Everything to Gain from Thriving Southland

Mike's Notes

My notes from an all-day workshop organised for farmers, which I attended yesterday.

Resources

• https://www.thrivingsouthland.co.nz/everything-to-gain/
• https://www.blog.ajabbi.com/2025/11/workspaces-for-agriculture.html
• https://www.blog.ajabbi.com/2026/02/waimumu-field-days-background-to-ajabbi.html
• https://www.blog.ajabbi.com/2026/04/agents.html

References

• Reference

Repository

• Home > Ajabbi Research > Library > Subscriptions > Thriving Southland
• Home > Handbook > 

Last Updated

08/05/2026

Everything to Gain from Thriving Southland

By: Mike Peters

On a Sandy Beach: 07/05/2026

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

I attended the all-day workshop "Everything to Gain" on 6 May 2026, held at the Ascot Park Hotel in Invercargill, New Zealand. Organised by Thriving Southland.

It was a day full of informative speakers on the global agricultural market, attended mainly by working farmers.

I learned a great deal from the objective data presented and from chatting with the farmers at our table. Hard times are ahead.

Thinking visually while listening

I mentally ran the Workspaces for Agriculture, testing the model assumptions against what I learned.

I also did a brain dump by creating 12 A4 drawings and solving the problem with variables in the current Pipi Core buildout.

Lessons I learned

Shifting a working Pipi 9 from a laptop to a data centre led to several unexpected consequences.

I underestimated the impact of

• The naming, generation, and pub/sub of variables.
• Host environment.
• OS
• Java
• CFML Engine
• Needing to turn Pipi into 4 separate role-based editions, which then exposed some hidden problems.
• Adding a nest structure between Pipi and the host environment.
• The impact of all of the above when each engine can pub/sub and be both deterministic and probabilistic, with multiple copies of each engine, and many in different locations.
• Path length constraint in Windows vs Linux.

This very hard problem can only be solved by running a simulation of all 18 engines in parallel and watching the interaction. Lots of feedback loops.

Yesterday, a lot of progress was made visually, answering these questions. The variable-naming convention used for 12 months has held up, despite some earlier false flags.

• More work is needed on variable distribution rules (messaging) for automation.
• Global
• Local
• etc

Today I did another 8 drawings. They were of the Messaging Engine (msg) routing variables between the engines in both deterministic and probabilistic modes.

I will sleep on all this for a few days to see if anything else pops out, then commit it to code.