[HN Gopher] What vertical farming and ag startups don't understa...
___________________________________________________________________
What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about
agriculture
Author : kickout
Score : 278 points
Date : 2020-06-24 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thinkingagriculture.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (thinkingagriculture.io)
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| About two years ago, I started with a much fancier AgTech with
| Hydroponics. Went all the way to the YCombinator interview in
| Mountain View (the last one for Indians), and rejected with
| something in the lines of "not advanced enough".
|
| Spent time researching, talking, and more researching about the
| core problems of Agriculture in India. It is one sector where
| everyone loves to toss and play around, the most politically
| involved and abused, with huge numbers but contributing less than
| 20% of the total Indian GDP. Everyone seem to have a vested
| interest -- both good and bad.
|
| At times, I'm shit-scared that I'm trying to help solve something
| so massive and gigantic that if I can make an iota of difference,
| it would be huge.
|
| Of course, my hammer is Technology and I'm trying to find just
| the precise nail-heads to hit, one at a time.
| newyankee wrote:
| Would be happy to connect to discuss more. There are plenty of
| opportunities in India for improvement, it is just that is a
| complicated market. The humanity improvement aspect here is
| bigger than the financial one for sure. The only way to start
| is with something that works low tech and cheap enough for
| average farmers to get into.
| julianeon wrote:
| You seem like the right person to ask about this.
|
| My sense was that hydroponics were so expensive that they
| really only made sense for one crop: marijuana. If your plant
| is selling for $1000, then spending $50 per plant to increase
| its yield and 'baby' it so that it sells for $1200 makes sense.
| But for most plants, it doesn't make economic sense. (Tomatoes,
| maybe. But they're going to have to sell for a higher price
| point, in more expensive markets).
|
| Is that accurate? I'm an amateur so if this is uninformed, feel
| free to correct me.
| pvaldes wrote:
| There are lots of really expensive products that can be
| cultured indoors, are perfectly legal, and aren't drugs
| julianeon wrote:
| I'm not being dense here - I really thought there weren't?
| Like the core problem with ag as a business is that it's
| very low margin and it's extremely hard to make money.
|
| I can only think of a handful: marijuana, fancy tomatoes at
| Whole Foods, maybe coffee or vanilla (?) beans... but even
| there, notice how there's either fierce competitive
| pressure, or it's possible to easily overwhelm the market
| (vanilla beans have to compete against synthetics). I mean
| there are surely some I'm forgetting, but it's a small
| number, and I thought that deterred VC investment.
|
| For your staples - corn, soy - that's still much cheaper to
| grow outdoors, so hydroponics can't win that market.
| degraafc wrote:
| I spent a few months at a consulting company working with a
| precision agriculture startup, and my mind was totally blown when
| I first learned how much technology goes into agriculture these
| days. I feel like a lot of tech people have a mental image of
| outdoor farming still being somewhat primitive (I certainly did!)
| which could cause the misconceptions mentioned in the article.
| gpanders wrote:
| My graduate school advisor is a big name in satellite-based
| navigation (e.g. GPS), and I spent a lot of time learning about
| state-of-the-art advances in GPS techniques such as precise
| positioning. I was surprised to learn that many of the former
| students in our lab went to work for John Deere of all places.
| At the time, I also had an image of outdoor farming being
| fairly primitive, but this was an eye-opening revelation to me.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I met a startup where I live during an event. The develop a
| solution for famers to integrate all their data in one system
| instead of spreadsheets, think of a farming ERP.
|
| One of the founders worked since his early teens driving
| large machines during harvest season. He said that
| agriculture is already now able to be fully automated, from
| GPS controlled tractors and such to milking and feeding
| robots. I had the same revelation, modern farming is way more
| tech heavy automated than I thought.
| Loughla wrote:
| We have auto-steer on all large equipment, full stop.
| Planting is a science down to the square foot to optimize
| yields. Spraying is optimized to 2 square inch across every
| field. Soil checks for nutrients, compaction, and other
| factors are weekly in the fall and spring, and monthly in the
| summer. Moisture checks are twice weekly in the summer.
|
| For livestock - they have routine blood screenings for
| disease and nutrient deficiencies. Rotation through pasture
| is decided via nutrient content and growth rate of pasture
| plants. Breeding and genetic lines are strictly controlled
| via artificial insemination. Animal growth rates, health, and
| any number of other factors are tracked long-term to decide
| lineages to keep, modify, or eliminate. All feed supplements
| are planned to absolutely optimize feed/meat conversion
| ratios.
|
| The problem with farming isn't that the data doesn't exist,
| or that the technology isn't being used. It's that the data
| lives in 18 different places, some in my head, and that the
| technology is ungodly expensive.
|
| The only way I can see to make SV and ag work well would be
| to focus on what would otherwise be mid-sized businesses.
| Large scale operations already have the tech and data. The
| farmers who run operations of <2000 acres can't afford the
| large scale purchases, and do much of what I talked about via
| 'inherent' and 'inherited' knowledge (i.e. they know the
| north pasture needs to be emptied for two months early
| spring, but don't know how to improve the plant growth there
| without messing everything up).
| bricej13 wrote:
| For a small peek watch this simple farmer dig a hole, put a
| seed in, and put dirt on top:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As
| carapace wrote:
| That's basically a robot, eh? A farm mecha.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Or think that every pistachio that goes to market has been
| visually inspected and individuals sorted, and has been for
| the last 25 years.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| Did you mean to post a link to a YouTube video
| demonstrating that? Your link is a dupe of the parent.
| mespe wrote:
| My PhD is in sustainable agriculture, and I have 18+ years
| experience in both field and greenhouse ag. Ironically, unlike
| many here, I went from agriculture to data science/programming.
|
| One thing missed by a lot of the comments: Indoor systems tend to
| be incredibly fragile affairs. If you've ever been in a well
| managed commercial greenhouse, you will notice a ton of
| sanitation procedures. There are greenhouse pests and diseases
| which are never an issue in the field, in large part because
| there is an entire ecological system of checks and balances
| working out in a field. Even in modern intensive ag fields. The
| truth is an agricultural field is an amazingly complex system
| which we don't fully understand (we are only starting to explore
| soil ecosystems and plant roots). Vertical farms are disconnected
| from this, though the costs might not be obvious. As a
| consultant, I watched a "trendy" aquaponics startup crash and
| burn because they underestimated this.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| What's referred to as "modern farming" is in fact kind of grossly
| inefficient, destructive, and hopelessly dependent on subsidies
| as well as a handful of companies supply pesticides, fertilizers
| and other chemicals needed to squeeze some life out of a dying
| and eroding soil. We "perfected" that over the last century or so
| and it's used to mass produce only a comparatively small number
| of staples. I grew up in an era that was probably peak industrial
| scale farming (i.e. the seventies and eighties last century). A
| lot of stuff you find in a supermarket today was simply unknown
| or considered exotic at best. Bread came in two varieties: brown
| and white. The flour came from a factory. A lot of the stuff you
| put on top came out of a tube or a jar. James May (from Top Gear
| fame) has a hilarious Youtube channel called food tribe where he
| satirically highlights some seventies era sandwich recipes.
|
| This type of farming scales only at the cost of variety, quality,
| the environment, and our health. Contrary to self serving
| studies, having less pesticides in your food intake is probably
| good for you. Also, less corn syrup in your life is definitely a
| good thing. And more variety in your diet is probably not a bad
| idea either. In a nut shell "modern farming" is a great way of
| feeding the poor and a core reason why obesity and poverty is a
| common combination in modern economies. All the cheap food is
| great at keeping you alive but not necessarily optimal for a long
| lifetime.
|
| The promise of actual modern farming is vastly more efficient use
| of resources (water, energy, chemicals, the environment), more
| variety, better freshness, nutritional value, cost, being able to
| grow it closer to the place of consumption, etc. It has nice side
| effects like being less taxing on the landscape and environment
| and generally being associated with things that give people warm
| fuzzy feelings, which they tend to attribute some $ value to. I
| other words, modern farming is what modern farmers want to do
| because that's where the money is.
|
| If you look at the value chain in farming, it's clearly a very
| tiered market. At the very bottom you have the basically inedible
| stuff that is destined for animal fodder and industrial
| processing. It's by definition low margin and high volume.
| Farming practices in this space tend to be very destructive. It's
| cheap only because the epic cost of cleaning up the mess is not
| factored in (that's for the next generation to worry about).
|
| One level up you have the stuff we actually can eat that is mass
| produced at razor thin margins for the industrial production of
| food. It's the bottom of a value chain where most of the money is
| made by industries using the produce as the input for their food
| products.
|
| Then we get more into niche farming where quality of production,
| production process, and the produce is the key goal. This is the
| stuff consumers pay extra for to get because it tastes good or
| makes them feel good. Whether it's organically produced spelt
| flour hand ground by some bearded hipster or some japanese beer
| fed and massaged Kobe beef; this is high value, high margin,
| produce. Any farmer with a clue wants to be here because that's
| where the money is. High margins and everybody thinks your cool.
| The only problem is that it doesn't quite scale to feeding the
| planet. But nevertheless this sector has exploded in the last few
| decades.
|
| And then you have actual high tech modern farming which does the
| former but in a smarter way such as to maximize quality and yield
| while minimizing cost. Vertical farming fits in here because it
| gets you fresh stuff pretty much straight from the farm into your
| shopping basket. The reason it's currently applied mainly at the
| top end of the market is simply because that's where the money is
| right now. But there's no reason for this stuff not to eventually
| gobble up the rest of the market. There's probably a lot of stuff
| that will fail to scale or to deliver but inevitably some it will
| work pretty much as advertised.
|
| In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving themselves
| with shaving of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny margin on
| producing glorified pig food. There are no 10x returns doing
| that. It's a race to the bottom. Selling fresh basil to city
| dwelling hipsters on the other hand is a thing short term but
| hardly the end goal.
| tankdoan wrote:
| > In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving
| themselves with shaving of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny
| margin on producing glorified pig food. There are no 10x
| returns doing that. It's a race to the bottom.
|
| Full disclosure, current employee. Farmers Business Network
| (fbn.com) is in SV operating in this space. Farmers take on
| huge amounts of risk, and we're helping them better their
| bottom lines. We try to make them more efficient (you can spray
| less of X here), save the money on their inputs, and help them
| find better prices when they go to market.
| valboa wrote:
| My response was too long, so I put it in my blog.
| https://www.yorch.co/what-i-think-about-food-production-and-...
|
| I think the author has great points, but is not the full picture.
| skybrian wrote:
| This article is at too high a level of abstraction. It doesn't
| make sense to talk about the huge, almost almost entirely
| automated farms that grow crops like corn and soybeans in the
| same way as the farms that grow fruits and vegetables that are
| still mostly picked by hand.
| indigo62018 wrote:
| In these days, whenever I hear a news that Google launches some
| services, I always ask myself this question - when this service
| will be abandoned?
