I grew up on a farm.  My father spent a lot of time away from our farm selling and installing systems for other farmers that gave them more opportunity at what was, quite literally, the grass roots level.

One of these systems was called a Mix Mill.  It was a processing machine about the size of a small refrigerator that ground grains like corn and soybeans into livestock feed.  Using a series of black dials on the front of a cool-looking and very loud mint green machine connected to a set of augers, a farmer could dial in mixtures of grains and nutrients, and control the blend and texture of the feed.  This saved the farmer all the time and labor of loading grain into a truck, hauling it to a centralized grain mill, grinding and mixing the grain there in one big batch, then loading it  into 100 lb bags and hauling it back to the farm.

Another product, a Grain Bin, was a big silvery cylinder with drying fans installed around its perimeter that allowed the farmer to store and dry grain until the market presented the best selling opportunity.  No longer did a farmer necessarily have to sell his grain at harvest time, when the market was glutted.  The Grain Bin gave farmers more flexibility by giving them a much larger window through which to move their product.

After breakfast this morning with Scott Walker, the founder of BrainCandy LLC, whose Runes of Gallidon explores production using a networked  model, I can see more clearly than ever that we are in an analogous scenario today.  The ’small farmers’ of our time are Independent Media Producers (IMPs) such as app developers, gamers, bloggers, filmmakers and storytellers of all stripes.

The Mix Mills and Grain Bins of new media–some of them even sporting agri-names like FinalCut, Feedburner, FeedRoom, FeedCompany, Mailbeans and Sprouter–are abundant, and give an IMP almost unlimited ways to intersect with market vectors.  (In fact, anyone thinking of launching a media app would be well advised to take a look at this first.  All 67 pages of it.  It should be mandatory.)

Like Mix Mills and Grain Bins did for farmers, these apps  give the IMP much more say in the supply chain.  A say in when the feed gets ground.  How long it gets stored.  What goes into it.

The apps also hold down the IMP’s expenses.  Costs of fuel, labor and transportation are all lowered.  What was once produced at the centralized grain mill (e.g. a large post production facility with heavy-duty Avid machines and 24-track consoles) can now be produced using laptops in someone’s home studio.

With all these ‘Mix Mills and Grain Bins’ and the unlimited spectrum of mashups and market entry points they make possible, we IMPs– we tillers of the cybersoil, farmers of the fractal, growers of the game–are left with only two questions that have no off-the-shelf answer:  What are we planting? and Why?