is trying to change that — combining chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage…
Read on for the fascinating details: “Recreating the smells of history,” from @knowablemag.bsky.social.
* Edward Thomas, “Digging“
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As we take a whiff, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924 that Coco Chanel agreed with the Wertheimer brothers Pierre and Paul, directors of the perfume house Bourjois, to create a new corporate entity, Parfums Chanel, Its signature product was Chanel No. 5. She had been selling small quanitites of the scent in her boutique since 1921.
Traditionally, fragrances worn by women had fallen into two basic categories. Respectable women favored the essence of a single garden flower while sexually provocative indolic perfumes heavy with animal musk or jasmine were associated with women of the demi-monde. Chanel sought a new scent that would appeal to the flapper and celebrate the seemingly liberated feminine spirit of the 1920s. Her scent was formulated by chemist and perfumer Ernest Beaux, who designed an unprecedented olfactory architecture, a bouquet of 80 scents whose precious notes were blended with high proportions of aldehydes, organic compounds that carry a crisp, soapy, and floral citrusy scent. In late 1920, when presented with small glass vials containing sample scents numbered 1 to 5 and 20 to 24 for her assessment, she chose the fifth vial. Chanel told Beaux, “I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year and so we will let this sample number five keep the name it has already, it will bring good luck.”
The first promotion for Chanel No. 5 appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 1924– a small ad for Parfums Chanel announcing the Chanel line of fragrances available at Bonwit Teller, an upscale department store. The fragrance, of course, become a fave. An Andy Warhol subject and worn by everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve to Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, the perfume, is a foundational part of fragrance history… and still sells a bottle every 30 seconds.
“The new media are not ways of relating to us the ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”*…
There is a vortex of forces shaping the future of journalism. Censorship, both direct and indirect, is on the rise in the U.S. and around the world. Concentration of media ownership is homogenizing coverage and creating “news deserts.”
At the same time, new technology and new applications of that technology are reshaping the Fourth estate. The Reuters Institute at Oxford surveyed 280 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories to learn what they are seeing– and planning. From the Executive Summary…
We are still at the early stages of another big shift in technology (Generative AI) which threatens to upend the news industry by offering more efficient ways of accessing and distilling information at scale. At the same time, creators and influencers (humans) are driving a shift towards personality-led news, at the expense of media institutions that can often feel less relevant, less interesting, and less authentic. In 2026 the news media are likely to be further squeezed by these two powerful forces.
Understanding the impact of these trends, and working out how to combat them, will be high up the ‘to do list’ of media executives this year, despite the unevenly distributed pace of change across countries and demographics.
Existential challenges abound. Declining engagement for traditional media combined with low trust is leading many politicians, businessmen, and celebrities to conclude that they can bypass the media entirely, giving interviews instead to sympathetic podcasters or YouTubers. This Trump 2.0 playbook – now widely copied around the world – often comes bundled with a barrage of intimidating legal threats against publishers and continuing attempts to undermine trust by branding independent media and individual journalists as ‘fake news’. These narratives are finding fertile ground with audiences – especially younger ones – that prefer the convenience of accessing news from platforms, and have weaker connections with traditional news brands. Meanwhile search engines are turning into AI-driven answer engines, where content is surfaced in chat windows, raising fears that referral traffic for publishers could dry up, undermining existing and future business models.
Despite these difficulties many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about their own business – if not about journalism itself. Publishers will be focused this year on re-engineering their businesses for the age of AI, with more distinctive content and a more human face. They will also be looking beyond the article, investing more in multiple formats especially video and adjusting their content to make it more ‘liquid’ and therefore easier to reformat and personalise. At the same time, they’ll be continuing to work out how best to use Generative AI themselves across newsgathering, packaging, and distribution. It’s a delicate balancing act but one that – if they can pull it off – holds out the promise of greater efficiency and more relevant and engaging journalism.
These are the main findings from our industry survey:
- Only slightly more than a third (38%) of our sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead – that’s 22pp lower than four years ago. Stated concerns relate to politically motivated attacks on journalism, loss of USAID money that previously supported independent media in many parts of the world, and significant declines in traffic to many online news sites.
- By contrast, around half (53%) say they are confident about their own business prospects, similar to last year’s figure. Upmarket subscription-based publishers with strong direct traffic can see a path to long-term profitability, even as those that remain dependent on advertising and print worry about sharp declines in revenue and the potential impact of AI powered search on the bottom line.
- Publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years – not quite ‘Google Zero’ but a substantial impact none the less. Data sourced for this report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search has already started to dip, with publishers that rely on lifestyle content saying they have been particularly affected by the roll out of Google’s AI overviews. This comes after substantial falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (-43%) and X, formerly Twitter (-46%) over the last three years.
- In response, publishers say it will be important to focus on more original investigations and on the ground reporting (+91 percentage point difference between ‘more’ and ‘less’), contextual analysis and explanation (+82) and human stories (+72). By contrast, they plan to scale back service journalism (-42), evergreen content (-32), and general news (-38), which many expect to become commoditised by AI chatbots. At the same time, they think it will be important to invest in more video (+79) – including ‘watch tabs’ – more audio formats (+71) such as podcasts but a bit less in text output.