|
| I can't imagine what would happened on their stock price if they
| didn't acquire YOUTUBE.
| carapace wrote:
| I've been thinking about this in the context of applied ecology
| (Permaculture, et. al.) It's undeniable that modern mechanized
| mass agriculture is incredibly efficient and already highly
| automated. It's kind of fantastic. (And very challenging to
| compete against.)
|
| The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and
| ecological ignorance.
|
| The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that
| will become endangered if we do not mitigate the severe erosion
| problems that stem from single species field that are barren (re:
| nothing actively growing) for 30-40% of the calendar year (in
| North America)."
|
| (Imagine installing millions of acres of solar panels and just
| switching them off for 1/3 of the year.)
|
| Broadly speaking, if our agriculture destroys topsoil rather than
| creating it we're gonna have a bad time.
|
| An interesting challenge would be to automate food forests. For
| concreteness, check out what these folks are doing:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance
|
| This is one family working on their home plot in a suburb who
| have converted it into a really cool food forest with chickens
| and lots and lots of different crops.
|
| Imagine replicating this across millions of acres, without
| involving hundreds of thousands of people (which wouldn't be a
| bad thing, but it couldn't compete with mechanized agriculture.)
| What kind of automation could help with that?
| jonnypotty wrote:
| I was just expecting a page with the word 'anything'
| kickout wrote:
| They know there is money to be made :)
| rmason wrote:
| With twenty years previous experience as an agronomist I can tell
| you that this article is right on.
|
| You want to know cropping ag's biggest problem? Too much data.
| Farmers are collecting all sorts of data - soil samples, weather
| station data, aerial infrared photos and yield monitor data to
| name a few. But there are few tools that give actionable
| information from all that data. Actionable in prescribing
| something that results in a positive ROI.
|
| Now as an agronomist who soil sampled, walked the field multiple
| times every year and sometimes even rode the combine with the
| farmer I was able to do that - sometimes.
|
| Someday it will happen but it's my opinion that AI is a long,
| long way from performing that job. But I do hope I live to see
| it.
| michaelscott wrote:
| Out of interest, what kind of prescriptions would you hope data
| could make? Are you talking about coming up with new ideas for
| production or further optimisation for what already exists?
| kickout wrote:
| Thanks. Agree---lots of data, little 'actionable' solutions out
| there
| hamzahc wrote:
| A lot of the points around efficiency of traditional farming vs
| vertical farming are valid points. Over time however, you would
| expect vertical farms to catch up to the level of sophistication
| of traditional ag. The two practices are not like for like and
| shouldn't be compared as such - vertical farming is still in the
| 80:20 phase of development where as traditional agriculture is
| now in the hyper optimisation phase after 000s of years squeezing
| for incremental improvements. The primary benefits of urban
| vertical farming come from things like:
|
| - Reduced transportation costs and emissions to people buying
| them due to being located close to urban centres
|
| - No dependency on natural climate/weather, you can never have a
| bad yield!
|
| - No need for pesticides that can get into the water table and
| damage local environments
|
| - Allows for high accuracy estimations of yields that can build
| better forecasting models for supermarkets etc.
| rudolph9 wrote:
| A really great non-profit focused on more sustainable agriculture
| is The Land Institute. Generally people also don't also
| understand that some advancements in agriculture take decades or
| even centuries.
|
| One example of an advancement from The Land Institute is their
| focus on domesticating a perennial cousin of Modern wheat. This
| is no small task given humans have been domesticating modern
| wheat for thousands or years. Although the cousin still yields
| relatively less grain, it has significantly deeper roots, is much
| more resistant to weeds and big in turn requiring less pesticide
| and can harvested with existing equipment. With time it's not
| unreasonable to think it would have comparable yields to modern
| wheat.
|
| They have a number of projects and been focusing on
| sustainability since 1976.
|
| https://landinstitute.org/
| gdubs wrote:
| +1 to The Land Institute. To give others context, perennials
| require much less input than their annual cousins, both in
| terms of labor and also petrochemicals.
|
| The other big benefit is carbon sequestration. Perennials
| typically root far deeper into the soil, giving prairies
| enormous amounts of (carbon sequestering) root mass. This also
| has benefits in terms of erosion control -- soil loss is one of
| the biggest, not talked about threats to society.
|
| Finally, perennials can help -- again through extensive root
| systems -- improve water capture, recharging aquifers.
| kickout wrote:
| Yes, Land Institute is excellent. I follow their work closely.
| They are on the right path.
| rudolph9 wrote:
| They actually had a run with the grain in General Mills cereal!
| The commercial name of the Modern wheat cousin Is "Kernza"
|
| https://kernza.org/
|
| https://www.dallasnews.com/food/cooking/2019/05/23/can-cerea...
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| I really like this video series from Exa Cognition on Vertical
| Farming that goes over many of the issues the article posts.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw
|
| And here's a video from Techno Farm he mentioned
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfyPlyJfKA
| newyankee wrote:
| really good videos, although an honest breakdown of costs is
| what will help with the naysayers
| nostrademons wrote:
| If you haven't read about the Green Revolution [1], you probably
| should.
|
| Basically, this is was a series of technological developments in
| the early 50s and 60s that completely revolutionized agriculture.
| High-yielding seed varieties, fossil-fuel fertilizers, chemical
| pesticides, etc. During the Green Revolution, the proportion of
| common feedstocks that are edible grew from 4-5% to 40-50%, and
| the number of humans that can be supported on earth by a typical
| 2000-2500 calorie diet grew from ~1-2B to 10+B. Most of the
| things we hate about modern agriculture - pesticides, GMOs,
| monocultures, Monsanto's dominance, the loss of small family
| farms, coupling between agriculture and fossil fuel extraction -
| came about because of the Green Revolution. But without it, 80%
| of the world population would be dead or never born.
|
| Agriculture isn't really in need of Silicon Valley style
| disruption, because it happened in the 50s. We currently produce
| enough food on earth for everyone to have a 3000+ calorie daily
| diet, and we could increase the world population by 50% _with
| current food output_ and still have enough to eat. The problems
| with agriculture today mostly concern distribution and tail risks
| - we produce plenty, but it 's allocated inefficiently (wealthy
| people eat veal and foie gras, poor people struggle to get enough
| basic grains) and it could be wiped out by a blight or supply
| chain disruption. Silicon Valley doesn't really help with these
| problems, and if anything exacerbates them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
| m3047 wrote:
| I bookmarked that site, I hope they keep posting.
| speeder wrote:
| I do have an interest in vertical farming.
|
| But solely because I want a farm, and land in Brazil is crazy
| expensive.
|
| But if I had a 1000 hectare farm I would gladly use it in a
| sustainable non-SV tech but still tech way.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| As a consumer, I don't care a tiny bit about making my food less
| expensive (by making production more efficient). Food is already
| very cheap.
|
| I care very very much about reducing the suffering of farm
| animals. I do not want to become vegan (for health reasons), but
| the guilt I feel because of my contribution to animal suffering
| is one of the worst parts of my life.
|
| Please, please, smart young technologists out there: figure out
| some cool technology to make it possible to raise farm animals
| efficiently while also ensuring that they live comfortable,
| decent lives.
| ntbloom wrote:
| Traditional agriculture has "solved all of the scale problems"
| through the use of pesticides, destructive monocultures, and
| disruption of the natural water cycle. It's also built on the
| idea that diesel is cheap both for the tractors to farm in the
| midwest and the trucks to deliver goods to markets around the
| country. Should any of those fragile pillars collapse due to
| regulation (not likely), major environmental catastrophe (pretty
| likely), or disruptions in the global fossil fuel economy
| (possible), solutions like vertical farming start making a lot
| more sense.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Farming is not a sustainable use of land. The article of the
| author assumes the massive scales of land use for farming is an
| invariant, but it is a massive contributor to species extinction
| and global warming.
|
| Vertical farming is as important as solar is to the future
| sustainability of the human race.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Other than soil depletion, it's perfectly sustainable. We've
| been doing it for 10,000 years. Of course, we also figured out
| how to revitalize soil a long time ago, vis-a-vis ruminant
| fertilization and crop rotation. But the soil nutrients are
| supplemented with artificial fertilizer these days for
| efficiency.
| microdrum wrote:
| One of the exceptions:
|
| https://www.waterbit.com/
|
| Takes advantage of current massive farm scale and extant
| automation, simply increasing yield by adding precision to
| watering.
| alisson wrote:
| Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into
| agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and
| felt in love with it because:
|
| - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize
| yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being
| biodiverse - It builds forests
|
| So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with
| rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest
| this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest
| fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over.
| All with extensive pruning.
|
| This way you end up with better soil each time without machines
| or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with
| them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes
| instead of inputs.
|
| There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers
| here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of
| agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because
| right now most machines are very focused on monocultures:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
| stelonix wrote:
| Hello, also a developer who's interested in agroecology. I
| actually also left development (as a job, not as something I
| do) in order to pursue a more human-centric approach to
| agriculture. With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing
| way more unemployment than what's happening right now, which is
| already alarming; small farms with synergistic crops &
| forestation seems like a no-brainer to achieve food
| sustainability. Plus, chemical pesticides are usually not used
| in syntropic systems, which makes it good for your health too.
|
| I dropped out of Agroecology course in 2018 but I actively work
| with it or did before the pandemic at least.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more
| unemployment than what's happening right now
|
| I fully support the underlying message, but automation has
| been happening at large scale for 70+ years now, unemployment
| rate doesn't follow automation, jobs are just shifted to
| other industries/sectors.
| dustyleary wrote:
| In other words, "Automation hasn't increased unemployment
| in the past, even though some pesky scientists and
| economists said that it would eventually be a problem. Some
| of those people were wrong in the past, therefore
| automation will never increase unemployment, ever."
