Cougar Chronicles: From Telegram to Tillage
Visiting the Cougar DAO, LLC farm in NE Colorado
Remember when we bought a farm with internet friends and their hard-earned JPEG-flipping money? No big deal. However, this transaction would have never been complete without literally lifting our fingers from the keyboard and sticking them in the dirt of the farm itself. So a few of the members decided to make the trek to Township 8 North, Range 47 West of the 6th P.M., Phillips County, CO Section 3 SE 1/4. You can see where this sits on a map at Farmapper.com with the farm and Colorado Cougar habitat.
In order to get up to speed as to the how and the why, here’s a sequence of this author’s journey from the very beginning followed by some highlights from the trip:
Start a project that will dabble in Real World Assets (RWA)
Realize that RWA is gonna be a lot of legal stuff
Try to obtain osmosis of legal jargon through LexDAO Discord
Realize that lawyers are people too with their own agendas and have an arguably better sense of humor than the tech industry
Stick around primarily for the banter and the weekly Real World Asset Consortium meetings
Join a spin-out initiative of an on-chain titling project TaterDAO
Banter multiplies in a quieter corner of Discord
2:31 AM Discord ping: “Fuck it, let’s crowdfund Cougar Island together”
Forms Cougar DAO, LLC on Kali in < 2 minutes
*Members check bank account then auction price* “Lol, nevermind”
“Haha, just bought a farm” - Legend James McCall on a live auction during the RWAC meeting several weeks later
Cougars assemble USDC capital to commit to CougarDAO, LLC on Kali
USDC -> USD conversion & other necessary logistics for land purchase led by the only remotely responsible member + master troller, Nick Rishwain.
CougarDAO LLC (a Wyoming LLC) signs papers for the farm, ties up remaining logistics, brings on a tenant, and DAO-managed farming commences.
ETH Denver rolls around, CougarDAO, LLC degens Angelo Alessio and Nick Bax agree it would be a good idea to rent a car to drive out to meet the tenant and see the farm. (Continued below)
With nothing but a mighty Mini Cooper rental and algo-reliance on Google Maps to understand “Township 8 North”, we headed up to Sterling, Colorado about 2 hours NE of Denver en route to the J&L Cafe for a hearty breakfast with the tenant. J&L Cafe is nothing short of a classic American diner that you would expect to find in a town of < 15K people. Over some grits and grub, these internet nerds connected with a 4th generation farmer on a wide variety of topics to include, but not limited to:
-Generational challenges of the agricultural industry
-Possible ways to prevent the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer
-Dodge Charger Hellcats and other 700+ HP cars
-A few of the hundred produce outputs of corn
-The prolific wind turbine placement in the region
-History of Sterling, CO and nearby Haxtun, CO
After breakfast, we followed the tenant’s Dodge Ram 3500 in our mighty Mini Cooper on another 20 minute drive out to a dirt road that led to the non-obvious plot of land that was in fact the CougarDAO, LLC plot. From there, on a quieter day of about 20-30 MPH wind gusts, we touched dirt! It was glorious, basically a Neil Armstrong moment for the frontier of a bunch of armchair farmers sans an actual farmer who got the consensus together in the first place.
Some details about the plot itself:
-The conditions of the adjacent plots vary drastically and primarily because of managerial competence of each plot. Key takeaway: visiting any prospective property is of utmost importance before cloud-funding it. Fortunately our tenant is one of the good ones with another 8000 acres under his purview.
-Corn is the primary crop in the region and the end uses for it from our farm are for animal feed and a premium brand of popcorn that gets processed nearby and exported to Mexico.
-The nearest town is Haxtun of about 1000 people which hasn’t changed for the last 50 years. There is a “brokerage service” (Silos + freight train loader) in town as the primary economic activity. The local high school is part of an 8-man football league (Haxtun Bulldogs) for small towns throughout Colorado.
-Primary growing season is April to September.
All sarcasm aside in this writing, it’s still a bit surreal that we now live in an era where you can basically go from Twitter-to-terra firma by connecting with people not only much more knowledgeable than ourselves on the internet, but more importantly complementary. Everyone in CougarDAO, LLC, and arguably every DAO contributor, has a unique perspective and skillset to bring to the table and achieve new objectives together. No longer bound by geographic isolation, DAOs have the leverage of unlimited knowledge and resources to make new ideas come to life. Who knows, we might just have to connect some Ag hardware next to some smart contracts to see what new boundaries can be broken. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a Tater NFT that had a live feed to the Ag hardware?