- In terms of off-platform strategies, YouTube will be the main focus for publishers this year with a net score of +74, up substantially on last year. Other video-led platforms such as TikTok (+56) and Instagram (+41) are also key priorities – along with working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms (+61) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. Google Discover remains a critical (+19), if slightly volatile, source of referral traffic, while some publishers are looking to find new audiences via newsletter platforms such as Substack (+8). By contrast, publishers will be deprioritising effort spent on old-style Google SEO (-25) – as well as traditional social networks Facebook (-23) and X (-52)
- Last year we predicted the emergence of ‘agentic AI’, but this year we can expect to start to see real-world impact of these more advanced technologies. Some sources suggest that there will soon be more bots than people reading publisher websites, as tools like Huxe and OpenAI’s Pulse offer personalised news briefings at scale. Three-quarters of our respondents (75%) expect ‘agentic tools’ to have a ‘large’ or ‘very large’ impact on the news industry in the near future.
- Alongside the traffic disruption from AI, news executives also see opportunities to build new revenue from licensing content (or a share of advertising revenue) within chatbots. Around a fifth (20%) of publisher respondents – mainly from upmarket news companies – expect future revenues to be substantial, with half (49%) saying that they expect a minor contribution. A further fifth (20%), mostly made up of local publishers, public broadcasters, or those from smaller countries, say they do not expect any income from AI deals.
- More widely, subscription and membership remain the biggest revenue focus (76%) for publishers, ahead of both display (68%) and native advertising (64%). Online and physical events (54%) are also becoming more important as part of a diversified revenue strategy. Reliance on philanthropic and foundation support (18%) has declined this year, after cuts of media support budgets in the United States and elsewhere.
- Meanwhile news organisations’ use of AI technologies continues to increase across all categories, with back-end automation considered ‘important’ this year by the vast majority (97%) of publisher respondents, many of whom integrated pilot systems into content management systems in the last year. Newsgathering cases (82%) are now the second most important, with faster coding and product development (81%) also gaining traction.
- Over four in ten (44%) survey respondents say that their newsroom AI initiatives are showing ‘promising’ results, but a similar proportion (42%) describe them as ‘limited’. Two-thirds of respondents (67%) say they have not saved any jobs so far as a result of AI efficiencies. Around one in seven (16%) say they have slightly reduced staff numbers but a further one in ten (9%) have added new roles/cost.
- The rise of news creators and influencers is a concern for publishers in two ways. More than two-thirds (70%) of our respondents are concerned that they are taking time and attention away from publisher content. Four in ten (39%) worry that they are at risk of losing top editorial talent to the creator ecosystem, which offers more control and potentially higher financial rewards.
- Responding to the increased competition and a shift of trust towards personalities, three-quarters (76%) of publisher respondents say they will be trying to get their staff to behave more like creators this year. Half (50%) said they would be partnering with creators to help distribute content, around a third (31%) said they would be hiring creators, for example to run their social media accounts. A further 28% are looking to set up creator studios and facilitate joint ventures.
More widely, could 2026 be the year when AI company stock valuations come down to earth with a bump, amid concerns about whether their trillion-dollar bets will pay back their investors? Meanwhile the amount of low-quality AI automated content, including so-called ‘pink slime’ sites, looks set to explode, with platforms struggling to distinguish this from legitimate news.
We can expect more public concern about the role of big tech in our lives. This may include individual acts of ‘Appstinence’ and other forms of digital detox and a desire for more IRL (In Real Life) connection. Governments will also come under pressure to do more to protect young and other vulnerable groups online, even in the United States.
The creator economy will continue to surge, fuelled by investments from video platforms and streamers. At the top end creators will look more like Hollywood moguls with big budgets and their own studio complexes. Within news, we’ll also see the emergence of bigger, more robust, creator-led companies delivering significant revenues as well as value to audiences – offering ever greater competition for traditional journalism…
Read the report in full: “Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026,” from @reutersinstitute.bsky.social.
* Marshall McLuhan
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As we ponder the prospects of the press, we might type a birthday note to John Baskerville, a pioneering English printer and typefounder, who was born on this date in 1706. Among Baskerville’s publications in the British Museum’s collection are Aesop’s Fables (1761), the Bible (1763), and the works of Horace (1770)– many printed on a stock he invented, “wove paper”, which was considerably smoother than “laid paper”, allowing for sharper printing results. And as for his fonts, Baskerville’s creations (including the famous “Baskerville,” a predecessor to the very similar Times New Roman) were so successful that his competitors resorted to claims that they damaged the eyes.
“A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product”*…
A quarter of a century ago Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia‘s founder, articulated its vision– one into which it has impressively grown: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”
On the ocassion of its birthday this month, Caitlin Dewey takes stock…
Happy birthday to Wikipedia, which is now old enough to rent a car without extra charges … but faces new (and newly urgent) threats from AI and political polarization. As a palate cleanser, should those bum you out (the second, in particular, is very grim/good), may I then suggest this “entirely non-comprehensive list of life principles” learned from 20 years of editing Wikipedia. [Scientific American / Financial Times / The Wikipedian]…
From her wonderful newsletter, Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends. All three are eminently worth reading.
* Clay Shirky, who went on to observe that “Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration,” but at the same time that: “We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.”
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As we treasure– and support— treasures, we might recall that it was on this date in 1885 that LaMarcus Adna Thompson received the first patent for a true “switchback railroad”– or , as we know it, a roller coaster. Thompson had designed the ride in 1881, and opened it on Coney Island in 1884. (The “hot dog” had been invented, also at Coney Island, in 1867, so was available to trouble the stomachs of the very first coaster riders.)
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