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yes; if people claim that X will cause Y, and over
| decades of doing X it continues to not cause Y, I'd like
| some _very_ compelling reasons to suddenly believe that X
| is going to start causing Y.
| primroot wrote:
| Contrast this with J.S. Mill.
|
| "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical
| inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any
| human being. They have enabled a greater population to
| live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an
| increased number of manufacturers and others to make
| fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle
| classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those
| great changes in human destiny, which it is in their
| nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in
| addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind
| shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious
| foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of
| nature by the intellect and energy of scientific
| discoverers, become the common property of the species,
| and the means of improving and elevating the universal
| lot. "
| neltnerb wrote:
| I am skeptical that "more farm workers" is a trend that
| anyone really wants. Maybe at small scale you can sell
| produce at vastly higher prices to make up for the higher
| costs, but I don't think that what you're suggesting would be
| good for agriculture if adopted broadly.
| feteru wrote:
| Might not be good for agriculture economy, but more farmers
| means more people with the means to feed themselves. Sounds
| like something I want.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Trade is fairly efficient at that too.
| stelonix wrote:
| Like others said, from a pov of global economics and
| current geopolitics, it might not make sense. But when you
| factor in _sustainability_ , _independence_ from the system
| and _health_ , things begin to make more sense. Mono-
| cultures degrade the soil, up to a point when it'll no
| longer be able to sprout that culture anymore, so what do
| these millionaire farmers do? They just log more and more
| of our forests in order to plant. That's where all this
| logging in the amazon rainforest comes from.
|
| All of this happens due to the green revolution & mass
| automation. We have papers plus empirical evidence you can
| turn any used up soil into good farming soil, if only we
| mimic the way nature does it, creating micro-climates with
| different cultures next to each other. One of the good
| outcomes of this method is that you don't even _need_
| chemical pesticides, because policultures are inherently
| more resistant to plagues. That and with this method, we
| attempt to use natural predators to cope with them too. It
| 's basically a method of rebuilding forests, which is why
| it's called an agroforestry system
| entangledqubit wrote:
| How much of this not "good for agriculture" is a result of
| a mispricing that doesn't factor in the unsustainability of
| the current mainstream approach? Like many areas this may
| involve more human workers before later transitioning to
| smarter machines in the long run.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Sure, that's fine. I was too unclear, I don't think
| _jobs_ should be a reason to intentionally make farming
| less automated and that if fully manual or mostly manual
| farming somehow became the dominant approach it would
| simply not scale.
|
| I am aware that family farms are more productive per acre
| and more sustainable usually, but there just aren't that
| many farmers or people who want to be farmers as a
| percentage of the population... it's hard work and
| exactly the kind of labor I'd expect to see automated
| right back away again ASAP.
|
| Helping farmers with new automation tools that enable
| sustainable farming seems like a far better option than
| trying to disrupt farming in a way that intentionally
| increases the labor required to feed people. If the goal
| is to help people get back in touch with nature that's a
| great goal. It's just not a goal I think could be widely
| adopted.
|
| Farmers are very smart, as the article mentions. If you
| give them the tools they need, they will use them if they
| make sense. Heck, farmers are pushing hard for the right
| to repair and modify their equipment (i.e.
| http://repair.org/agriculture/)
|
| Edit: In case this is still unclear (it's hard to phrase
| right), I'm trying to make the point that you're better
| off trying to create a win-win with existing farmers
| rather than trying to start from scratch. If they are
| given better tools they will generally prefer to make
| their farms and soil healthier because it improves their
| bottom line. I don't think it makes sense to flip it
| around and completely change the agriculture system
| _twice_.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| what advice would you offer to another developer that longs to
| get into agriculture?
| [deleted]
| kls wrote:
| If you are wanting to do it as a commercial venture, then
| livestock (particularly beef if you are in the US) is about
| the only way to go unless you can purchase vast tracts of
| land and the equipment to run it.
|
| If you are considering vegetable farming commercially, don't
| unless it is an extremely boutique product like truffles or
| exotic mushrooms, the economies of scales are crushing. The
| other option that is still viable is small plot that produces
| and end product. e.g you own a vineyard but you are not
| selling grapes you are selling wine. You own a pepper farm
| but your end product is hot sauce. Those are still viable for
| small plot.
|
| The best thing you can do with a decent tract of land is to
| plant it full of expensive hardwoods such as black walnut and
| occasionally prune the trees to promote straight growth for
| lumber.
|
| I have 7 acres and I planted 4 of it with African Ebony, one
| of the most expensive woods in the world. They are not native
| to my area so there is no issue with harvesting them and they
| require little in the way of care. They will provide a nice
| cushion for my children when they mature given that a single
| tree is worth between $300,000 to $1,000,000 (at current
| market) depending on size and quality of lumber. I planted
| about 50 trees per acre. The math is pretty self evident and
| it is the best use of land agriculturally if you are looking
| to maximize profit via small plot agriculture.
|
| My wife uses some of the other land for personal farming but
| that is her gig, I grew up on a farm (citrus) and after NAFTA
| swore I would never scratch a living out of dirt again. I
| told her she was on her own with the vegetable farming other
| than helping her with where to plot certain vegetables and
| when to plant them.
| hyko wrote:
| Buy a copy of Farming Simulator.
|
| Agriculture is a brutal, pitiless world of perfect
| competition, commoditisation, and winner-takes-all
| consolidation. There's an old farming joke: "What would you
| do if you won the lottery? I'd farm until it was all gone".
| gcbw3 wrote:
| farm sim is the most broken game ever.
|
| Even with the more realistic mods, which brings the most
| basic things like seasons(!!!), it is a futile fight
| against the bugs and bad UI.
|
| farm sim is nothing but an advert for tractor brands.
|
| Watch a couple youtube videos but NEVER pay it. you've been
| warned :)
| alisson wrote:
| Just do it, start getting your hands dirty as other said. I
| personally started with composting and now I have a system
| where my food waste becomes forests, I eat lots of
| vegetable/fruits and I just throw the bucket on a specific
| place, cover with mulch and food grows. Avocado, papayas,
| limes, cucumber, tomatos, lots of them grow easily here just
| by doing this.
|
| If you look for "agroforest academy" in youtube you may find
| a video course in english on this syntropic agriculture topic
| too.
| edoceo wrote:
| Start by getting your hands dirty. Grow some herbs in a
| window box or something simple. Once you reap the rewards,
| you may get the green-thumb itch and keep going. Getting
| started is easy: seed, dirt, water, sunshine
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| > Start by getting your hands dirty.
|
| Same advice I'd give someone in agriculture looking to get
| into code.
| dejv wrote:
| decide what kind of agriculture you want to do and check what
| is time and money requirements and seasonality is. Next step
| could be doing internship to see what it it feels like. There
| are many options from wwoofing to more job like situations.
|
| Well and then you are ready to decide. Being small farmer is
| tough: not a lot of money and a lot of work, but it is
| rewarding by many means.
|
| I personally decided to be in more play farm: few acres of
| vineyards, small wine production. It is still professional
| operation but I don't expect to be making full living off it.
| disantlor wrote:
| your description reminds me of Jane Jacobs in Death & Life of
| Great American Cities
| dhruvkar wrote:
| I would like to transition to this in the next 5-10 years.
| Starting off with a garden on a plot of land I just purchased.
|
| That syntropic agriculture video was powerful.
|
| Any way to contact you to understand how you've made the
| transition?
| alisson wrote:
| For sure, will be a pleasure, you can find me at
| alissonpatricio at gmail
| cycop wrote:
| Nice to hear it can be done .... after 20 years in technology I
| am on the same path to get into the agriculture sector.
| mahaganapati wrote:
| Wow, that's so cool. I have long been interested in
| permaculture, which this seems quite similar to -- how would
| you describe the difference? Answering my own question I'd say
| that immediately the focus on automated harvest of non-monocrop
| is very important, ad the main arguments against permaculture
| that I've come across (here and on e.g. Reddit) are that it's
| not scalable with automation. Thanks so much for sharing
| alisson wrote:
| They are very similar actually, but permaculture is about
| more than just agriculture, agriculture is one of the sides
| of permaculture. For me syntropic agriculture is that side,
| some people also call it agroforestry but this term is used
| for other kinds of agriculture, which builds forests but
| differently. On syntropic the main difference is very high
| density of plants and extensively pruning. The video I posted
| in the first comment you see a few people doing research on
| automating this processes, there's also some people Swiss
| investing into this, sure with less biodiverse but its being
| working great for them, so yes, can be automated, also lots
| of machines used on fruits crops can be used on this system,
| specially to speed up pruning bigger trees. And usually on
| syntropic its not common to find "key" shapes beds and stuff
| that we see from permaculture, its usually straight rows,
| which helps a lot with automation I guess.
| antocv wrote:
| Hey man no way, you have been living my dream!
|
| First I wanted to just grow berries, then I realized,
| pesticides and so on, so add another plant to fight that
| attacker instead of pesticide, then add another plant to
| protect that plant by being attractive for those other bugs
| which kill the bad bugs. Then I realized, this would eventually
| be a forrest with just more berries and edible fruits than
| normal. Thats where the problem appeared, reaping it would be
| hard to scale, indeed even planting such a forest would be hard
| to scale with current mechanical means.
|
| I have a few designs for robot-like planting and pickery, yet
| all I currently have in realization is 2sqm dirt with potatos,
| carrots, strawberries and another pot of blueberries. :-/
|
| Then another depressing realization, even if I made this on
| 100ha of land and produced a lot of nice fruits, berries,
| roots, the pay-off in money would probably not be worth it.
| valboa wrote:
| Smart Farming is the way! You need to concentrate in flavor
| and quality. Yield is a race to the bottom.
| DataGata wrote:
| Why wouldn't the pay-off in money not be worth it? You can
| charge a "responsibility premium" to local hipster stores.
| fataliss wrote:
| The good and the bad news is that eventually, when the rest
| of the land goes infertile from overuse, your method will be
| worth the money :)
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| How did you support yourself economically when setting this up
| and ongoing? Was it economically viable and sustainable?
| alisson wrote:
| I had a small reserve, and I cut my living costs a lot. I
| wasn't trying to make money from agriculture in the
| beginning, was all about learning, I volunteered a lot and
| did a few courses later. This year we started actually
| selling produces and I get lots of calls to pruning jobs
| which I do decline because 2 years down this line I started
| working with development again because I got out of money. We
| would be able to live from the land today for sure, but also
| having economic security and being able to invest in better
| tools and such is also very good.
|
| I'm now looking to merge this two worlds and work as a
| developer on solutions for agriculture/forests. I have a
| product in mind which I'm currently working on, lets see :)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I can see that being critical in Brazil, near the rainforests,
| but does this strategy work in the great plains?
| oddsockmachine wrote:
| Might not count as the great plains, but Mark Sheppard's New
| Forest Farm in Wisconsin is a good demonstration of a similar
| approach in a different context.
|
| https://newforestfarm.us/about/
| alisson wrote:
| Yes, the method applies anywhere in the planet. But for that
| you need to deeply understand the plants available for you, I
| mean those that are able to grow there in the beginning,
| native or not, here we use lots of african grasses and
| eucalyptus to start. There are a few people replicating this
| all over the world in very different environments.
| newyankee wrote:
| I am thinking of a similar route, as a data scientist i am
| eager to know what graduate level courses would you recommend ?
| Especially for agriculture in cold climate (Canada )
| awavering wrote:
| It's not a graduate course in the traditional sense, but Paul
| Wheaton runs a number of hands-on permaculture classes and
| courses on his land in Montana. Maybe not Canada-cold, but
| there's a large focus on shaping land and designing buildings
| to use energy more efficiently.
|
| https://wheaton-labs.com/
| valboa wrote:
| If you want to learn about agriculture, find a farm you can
| support close to you, and enroll in a summer program. You
| will learn more if you get your hands dirty.
