--- schema: 1 type: video title: >- You’re Not Thinking Big Enough: Rebuilding Food Systems with AI Agents — Cody Menefee, Firecrawl description: >- 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 --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/ztlXKfPCT3Q-youtube-54b3735d83f935b2225e Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/you-re-not-thinking-big-enough-rebuilding-food-syst-d3a51e1a829e markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/you-re-not-thinking-big-enough-rebuilding-food-syst-d3a51e1a829e.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-23T22:20:56.742Z' language: null children: [] videoId: ztlXKfPCT3Q durationSeconds: 1106 publishedAt: '2026-09-23T15:30:27.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 24 endSeconds: 81 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=24' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 357 endSeconds: 368 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=357' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 299 endSeconds: 357 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=299' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 390 endSeconds: 400 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=390' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 400 endSeconds: 478 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=400' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 478 endSeconds: 489 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=478' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 489 endSeconds: 607 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=489' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 489 endSeconds: 607 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=489' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 619 endSeconds: 672 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=619' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 682 endSeconds: 860 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=682' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 682 endSeconds: 860 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=682' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 871 endSeconds: 958 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=871' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 871 endSeconds: 958 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=871' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 969 endSeconds: 1106 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=969' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 619 endSeconds: 672 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/ztlXKfPCT3Q?t=619' heldReason: rights --- # 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 --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/ztlXKfPCT3Q-youtube-54b3735d83f935b2225e Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/you-re-not-thinking-big-enough-rebuilding-food-syst-d3a51e1a829e · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.