You are halfway proving my point and halfway showing that you don't get what can be done.
In the proving my point camp -- If your goal is to make money, please do not go into agriculture. Go into this arena if you goal is to improve the world. Money can be made elsewhere. Decisions that will impact the ability of people to live or die should NOT be based on the cash it will bring back into the hands of a startup.
And in the not getting it camp - 8 billion people each doing small tasks IS scale. Helping them do those tasks easier decreases the maintenance in their lives. Maybe it is a content-based app to see what has worked for other people. Maybe it is training materials to which people can subscribe. Maybe someone will sell modular garden box kits, with built-in drip irrigation, so you just plug in your hose and you have a system that can work in an arid climate. Or a set of 3D printer designs to print out your own hand tools for gardening.
All of those ideas can scale to be a profitable startup, and they are just off the top of my head. Who knows what could be developed if people really sat down and worked on it?
Finally, as far as gardening not making your life easier, I cannot help you with that. It isn't for everyone. But that is also the reason that communities work better than individuals. In our family, I do little of the farm work, but I make all of the money. It balances out. Find the right people to live with.
This something I've been curious about for a while now. I don't have a lot of experience, but I've worked on a farm and with a research team looking at agricultural water management. It seems like there is a lot of potential in distributed small-scale farming, and later, small-scale automation. I just don't know what would be the most viable route to get into the business of... I guess I'd call it small-scale decentralized farming? But these kinds of ideas are getting me thinking about it again.
I'd guess the greatest interest comes from educated young Western homeowners. But I would rather dream of it breaking into the mainstream and becoming the new pattern of food production. I want to do the math and find out if it's a feasible future, because I suspect it will be, but the question is when. But I'm not sure where to start, or if the data to answer that even exists yet.
The first step is probably gathering a group of like-minded folk and just starting to work the ideas, do the research, crunch the numbers, etc. I don't know what the best product to start with would be, but I'd certainly be up for at least getting some discussion going.
These kinds of ideas are one of the few things that would get me to leave my cushy stable coding job and go back to the startup world.
A startup has to make money, Silicon Valley bubble puffery notwithstanding. If you want to spec this out as a money loosing proposition for a charity, fine, bit then don't go wondering "why aren't the startups not flooding into a market I just said they can't make money in?"
My objection is not necessarily to your ideas, but to the absurd idea that startups should be piling in.
In the proving my point camp -- If your goal is to make money, please do not go into agriculture. Go into this arena if you goal is to improve the world. Money can be made elsewhere. Decisions that will impact the ability of people to live or die should NOT be based on the cash it will bring back into the hands of a startup.
And in the not getting it camp - 8 billion people each doing small tasks IS scale. Helping them do those tasks easier decreases the maintenance in their lives. Maybe it is a content-based app to see what has worked for other people. Maybe it is training materials to which people can subscribe. Maybe someone will sell modular garden box kits, with built-in drip irrigation, so you just plug in your hose and you have a system that can work in an arid climate. Or a set of 3D printer designs to print out your own hand tools for gardening.
All of those ideas can scale to be a profitable startup, and they are just off the top of my head. Who knows what could be developed if people really sat down and worked on it?
Finally, as far as gardening not making your life easier, I cannot help you with that. It isn't for everyone. But that is also the reason that communities work better than individuals. In our family, I do little of the farm work, but I make all of the money. It balances out. Find the right people to live with.