| [deleted]
| alisson wrote:
| I don't know what to recommend you. I know a few people doing
| syntropic agriculture in Portugal which is as close as a
| close climate that I know. There is a guy in Florida, he have
| a company called GreenDreamsFL, hes the only one I know in
| the US doing this. But sadly this is not very much taught in
| academic courses down here in Brazil, but anything related to
| agroecology is very close, also understanding deeply plants
| biology helps A LOT when working with this systems, so we see
| a lot of people from Biology with a focus on Botany and
| Plant's physiology, and "florest engineering" I couldn't find
| a good translation to it, but its an academic course found
| here in Brazil which also helps a lot on understanding
| forests processes.
| asdf21 wrote:
| After watching that video, it seems like you could just mulch
| large areas of "dry land" and it would have a similar effect
| more quickly. The pruning (and rotting of the wood) is what is
| fixing the soil right?
| alisson wrote:
| Yes exactly! Its what happens naturally, trees dies, falls,
| takes others with them with the fall, make space for newer
| trees and wood decompose... Natural succession.
|
| If you don't have woody material, just leafs works too, the
| key is organic matter build up and photosynthesis. So we tend
| to cut weeds (when they start to mature/flower usually) very
| cleanly for them to grow bigger and better, not killing them,
| focus is to build soil for more demanding plants.
| alextheparrot wrote:
| The phrase "It builds forests" is so powerfully, simply
| descriptive.
|
| I think that framing agriculture's transition (hopefully) away
| from mono-culture into a more ecosystem focused idea seems like
| a tractable optimization problem. If we look at the reasons for
| mono-culture, I would argue part of the reason is that
| traditionally bigger yield is linked to bigger tools --
| tractors are much larger than horses, spraying a chemical is
| easier when only one thing needs to survive. Monoculture makes
| it easy to apply big things, harvesting one row of corn is easy
| to scale to ten rows of corn just by making the combine
| harvester wider -- the harvester's problem statement is generic
| and scaleable in this way.
|
| The hard problem, that you raised at the end, is how do we
| scale harvesting non-mono-cultures. The constraining variables
| are quite different when we need to perform a set of ten
| actions with no locality guarantees (Monoculture just
| guarantees locality of similar actions). I think one natural
| perspective is to look at how we do things non-locally at
| scale, which effectively reduces down to a distributed systems
| problem.
|
| edit: few small changes
| greenie_beans wrote:
| I'm not "silicon valley," but only a single programmer who has an
| interest in agriculture. The author is talking about large scale
| farms. What about small scale farmers? In my experience with
| those farmers, they don't typically have the access or money to
| afford tech. Do you not think there's an opportunity to create
| cheap tech tools--automation and robotics--for small scale
| farmers?
| kickout wrote:
| There is. But its hard to recoup any profit for the same reason
| you don't hear about iPhone's/premium tech in poor
| countries/region. Money just isn't there. Also, as pointed out,
| most farms are larger and getting larger. Small farms and small
| farmers will (in general) be aggregated (according to history
| at least).
| carapace wrote:
| I think (hope) there are opportunities around connecting
| small farmers directly with customers for both produce and
| value-added prepared food. There are a few "virtual farmer's
| market" services already.
|
| But this is much more an issue of marketing and communication
| than technology, eh?
| coderintherye wrote:
| The author here has a good premise, although glosses over many
| things. Yes, "vertical farming" is over-hyped. That said, the
| author didn't mention weather or pesticides/fertilizers at all.
| Statements such as "Current agriculture doesn't need an
| artificial energy source" are plain wrong. Producing fertilizers
| takes quite a bit of artificial energy and the bulk of the corn
| and soybean farmers the author is pointing to are the ones
| heavily using them. And to completely ignore weather and climate
| is to ignore the single most important variable factor in
| farming.
|
| It's also a very US-centric view. There is a ton of innovation
| happening in other world markets, especially with smallholder
| farmers. Especially around financing.
|
| The author completely ignores financing (even saying there is no
| VC money in agriculture which is false), which with larger
| farmers is actually one of the biggest issues for farmers today.
| Given that farm equipment is getting bigger and more costlier, a
| lot of thought goes into financing that equipment. Insurance is
| also a huge deal, and there's certainly a lot of room for
| streamlining the process of insuring crops and obtaining payouts.
| newyankee wrote:
| Efficiency and land use is indeed an issue in India as with the
| struggles to feed an increasing population with a higher
| protein intake requirement as well.
|
| Instead of natural gas -> Fertilizers route, a solar or
| renewable energy -> LED route can help for certain crops
| provided they do grow efficiently.
| kickout wrote:
| Fair points...I'll follow up in another post.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| I would like to build on top of your point:
|
| - Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like
| drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to
| the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
|
| - Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water
| in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.
|
| - Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these
| water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.
|
| - The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other
| poisons will also have major advantages.
|
| - The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in
| terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas
| powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more
| efficient.
|
| - The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing
| cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across
| the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.
| infogulch wrote:
| Most of these sound reasonable, but I've never bought into
| the "grow vertically" idea. It seems to ignore _physics_.
|
| Sunlight is delivered as electromagnetic power (watts)
| proportional to _surface area_. Plants naturally grow on the
| surface of the earth, and therefore receive a small
| proportion of that power which they use to convert CO2 into
| sugars and eventually plant mass which we eat. Stacking a
| bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the
| lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot
| grow as much. And that 's ignoring the added complexity and
| logistics (read: overhead) of maintaining a system that
| stacks plants on top of each other, which would surely
| obliterate whatever 2-digit% efficiency bonus you can eke out
| of stacking. The universe doesn't work like Minecraft.
|
| Chemical and water use reduction seem to be a pretty good
| outcome, as well as being able to ignore seasonality.
|
| I would like to see some numbers on farm equipment
| (in?)efficiency before throwing that out as a fact. Color me
| skeptical but it doesn't seem obvious at all that rebuilding
| a 10000-acre greenhouse every 20 years will necessarily
| produce less greenhouse emissions than running a few
| tractors. Or even that harvesting food in a greenhouse takes
| less energy than doing it with a tractor.
| Someone wrote:
| _"Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot
| change that the lower plants must receive less power, and
| therefore cannot grow as much"_
|
| That assumes all light comes from straight up. That isn't
| even true if the sun is straight overhead, and definitely
| not true close to the poles.
|
| I don't know whether it's profitable, but I would think the
| economics of vertical farming on Iceland (sun lower in the
| sky, greenhouse heating cheap, imports expensive) are
| different from those in Equatorial Guinea.
| infogulch wrote:
| No, it assumes that power is delivered based on _surface
| area with respect to the sun_. Vertical /3d farming can't
| work more than ~2 plants deep, where "depth" is measured
| as the number of plants between a given plant and _the
| sun_. Sure, build it vertically on the north pole, but it
| 's still gonna be essentially "flat". You can't magically
| get power deep into a 3D farm when there 20 other plants
| on every side that would get the light first.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I have never heard anyone suggesting that vertical farms
| enabled 3d planting. It simply removes the linear
| relationship between square foot of land and number of
| plants.
| newyankee wrote:
| Indeed, if the market is remote and energy rich (e.g.
| remote Canada with lot of surplus hydropower but lack of
| sufficient sun) the economics changes
| lurquer wrote:
| Every once in a while you see some high school science fair
| project where a kid has the brilliant idea of making 3D
| solar cells... maybe little pyramids or ridges instead if a
| flat plane, to capture light from all angles.
|
| The kid gets patted on the head. Those who know better,
| immediately recognize there is no great increase in power
| obtained as the 'shadows' caused by the raises structure
| invariably decrease the efficiency down to that of a plane.
|
| Anyway, vertical farming reminds me of this. You would
| defintyl need artifical lights.
|
| Akyway, it's amusing watching amateur would-be tomatoe
| growers get excited about a technology that has been around
| as long as Cheech and Chong.
|
| Using these systems for decorative purposes, on the other
| hand, is a cool idea. It's a fast and cheap way to make an
| 'instant' hedge. I have a 'wall' of pole beans planted in
| this manner which thrive and create a solid mass of
| greenery within a month of planting.
| ddxxdd wrote:
| It's been a few years since I've followed vertical
| farming, but I have recalled an argument being made that
| an artificial light source can be made efficiently by
| using a single-wavelength, super-efficient LED with a
| specific color that stimulates photosynthesis.
|
| On the other hand, I've also read (old, long-lost)
| sources that state that the energy cost per loaf of bread
| is about $10 for indoor farming, vs $5 for outdoor
| farming.
|
| These specialized lights won't save vertical farming
| today, but I will keep following the progress. If nothing
| else brings value to vertical farming, the fact remains
| that local food independence is valuable; growing food in
| a dense apartment or a dense city will pay dividends in
| the event of large-scale famine or civil unrest.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot
| change that the lower plants must receive less power, and
| therefore cannot grow as much.
|
| I thought the common idea (and implementation) of indoor
| vertical farming used artificial lighting at each level.
| Possibly only using light in the wavelengths actually used
| by the plant, not "wasting" power at other wavelengths like
| the sun does.
| dejj wrote:
| > water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean
|
| If you're thinking pipes, the water might become toxic after
| 500km or so.
| xxpor wrote:
| >Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like
| drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to
| the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
|
| Are you aware of how much water it takes to produce the
| output of the Midwest or Central Valley? We'd be talking
| about the largest desalination project in human history by
| orders of magnitude.
|
| As of 2013, Israel had a desalination capacity of 500 million
| cubic meters per year.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in.
| ..
|
| As of 2015, the US used ~450 million (edit: fixed from
| billion) cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation.
