Hey @kr! Better late than never. I apologize for not seeing this post until now.

I still owe you an explanation.

The problem-space:

People want high-quality, fresh beef for a reasonable price.

People may also say they want a relationship with their rancher or farmer, but convenience often wins out. If the steaks are available in the supermarket, you grab them there.

When selling animal shares, farmers are not incentivized to handle small orders for a typical household fridge. Below (in my opinion) a 1/2 cow share, it doesn't make sense for a farmer to spend a lot of time marketing and/or selling to smaller (normal people) buyers.

A solution:

Small scale Butcher Box-like offerings and Bitcoin customer aggregation for animal share purchases / processing.

Using Nostr (a protocol used heavily by Bitcoiners, some of whom claim to desire fresh red meat and developing relationships with their ranchers), farmers could blast out information about Butcher Box-like assortments that they have available.

In turn, consumers could either zap or respond to the message as a deposit for their order. If 16 people zap for 1/16th of a cow each or 32 people zap for 1/32nd of a cow each, now a farmer is selling a whole cow and the incentives are back.

A farmer could then get the animal processed, boxes filled, and orders shipped to customers (within regional limits).

Challenges I ran into:

The Lightning ecosystem / Lightning as a service. Obfuscating Lightning and Nostr networks in UI to create a simple user experience for farmers and ranchers selling on the platform. Deposits requiring more liquidity than typically transacted on Lightning and Nostr rails.

Additionally, this business idea eventually is meant to connect consumers and farmers, effectively cutting out my middle man platform. Why would you by from Agstr when you can now call up your farmer for orders?

Final Thoughts:

I still really like the idea and want to continue working on it and hopefully collaborate with others. There's a lot more to explore in terms of connecting consumers and producers in this ecosystem and making it easier for consumers to buy meat, dairy, and produce (more) locally.