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-
| resources/science/i...
|
| Obviously not exactly a fair comparison for numerous reasons,
| but it gives a sense of the scale we're talking about here.
| newyankee wrote:
| If your nos are correct and if desalination was done at the
| scale of Israel in US, it would mean it would be able to
| provide 10% of the irrigation needs via desalination.
|
| This is off course not a big deal in USA and desalination
| and economics of certain agri crops if reassigned can lead
| to better outcomes. However i am sure India can do with the
| level of desalination Israel has (scaled up to its
| population size) as can other middle Eastern countries. If
| not today, then may be a decade or 2 in the future. This
| can enable habitation in many areas in land and water
| scarce countries.
| jedberg wrote:
| Israel coastline: 171 miles
|
| US coastline (not including Alaska): 5,800 miles
|
| So the US has 33 times the coastline. It sounds like we're
| only one order of magnitude off to meet those desal needs.
|
| ps. If we include Alaska, which is another 6,600 miles of
| coastline, we could again halve that need.
| Retric wrote:
| Coastline distance is irrelevant, you could use a single
| mile of coastline to extract this much water. The issue
| is infrastructure and energy costs. Traditional
| irrigation is about 3 orders of magnitude cheaper than
| desalination.
|
| All those rivers dumping into the ocean demonstrate how
| rarely it's needed. Long term pumping water from the
| eastern US to the Midwest is vastly cheaper than the kind
| of massive and effectively pointless desalination effort
| required.
| pas wrote:
| So with indoor farming let's say you'd only need 5-10% of
| that, right? That suddenly makes it basically the same
| magnitude.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| You know if we are already going through the effort of
| transporting & stacking dirt vertically for these things we
| might as well go all the way and integrate them into the
| pylons of offshore wind turbines, which'll guarantee them a
| viable support structure, an infinite amount of available
| seawater & more than enough power to desalinate it locally.
| Heck, the harvest logistics means it'll give fishing boats
| something to do off-season too.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > As of 2015, the US used ~450 billion cubic meters PER DAY
| for irrigation
|
| I think you mean to say 450 billion liters, which would be
| 450 million cubic meters.
|
| Your source says this: "For 2015, total irrigation
| withdrawals were 118,000 Mgal/d"
|
| So roughly speaking Israel desalinates in a year how much
| the US uses for irrigation in one day. That doesn't sound
| so outrageous. Israel is a small country.
| xxpor wrote:
| Ah you're right, I read the wrong line in the wolfram
| alpha output. That does make it seem less crazy. It would
| still be a crazy project but not "entire GDP of the US"
| crazy.
| dx034 wrote:
| Also, indoor and especially vertical farming can save
| precious land. Maybe the US has enough land for farming,
| other countries certainly do not. Rain forests burned to make
| space for soy or palm oil are proof of that.
| Aunche wrote:
| Rain forests are being burned down because these areas are
| poor and farming is the simplest way to make money starting
| from scratch. Multi-million dollar vertical farms don't
| help.
| newyankee wrote:
| Forget even about money, sometimes if you cannot
| participate in the 'official' economy and have no
| prospects, you need bare minimum capacity to cultivate
| land and feed yourself and your family. This is what
| happens in developing countries.
| kickout wrote:
| Save land? Most land in the US is doing NOTHING, or has
| little potential for anything other than carbon
| sequesteration
| vkou wrote:
| What is the calory output of vertical farming?
|
| The only things I ever see grown in those vertical farms
| are low calory, short-shelf-life leafy greens, and the
| occasional bland tomato.
|
| Greens are nice and all, but calories are what keep us
| alive. Until they can produce calories, I will continue
| seeing them as a pointless distraction.
| dzdt wrote:
| I had the impression indoor farming is heavily hoping to
| pivot to marijuana.
| vsareto wrote:
| That's easier to secure vs. a field of marijuana so there
| might be other reasons besides growing.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Calory-dense foods are more economic to ship long
| distances though. From a 'power plant to plate' energy
| conversion viewpoint, leafy greens that don't ship well
| are probably the best things to grow in urban farms,
| assuming people will eat them anyway.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Outside of North Korea, humanity in 2020 has no shortage
| of calories.
| vkou wrote:
| I believe that in 2020, we may have a shortage of
| calories if we were growing all of them in a
| _sustainable_ manner.
|
| I will also note that in 2020, we have no shortage of
| leafy greens.
| datavirtue wrote:
| And they can be run in the case where a super volcano has
| blown its top and is blocking out the sun for a year or two.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Also, no mention of drought and other extreme weather events.
| Additionally, no talk about how the Ogallala Aquifer (and
| others) is being decimated and continued trajectories would be
| catastrophic in just a few decades. The higher yield and
| minimal water and and getting rid of pesticides/fertilizers and
| removing transportation pollution are interesting things to
| research and see if we can do better. It is already a high bar
| of productivity but so where horses compared to walking but
| they were replaced with something better.
| [deleted]
| kickout wrote:
| I'm very familiar with the Ogallalla aquifer. When the
| drought of 2012 hit, people were very worried about it never
| recovering. After several 'wet' years it appears to be fine.
| Mother Nature is stronger than we give her credit for
| evan_ wrote:
| The article also doesn't mention all the diesel fuel used by
| tractors and harvesters during cultivation as well as trucks to
| move the harvested crop to the elevator and then to wherever it
| needs to go to be consumed.
|
| Then again most of the crops people are talking about doing
| vertically are things that are planted and harvested mostly by
| hand, so maybe that's not such an oversight.
| roenxi wrote:
| Not strictly relevant to the article, but I'm not excited by the
| efficiencies as much by the idea that it might offer a space-
| efficient option for me to have my food grown locally.
|
| Food production at the moment is very much out-of-sight, out-of-
| mind. I don't have a feel for what monoculture are developing in
| the food industry, I don't have a feel for what the supply chain
| risks are. If food ever stopped flowing in from wherever it comes
| from to my city, I'd be in trouble.
|
| It isn't totally rational, but I dream of being able to invest in
| food grown a few blocks away from me. If it only cost double
| existing prices that'd be a solid win.
| j-c-hewitt wrote:
| Uh, for you. Some of us live near farms -- it's neither out of
| sight nor out of smell (heh).
|
| The US is the most agriculturally productive nation in the
| world by a fair margin. Food and fuel are two of the things
| that the US is unlikely to run out of even under conditions of
| global nuclear war.
| Valgrim wrote:
| I'm not sure how prevalent this is around the world, but in my
| city we can register for produce baskets. In spring, I register
| on a website and I choose and pay in advance of the whole
| season a local farmer (less than 50 km away), who comes once
| every week to distribute his baskets a few streets away. The
| produced is freshly picked the same morning, it varies from
| week to week, it's a small family farm and I know it doesn't
| contain any pesticide or artificial fertilizer.
| jpindar wrote:
| That's common in small town or exurban areas in the US.
| seph-reed wrote:
| I always thought vertical farming was about developing strategies
| that will be essential in space under the guise of figuring out
| how to make cities less dependent on external resources.
| wbazant wrote:
| There's only so much that can be grown and mechanically
| harvested, and the US surely excels at producing maize, wheat, or
| soybean, but vertical farms don't try to compete with those. The
| production of other crops does not happen in the US that much,
| but it also operates at a rather spectacular scale - instead
| relying on poorly paid laborers abroad.
| Animats wrote:
| There's a need for automated harvesting machines for a few
| remaining crops - apples, lettuce, etc. The big field crops -
| wheat, corn, etc. have been fully mechanized for decades if not
| centuries.
|
| There are vision guided fruit picking machines. They're too
| slow, too fragile, and need too much supervision. But they
| mostly work. What they need now is good practical mechanical
| engineering. The 2016 version:[1] The 2019 version.[2] When
| they get about 2x faster, have half the parts count, and can be
| routinely pressure-washed, they'll be ready. The "AI" part is
| done.
|
| One of the simpler automated systems is automatic weeding.
| Machines come in several forms, but the most successful seem to
| be wide implements towed behind a tractor. Deere has some of
| these. They recognize weeds with cameras and do something about
| them. Some stomp or pull, some zap with electricity or a flame,
| some squirt on an overdose of fertilizer. It's "organic", too;
| no pesticides. You can get this as a service in a few areas.[3]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ
|
| [3] https://www.robovator.com/
| kickout wrote:
| This is correct. But the crops they target (veggies mostly) are
| also grown outdoors. But the higher margins on these veggies
| give the indoor people and hydroponic people an opportunity to
| compete (also year round veggies command a premium as well)
| bb2018 wrote:
| This article compares growing food like wheat locally and
| rightfully points out how insane that would be in terms of land
| required. Growing some specialized foods locally is what others
| have suggested but I still find this extremely misguided.
|
| First, as a citizen of a large city, if we are going to give
| valuable land to a large building is it really beneficial to make
| it a farm? Making space for housing (whether affordable or
| regular apartments) seems more appropriate for most cities.
|
| Second, as a consumer, would I really prefer the building crop to
| a the crop of a farm about an hour or two away from the city?
| Probably not (and especially not if tower fruit is more
| expensive).
| mrep wrote:
| Most of the US is does not have high land prices because they
| are not space constrained; it's basically just the west coast
| [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
| masona wrote:
| The biggest opportunity for disruption is the checkoffs.
|
| >These types of programs represent an already existing framework
| of farmers 'paying' for this type of knowledge. This model has
| proven scalable, even more so with the internet and social media
| making information readily available. Note this doesn't prevent
| bad information from being shared, but since savvy farmers will
| try and eventually ignore unprofitable methods, one can assume
| this is an efficient system.
|
| No. It is one of the most wasteful systems I've ever seen. Take
| one look at the reports they put out to justify their existence
| and you'll see that it is filled with ridiculous math, where ROI
| is based on outputs instead of outcomes. The data being collected
| is junk, all the vendors are super-insidery and collaboration is
| a political minefield at best. There's so much room for
| improvement you could throw a dart at any of the checkoff 5-year
| ROI reports and blindly hit an area to innovate on.
| kumarski wrote:
| My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years.
|
| I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-
| fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now)
|
| Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to
| convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd.
|
| - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms
|
| - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinate. More if
| it gets periodically polluted at an increasing rate.
|
| - Large majority Agrarian populations exist because the countries
| are stuck in a purgatory of <1 MWh/capita annum whereby the
| country doesn't have scaleable nitrogen and steel manufacturing.
|
| - Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes are some of the highest
| satiety lowest input to output ratio produce. High efficiency.
|
| - In civilizations where you are at < 1MWh/capita annum - there
| is not enough electricity to produce tools for farming, steel for
| roads, and concrete for building things. The end result is that
| the optimal decision is to have more children to harvest more
| calories per an acre.
|
| - Property, bankruptcy, and inheritance law have an immense
| influence on the farmer population of a country.
|
| I remember telling some "ag tech" VCs my insights and offering to
| introduce my father who has an immense amount of insight on the
| topic from having grown things for as long as he has....My
| thoughts were tossed aside.
| MintelIE wrote:
| Just one thought, everybody can buy an imported tractor these
| days. And steel too.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Great comment, thanks.
|
| HN just keeps delivering. It is almost impossible to believe
| how much embedded technical knowledge is lurking here. You
| could colonise Mars with it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > HN just keeps delivering. It is almost impossible to
| believe how much embedded technical knowledge is lurking
| here. You could colonise Mars with it.
|
| Of course, in this context you should be prepared for the
| possibility that if you could tap all that expertise what
| you'd actually get is "reasons that colonizing Mars actually
| can't work". ...hopefully not, of course, but beware mixing
| hopes and dreams and reality.
| mtgp1000 wrote:
| So you can't grow potatoes vertically? Can you elaborate? Is it
| a function of physiology, i.e. calorie dense vegetables need
| far more leaves and supporting stems than can be practically
| stacked vertically?
| mespe wrote:
| You probably can grow them (you can "grow" a potato in a cup
| of water on your counter), but probably not profitably.
| Potatoes have a fairly low commodity price relative to their
| light and space demands. Additionally, they store and
| transport really well.
| eloff wrote:
| I imagine space is a factor, but energy will be a big one as
| well. Calorie dense foods will likely need more space and
| energy (light) inputs. Vertical farms are very water
| efficient, so I don't think that matters much.
|
| Vertical farms make a lot more sense with fresh vegetables
| like leafy greens that grow quickly, command high prices if
| grown organically, and benefit from being closer to market.
|
| Potatoes are the exact opposite. If it ever becomes more cost
| effective to grow corn, wheat, and potatoes in virtual farms
| then outdoor agriculture is dead. While I don't agree with
| the article that it will never happen, it might require
| energy advances like fusion power or drastically higher
| _rural_ land values and water prices.
|
| Greenhouses make sense long before vertical farming, just
| look at agriculture in the Netherlands, it's mind boggling
| how much they produce for such a tiny country.
| bgroat wrote:
| Can you expand on this?
|
| I get that to store a calorie in a potato I need to supply
| a calorie of energy from somewhere else.
|
| But why is fusion power required instead of better UV lamps
| in my vertical farm? (Assuming I had enough electricity to
| run them)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| What powers the UV lamps?
|
| Sun + water is cheap and plentiful. Small scale farms can
| sell potatoes at $0.50/lb or less. Amish farms with oxen
| can go a little less.
|
| Capital and operational costs for vertical farms don't
| seem to make sense, unless there's some disaster in the
| Colorado watershed or a trade war that makes hothouse
| winter produce a viable business again.
| evgen wrote:
| I think the suggestion is that fusion power here is a
| stand-in for electricity that is too cheap to meter --
| basically free power.
| pmontra wrote:
| The total amount of electricity to power those UV lamps
| should be on par with what the Sun sends to the potatoes
| fields. Maybe that's the reason for fusion. It didn't do
| the math.
| porcellobanks wrote:
| same exact boat.
|
| the VC that use to approach us for insights would just never
| listen. my father literally knew the researchers that tried it
| in the past and failed.
|
| it did not stop this VC from investing his LP's money in a
| vertical farm. although i suspect his willingness to allocate
| other people's money in this manner, for this particular
| company, had more to do with the social side of things re the
| founders and other investors.
| chx wrote:
| > 1MWh/capita annum
|
| Oh this is fascinating! I never thought of this but of course
| energy consumption per capita is going to be an indicator of
| how industrialized a country is. I briefly checked the two
| countries I am a citizen of (Canada, Hungary) and
| counterchecked with one of the poorest countries I know of
| (Chad) and the numbers are as expected: 14.6, 4.1, 0.013 (oof).
| abyssin wrote:
| On the topic of energy, I find this correlation fascinating
| as well: https://jancovici.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/04/petrole_gra.... Oil consumption
| predicts GDP. Complete article:
| https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/oil/is-the-
| price-...
| saeranv wrote:
| Yes, and for this reason (IIRC) GDP/capita scales linearly
| with MWH/capita.
| saeranv wrote:
| Re: <1 MWh/capita annum
|
| Which brings up another issue, which is energy density/m2 of
| land. To support industrialization/high density urbanism the
| only fuel sources that do this are currently fossil fuels, or
| nuclear, but none of the renewable fuels have the energy
| density.
|
| So if these countries want to increase the amount of
| MWh/capita, the most efficient (only?) pathway is through high-
| energy density fuel sources, which right now is being achieved
| through the use of fossil fuels. To me, this is (one of) the
| main reasons nuclear energy needs to be prioritized as a
| climate change solution.
|
| ETA: And, now that I think about it, another way to squeeze
| more effectiveness from your grid is to build super energy-
| efficient buildings that reduces the overall and peak grid
| energy consumption.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| Why is energy density important in that context? If all other
| variables were identical between a high density an a low
| density solution, the high density one would of course be
| preferable. But if the low density solution is cheaper and
| relies less on pre-existing long-distance grid
| infrastructure, why would high density still be considered
| the most efficient, or possibly the only viable pathway?
| saeranv wrote:
| IANAE but the general idea from the discipline of urban
| geography is that industrialization, and also the knowledge
| economy relies on the economies of scales that come from
| high density, mixed-used urbanization. These regions rely
| on extremely high power that must be supplied from scarce
| land resources.
| DanBC wrote:
| > The end result is that the optimal decision is to have more
| children to harvest more calories per an acre.
|
| For a photo-essay about this there's the New Humanitarian
| article here:
| https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/94947/lesotho-weat...
|
| It describes the interaction between climate change, HIV/AIDS,
| and poverty.
|
| (It used to be called "Too poor to farm").
| trophycase wrote:
| I guess I was always under the impression that vertical and
| urban farming would be done for "specialty" crops like herbs or
| kale or something, never for high volume cash crops like
| potatoes or corn. I can see a benefit for these "specialty"
| crops because they aren't done to the same scale (maybe I'm
| wrong about that)
| markbnj wrote:
| Yeah that was my take as well. I think there's some sort of
| trade-off point here, though I don't know where it is. Yes
| modern outdoor agriculture is hyper efficient, although I
| think the author's comments about cash flow self-sufficiency
| gloss over a lot of government subsidies and bank bridge
| loans. In any case, indoor ag should be able to exploit the
| lower weather/pest risks, lack of need for damaging
| pesticides, consistent conditions, 365 day growing season,
| proximity to markets, etc. at least for some combination of
| products.
| messe wrote:
| > Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes
|
| Is this a typo? Did you mean to write a second vegetable?
| HeXetic wrote:
| Probably regular potatoes; they are incredibly calorie-dense
| and resilient.
| primroot wrote:
| > You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical
| farms
|
| Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) grows on the sidewalk already,
| and often next to some wild amaranth (Amarathus Hybridus). What
| is the point of more efficiently producing specific crops, when
| there are all these underutilized nutritious plants growing
| without any human input (or should I say growing despite human
| input)? This is another problem that I see with the
| technification of food production in general (including the
| Green Revolution). Some food wants to be free, but people keep
| looking for whatever makes the land produce more money in the
| short term, not what makes it produce more nutrition, etc.,
| because the latter does not adapt so well to the market.
| akajakaj wrote:
| Of course they don't understand it, their field is technology.
| Agriculture requires years of specialisation and most people here
| if they do have a degree are computer scientists, doctors,
| biologists, etc. But it's rare to find someone who has genuine
| passion and knowledge of agriculture. It is far removed from the
| city lifestyle and it is incredibly hard to break into, both for
| land reasons and because it's a hard job.
|
| Moreover, agricultural sciences is probably just not a very
| commonly pursued degree for people in the city (citation needed).
|
| So that brings me to my main point: disrupting an industry is
| usually done by people who want money when all the other good
| ideas have been taken. There is nothing wrong with this, but the
| cost with this fast paced approach is that the oldest and most
| complex industries like agriculture are going to put you in your
| place if you haven't done the work to understand them.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Agreed. I grew up in rural Australia, when I moved to the city
| it was funny to see people talk about farmers in a willy nilly
| fashion. Farms are extremely hard to build, and the knowledge
| to run them has to be built into tradition. I'd wager if a
| governments policies bankrupted a large amount of them, you
| could almost starve the nation with no remedy. It would take
| lifetimes before anyone learnt how to till the land again.
| quacked wrote:
| I agree that farmers are misunderstood and under-valued by
| people who are only able to live in stability because of the
| ability of farms to deliver food to them, but isn't farm
| complexity able to be documented and analyzed in a similar
| fashion as other "very complex" fields like law and finance?
|
| It seems like farmers are still beholden to long "if-then"
| chains and risk analysis (what to plant, where to plant, how
| to plant, etc. based on predictive yield), just that the
| underlying mathematics hasn't been as accessibly documented
| because it's not as profitable.
|
| So "generational knowledge and tradition" are important, but
| I don't see how that changes the fact that this sort of thing
| can be written down and analyzed.
|
| (Edit: I should clarify that I am not in favor of "disrupting
| agriculture" and I also do not think that mathematicians can
| somehow usurp farmers and plan better farms than the ones
| that already exist. I'm just wondering what's stopping the
| logic and practices of the ones that already exist from being
| documented and reproduced without "lifetimes" passing, as you
| say.)
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| I think you're right to believe that because it is true and
| I skirted over why I believe it takes generations.
|
| It is not impossible but difficult to document how to do
| effective farming because every farm has its own individual
| needs. And what may be true for one farm will likely not be
| true for another. Hence relying on first hand knowledge,
| albeit extremely fallible, is more reliable than reading a
| book and then destroying your crop for a year. (Obviously
| farmers read, study and improve)
|
| The main reason would be location.
|
| - How does water irrigate around your property? Where is
| the clay? Where does the water lock in when it sinks in
| different acres? What happens when there is a drought in
| this area? What happens when it floods? What should you
| _do_ when there is extreme weather? - What makes the soil
| in this locale good? What is it naturally good at growing?
| How should you replenish the soil? What native wildlife
| contributes to the soil? What insects plague the area and
| do they have decade long life cycle bursts? What to do when
| a swarm of locust come? - When does your first frost
| generally occur? What plants can you grow through a frost?
| Maybe Kale will survive because although there is frost,
| you live in a valley where the humidity is higher so the
| Kale can live. You can 't grow X crop because the wind is
| ever so slightly stronger every 5 years because of
| atmospheric shifts.
|
| And just to make it more fun, sprinkle on the problem of
| economics(supply/demand) and logistics.
|
| Also it would be hard not to meet a farmer who calls it a
| "way of life" because it absolutely is. They live far away
| from the spoils of civilisation, work incredible hours and
| live isolated lifestyles. They laugh at city folk because a
| city man "wouldn't last a week on the farm", which is
| probably true. Fun fact: Australian farmers have twice the
| national suicide rate than the average man.
| quacked wrote:
| That all makes complete sense, and the misunderstanding
| of "tech people" made obvious from your paragraph of
| questions that farmers have to answer. Computers always
| do what you tell them to. It sounds like farms do not,
| even when you give them the "right" instructions.
|
| "No farmers, no food", after all, and yet for some reason
| the suicide rates stay high. It's the same among American
| farmers. Dairy farms are shutting down at high rates in
| Wisconsin, where I'm from.
|
| What can the spoiled children of civilization to do help
| farmers? What can I do? I didn't even know about this
| plight until I was out of engineering school.
| newyankee wrote:
| I was actually thinking if an open source project to do
| this 'if then' predictive analytics that works across the
| world is available. It would be a great contribution to
| humanity if someone can work it , but like every complex
| problem i do not think it is that easy to distill all the
| information especially without sufficient profits.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This may not be a high quality interjection, but I just
| want to point out that agriculture has been continuously
| disrupted for ~250 years.
|
| Back then 90-95% of people worked in food production. Now
| it's 2-3%, and they produce vastly more food per person.
|
| So it's not like farmers are not used to change.
| chungus_khan wrote:
| The term disrupted isn't really appropriate here IMO, it
| is more of a continual and rapid evolution, which
| actually even better captures the dynamism of
| technological change they have to follow. To stay as
| productive as possible, farmers have to keep up on and
| integrate new innovations on the fly, often without
| definitive singular signals one would describe as
| "disruptive" in tech.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure, "disrupted" is a bit hyperbolic.
| c54 wrote:
| This is what happened in Soviet Russia (productive farmers
| were deemed class traitors, shipped off to siberia, and
| obviously net farming productivity collapsed), Ukraine
| leading up to the Holodomor (knock on effects from russia's
| actions), and in Mao's china (government mandated
| agricultural actions forced farmers away from their evolved /
| cultural practices and caused food production collapse).
|
| Systems like this are more complex than the foolish give them
| credit for being!
| nostromo wrote:
| Mao's Four Pests Campaign was particularly disastrous and
| ended killing millions in famine.
|
| He decided that sparrows, which ate some fruits and seeds,
| should be destroyed. He didn't realize that they also eat
| locust larva and other pests, which exploded in population
| without sparrows. Those pests ended up killing massive
| amounts of crops after the people were ordered to eliminate
| all sparrows and their eggs -- it ended in widespread
| starvation.
| logicNSci wrote:
| Specialization sure, but science is universal.
|
| Unless agriculture is built on trade secrets or art, you can
| contribute.
|
| This is one of my criticisms of Medical. It's not a science or
| the barrier to entry would be significantly lower, and as a
| result cost would be lower.
|
| Degrees are good, but not necessary if you can do math and get
| experience.
| nradov wrote:
| There is a lot more to medicine than just math and science.
| That is not a sound basis for criticizing the field. You'll
| have to do better than that.
| logicNSci wrote:
| >There is a lot more to medicine than just math and science
|
| This is the problem.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| There are lots of not-fully-understood processes in the world
| that only work because we lucked into some way of doing them.
| If you come at these problems with a scientific mindset but
| with no real experience, you are going to have a bad time.
| neffy wrote:
| The difficulty with medicine lies in attempting to control
| the death count involved in gaining the experience. Some
| supervision required.
| _ah wrote:
| Weirdly, the thing I find missing most from this discussion is
| _finance_.
|
| If we take the premise that information is valuable (decrease
| inputs, improve yields) and that equipment is valuable
| (automation), then there's a very real return to be gained by
| using these valuable products. What's nuts to me is that we would
| ever ask the _farmers_ to bear the risk of these products. I
| mean, sure they could I suppose (better returns overall!), but it
| concentrates all the risk in the worst places.
|
| I feel like there's a much better opportunity here for a targeted
| financial product. "Implement our methods with our data, and
| we'll skim a percentage of your profits." Imagine if the risk of
| buying a new tractor was gone, because it was provided by the
| company. The risk of data integration was also gone, because it's
| guaranteed to work with the provided tractor. And the risk that
| the data is crap is also gone, because the financing and return
| risk is borne by a diverse number of institutional investors.
| Almost like weather / crop insurance, but much much bigger.
|
| For the farmer, the sale is simple: Do our thing, and you don't
| have to worry about paying for stuff that may not be valuable.
| You might make slightly less total profit in the good years as
| the price of offloading that risk.
|
| For the investors, it's also a great story: look at these great
| startups! Wouldn't you like a piece of that productivity and
| return?
|
| ...and maybe the startups are wrong, and the equipment doesn't
| work, and everyone learns a lot while they go bankrupt. Everyone
| except the farmer, who offloaded the risk.
|
| Surely this is a thing that _someone_ is working on?!? I 'm sure
| it's available in bits and pieces, but a unified financing and
| operational solution seems like it would be a slam dunk.
| gdubs wrote:
| What I want: an autonomous, EV brush mower to take care of the
| scarily steep slopes of our native upland prairie restoration
| project.
| adammunich wrote:
| You mean... Goats?
| gdubs wrote:
| Lol, that's great. Would love to have grazing animals in the
| future but we're not quite ready to take care of them yet.
| Also involves decisions on fencing etc. I have been warned a
| LOT about goats and their ability to destroy everything, and
| evade even the tallest fences.
| m3047 wrote:
| What about goats with earphones, trained to stimuli?
|
| I'm not actually "rural", but I have chickens. (One of
| which is 10 years old!) There is such a thing as a "judas
| goat"; or "judas chicken". I've been through three
| generations of chickens now. The first generation ended up
| a quarter mile away on Pete's garden (he wasn't that
| upset). It doesn't happen any more.
| adammunich wrote:
| You're right, goats can be trouble makers. We use sheep to
| mow our lawn and they are very easy to deal with. They
| won't go over a 2 foot fence and don't need a lot of
| maintenance. Water, occasionally some mineral rich feed,
| and a shear.
| Kye wrote:
| Are there any plants you can replace the brush with that do
| well in the environment, fit what you want better, and stop at
| an acceptable height?
| gdubs wrote:
| Most of it is really just mowing the prairie grass. The brush
| has largely been mechanically removed, but the mowing is
| meant to suppress weeds as well as annuals which try
| relentlessly to suppress the native vegetation. Reduces need
| for spraying / extensive manual weed control.
| Loughla wrote:
| Autonomous, EV mower/tedder/rake for hay fields with an
| integrated weather center. Would like that for my life. Bonus
| points for super low center of gravity, so we could get value
| out of the hills more than CRP checks.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I find this story odd because it seems like it's over-emphasizing
| the large scale/ low manual labor crops. In other words, the
| article is talking about inexpensive, long shelf life crops:
|
| > The Midwest in the United States has close to 90M acres of
| corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat.
|
| Maybe I've got this entirely wrong, but my understanding is most
| vertical farming focuses on producing highly perishable fruits
| and vegetables which often still require a fair amount of manual
| labor and where being close to market is a benefit.
|
| I haven't yet seen large scale vertical gardens being
| commercially successful yet, but if they do, I'm certain they
| won't be producing corn, wheat, or soybeans.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| How does vertical farming compete with traditional row crops? I
| have never seen a proposal to grow wheat in a skyscraper. It has
| always been higher value fresh foods like lettuce and spinach.
| krzat wrote:
| Most likely terrible. You need to gather electricity in one
| place, send it to the farm, emit some light, plant will absorb
| 5% of that light, and then 5% of that 5% will end up in the
| final product.
| Ms34me wrote:
| According to the author, "hyper efficient" is throwing 40+% of
| the food in the trash, while slowly increasing prices YoY.
|
| Yeah right
| aj7 wrote:
| Go to YouTube and search "operate a combine" if this is new to
| you.
|
| Our farmers are computer literate.
| austincheney wrote:
| What numerous Netflix documentaries and now Covid has revealed is
| that ag industry is perhaps too efficient from a people
| perspective. Those people closest to production carry a
| disproportionate risk of the supply chain with very little
| compensation. This is problematic in that it creates funnels too
| close to the raw materials that can break without adequate
| redundancy.
|
| Where ag industry is less efficient is in material usage like
| fertilizer, water, and waste products. For example it takes about
| 18 gallons of water to produce one avocado fruit and there are
| concerns about a future shortage of phosphorus. Then there are
| also the environmental footprints as well.
|
| For what it's worth the loss of resource efficiency inversely
| drives land use efficiency. When resource inputs/outputs are a
| concern land use is compressed to consolidate management concerns
| while land use concerns relax when resources are more abundant.
|
| One segment that really seems to nail resource efficiency, at
| least in North America, is commercial lumber but then they
| operate on long time horizon unlike edibles.
| a1nnai wrote:
| Hello my hot photos are here .. http://69chat.club username
| annaxx))
| mmargerum wrote:
| Robotics on traditional farms is where it's at. Weed/Pest
| killing, fertilizing/watering, and tilling robots will cut down
| on fertilizer/water usage and will alleviate the need for GMO and
| pesticides.
|
| I hope to run a droid farm in 10 years like uncle Owen Lars. I
| just don't want to be charred at the end :D
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I would hope that the savviest of SV or startup folks recognize
| that the actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't
| the thing that they are trying to innovate on.
|
| Rather it's the disastrous logistics chain and resultant waste,
| leading to overproduction and augmentation of our food system, is
| the problem trying to be solved.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't the
| thing that they are trying to innovate on.
|
| There are enormous problems there, such as a heavy reliance on
| human labour for picking and processing.
|
| The problem with going after waste reduction is that the tab
| for that is picked up through subsidies. The inefficiency is in
| policy.
| adrianN wrote:
| The problem with human labor in agriculture is that we've
| already spent a lot of effort to remove humans, the jobs that
| are left are really hard to automate.
| protomyth wrote:
| Can you explain this "disastrous logistics chain"? I am a bit
| confused given all the effort that goes into logistics by farm
| companies.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's the logistics chain from the farm to your plate that's
| the disaster. That's not for lack of trying. But having
| exposure to farming growing up, there's no good way to get a
| ripe berry from Washington State to Florida before it spoils
| without freezing it, genetically engineering it (which is
| fine, I'm pro GMO, it's just costly) or treating it. Even if
| you do, handling it will see large losses.
|
| So the trick is, how do you reduce how far something needs to
| travel from the time it's ready to harvest until it's
| consumed.
| PeterisP wrote:
| There are two main options to avoid having to deliver food
| from (for example) Washington State to Florida.
|
| One is to change consumer behavior to focus much more on
| in-season products that can be grown locally. This is a
| difficult social challenge.
|
| The other is to change plant behavior so that they become
| products that are always in season and can be grown
| everywhere. This is a difficult technical challenge, but
| things like indoor vertical farming can potentially solve
| that. The problem described in this article is that it does
| not (yet?) work for effective farming, but making it
| possible to grow the appropriate berries or fruit locally
| throughout the year _would_ fix the logistics chain by
| eliminating most of it.
| protomyth wrote:
| Well, you can get it there, but berries aren't worth enough
| to make that journey by air. That is generally reserved for
| seafood and there is an equally amazing logistics system to
| do that. Calling one of the most amazing processes on the
| planet "disastrous logistics chain" is just disingenuous.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 30% of all food produced - approx 1 Trillion dollars
| worth - is lost in the supply chain, and contributes the
| equivalent of the third largest CO2 producer if it were a
| country.
|
| I'm not sure how to describe that other than a disaster.
|
| http://www.fao.org/3/a-bt300e.pdf
| protomyth wrote:
| I call it an unavoidable cost of making sure people have
| food on the table. There is no way on this planet that
| you can design a supply chain that you produce the same
| amount of food that is consumed. This isn't parts that
| get put in some widget, people have different tastes at
| different times. I'm honestly surprised its only 30%
| given the fickle taste of people.
|
| The CO2 production will reduce as we steadily change from
| diesel to electric. Ocean going vessels are just
| environmental problems that treaties seem to ignore.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| There is room for improvement, and there is significant
| financial incentive to realize that improvement. That
| said, I'm not sure that measure is the whole picture. If
| we are losing 30% of our food to the supply chain, what
| is the alternative? Perhaps we could farm things more
| locally and shorten the supply chain? If we did that,
| would we still get 100% of the yield of the old approach?
| What I am saying is that if we try and fix the waste
| problem, it would very like be at the expense of reducing
| yield. The extreme example is the tomatoes I am growing
| in my back yard. None of them will be wasted, but I'm
| fairly certain that the yield per square acre is
| absolutely atrocious.
| jfb wrote:
| Why did the title get changed from the article's title ("What
| Silicon Valley Doesn't Understand About Agriculture")?
| thorwasdfasdf wrote:
| What this article doesn't understand is that some people like
| myself would like to have fresh vegetables that are bred for
| nutrition and taste, not something that's been bred for maximum
| shelf life.
|
| From big Agg, When those big optimized over fertilized tasteless
| tomatoes arrive, I'm not excited.
|
| But, those local farmers markets sometimes come up with superior
| tasting products. I once tasted an early girl tomato from a local
| farmers market and it tasted like nothing else.
|
| some people want quality of quantity.
|
| Besides when it comes to freesh produce there's not much choice
| right now. I mean, we have gazillion different varieties of
| frozen stuff in the freezers, but only 1 kind of cucumber to
| choose from,etc.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Look at the Netherlands. Tiny country (slightly bigger than MA),
| basically underwater, and the second largest exporter of
| agriculture in the world. Denmark is similar although at a far
| smaller scaled.
|
| The reason the US is inefficient is because it has massive scale.
| Huge country, basically no-one lives there in population density
| terms (tbf, Australia is the same size and even less dense
| though...so not an outlier). The future will be about doing more
| with less, and the US is an example of doing less with more.
|
| Simple. The room for innovation is still huge.
|
| Saying vertical farming is overhyped is probably correct too. But
| that ignores the fact that this is essentially what Netherlands
| has been doing for two decades. Their ag research programmes have
| focused on minimising resource use for a long, long time. And it
| does work...it is working already, and has been for a long time.
| Call it overhyped or whatever but it is happening already (the
| level of hype is correlated to funding or whatever...this just
| works).
| newyankee wrote:
| US agriculture is one of the most advanced in the world, its
| agricultural incentives and economics however ... are not.
| Subsidy to certain crops over others and do not even want to
| get into the health impact aspects.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Yep, I left that out and it is definitely a huge factor.
|
| Europe definitely has the same issue with subsidies but the
| CAP program actually works on the volume planted, so
| Netherlands gets royally screwed (and the big inefficient
| producers in France/Spain and, more recently, Eastern
| Europe...where there is huge corruption in CAP...get the
| lion's share) because they minimise resources (and don't have
| many to begin with).
|
| I understand a certain level of subsidy to boost
| security...but the unintended consequences are huge.
| blobbers wrote:
| I think you should note this is export, not production. The
| Netherlands has a very small population so they export what
| they grow. Clearly they're not capable of producing
| anything on the scale of the USA, China etc.
| cagenut wrote:
| This has the infuriatingly common fatal logical flaw of wrapping
| "farming" in one giant layer of abstraction and comparing indoor
| vs outdoor at the broadest scale.
|
| Indoor farming, or greenhouse farming, or high-tunnel farming, or
| a zillion others are all incremental adaptations of particular
| plants and particular markets. You cannot compare the global corn
| and wheat markets to the nyc lunch salad market. "Farming" has
| always meant thousands of different things, and for _some_ of
| those things there will be markets for indoor grow ops. This is
| not an assertion, we all know there 's a very robust one right
| now.
|
| Debating indoor vs outdoor farming at this broad a level is like
| debating cars vs bicycles as if we have to pick one.
|
| If anyone would like to see an extremely deep dive into the exact
| scientific measurements at which certain plant markets become
| viable at certain energy prices you will find this half hour very
| well spent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk
| danans wrote:
| > Current agriculture doesn't need an artificial energy source
|
| I agree that vertical farms have their limits for producing
| certain important products like grains, but current agriculture
| does require a massive artificial input in the form of petroleum
| based fertilizers (via the Haber-Bosch process) - to say nothing
| of large amount of diesel used to transport agricultural products
| from rural growing areas to market in urban areas.
|
| The transport could in theory be electrified, but the fertilizer
| can't at this point be produced in another way. Vertical farming
| can use far less fertilizer due to its precision. Again, not that
| it doesn't have downsides. For example, if vertical farms are
| powered by fossil fuels, they could be even less efficient and
| more carbon intensive than traditional agriculture.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The energetically expensive input to the Haber-Bosch process is
| hydrogen. Hydrogen is predominantly manufactured by steam
| reforming of fossil fuels, which produces CO2 as a byproduct,
| but it can also be produced cleanly with water electrolysis
| driven by clean electricity.
|
| I actually think that Haber-Bosch plants will predominantly run
| off of clean electricity before farm machinery becomes
| predominantly electric. Farm machinery has a very slow
| replacement cycle. Some of my farming relatives are still
| running diesel powered machines built in the 1930s.
| Vysero wrote:
| I currently work as a developer for a company that develops a
| "black box" (as we call them in the business) for the AG
| industry. We develop the systems the author was referring to that
| provide: auto-steer/guidance, and application control for
| tractors.
|
| I am not sure if that makes my perspective unique or not, but as
| a general rule of thumb I would tell anyone looking to get into
| the "dirt work" (growing) of the AG business to change their
| minds. In fact, I would tell them to run for the hills. Most
| farmers in America (aside from the huge co-ops) operate at a loss
| each year, and only survive due to subsidies, at least here in
| America.
|
| That being said, if you are interested I can say for sure there
| is a LOT of money to be made developing the systems I currently
| work on and/or contracting yourself out to companies like mine
| for existing work we can not handle in house.
| pnathan wrote:
| I used to work at Climate. Always fun seeing ag tech come up in
| articles. The wealth of knowledge available to farmers in the US,
| as the article points out, is staggering. We're very efficient
| here on the production end of things.
| Valgrim wrote:
| I believe I've never actually eaten soy, and I rarely eat corn.
| I'm also pretty sure the amount of wheat humans eat is less than
| what we feed to poultry and livestock.
|
| The author seems to conflate the purpose of the "modern row-crop
| farmer" (which is mainly to repay their huge debts and to feed
| cows and chickens), and the solution touted by vertical-urban-
| aqua-dome-whatever-ponics: to provide year-round, local, fresh
| and varied types of plants to feed humans.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| It's very unlikely you've never eaten soy, unfortunately. It's
| essentially added to every processed meat product, nowadays.
| cyberbanjo wrote:
| You've probably eaten more corn than you know.
|
| 1:Corn has made its way into everything: a Washington Post
| article
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how-c...
| Valgrim wrote:
| This articles points out that this is a very american-centric
| reality. If you cook your own food from basic ingredients
| there's almost no corn reaching you directly.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| Soy is crushed into what Americans call vegetable oil, and
| meal. The meal is the protein source for pork and chicken
| production. If you get a piece of fried chicken from KFC, the
| chicken was raised on soy meal and corn, battered in milled
| wheat, and fried in soybean oil.
| legitster wrote:
| "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
|
| It should come as no surprise that programmers who spend all day
| thinking about the theoretical problems they might run into may
| be bad at understanding current limitations and bottlenecks in
| the real world. This doesn't just apply to agriculture. Think of
| how many startups you know aimed at addressing problems that seem
| imaginary outside of the bay area.
|
| At the same time, I think we underrate the benefit of naive
| amateurs throwing themselves into industry. If Stripe actually
| fully understood the amount of work they had to do to get to the
| other side of a complex, messy, and competitive market, I'm going
| to guess they never would have done it in the first place.
| vincehark wrote:
| The problem with industrial outdoor farming isn't the efficiency,
| it's the toxic pesticide applications, the environmental
| pollution in air and soil getting in the crops, and lack of
| nutritious crop diversity leading to inefficient food supply
| chains. Growing plants with coal indoors isn't a solution either
| but hyper-efficient indoor and vertical farming is getting closer
| by the day and more funding needs to go into new evidence based
| controlled environment farming techniques. Check out
| https://youtu.be/VIrXQo00OWc for an example of what hyper
| efficient indoor farming looks like.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Think about it. The biggest legacy of the hippies is that their
| critique of food and agriculture evolved into the mainstream's.
| (Well, that and same process with nuclear engergy.) The problem
| is it's incoherent mix, then and now. We have jumbled together:
|
| - Nostalgia. First this was yeoman farmer nostalgia. Now there is
| also pre-agricultural nostalgia. Primitivism is coherent, but
| only once you embrace what it really entails, which paleo dieting
| absolutely does not.
|
| - Anti-monpolization. Great idea.
|
| - Corperations-are-bad-so-their-means are bad. Cargill might be
| bad, but that doesn't mean combine harvesters are.
|
| - Concern about environmental externalities. Good idea.
|
| - Concern about nutritional externalities. Good idea. It's crazy
| we gave 0 fucks about supply chain risk and other security
| concerns, but focus on cranking out carbs in a way that only
| global armageddon justifies.
|
| GMO hysteria among heirloom lovers is a funny small example:
| please just say biodiversity is good, and tons of GMOs or tons of
| hierlooms will be good, and purely golden rice or purely sweet
| delishious apples not so much.
|
| Even "locavorism": Guess what? it takes like <5 days to transport
| anything within continental US, easy. If your non-California
| produce sucks, it's not because distance, per-se, it's because
| warehousing.
|
| ------
|
| Now, back to the question at hand, I absolutely don't believe
| your average Ag wantrepreneur is immune to the current in the
| larger culture. I mean think about it, modern gourmet-mediocre
| -----fancy food culture is per-dollar, easily the Bay Area's
| biggest cultural export, ahead of anything SV ever did.
|
| So what might an Ag startup look like instead? Well, conquering
| externalities
|
| - without changing government policy - still making a profit - at
| a scale to actually matter
|
| is just some liberatarian wet dream so let's not worry too much
| about that.
|
| I would rather worry about the bullshit job problem. Average
| person is spending all their time doing useless shit, or not
| being paid enough doing useful shit. Ag is super efficient
| putting everything else into stark relief (well, super efficient
| when they aren't over-leveraged looking like fools and Daddy USDA
| bails them out). How about we give people lifetime food for a
| portion of their earnings?! Just like Worry-Free but
| fiancialized. Could actually work, certainly given today's "10
| years no profit is fine" model.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| We simply have food stamps if you find yourself too poor to
| afford food. That's a fine system, in my opinion. I, of course,
| already pay for my lifetime supply of food with a portion of my
| earnings, which I hand over to the grocery store.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Basically anyone thinking agriculture disruption should read
| about the Hutterites[1] rather than get caught up with some
| vert ag thing.
|
| Hutterites have major capital expenses (unlike Amish), and yet
| they are farmers. Income-portion subscription model maybe
| doesn't so crazy if you consider employees can live off the
| surplus food on one hand, and so the subscription can largely
| go into capital and operational expenditures.
|
| It sounds dual to "lifetime cut of earnings to pay for
| college", since education is considered the ultimate personal
| capex, and food the ultimate personal opex. But considering the
| rat-race nature of bullshit jobs, and the basic income studies,
| a lifetime free from fear starvation could well kick one up the
| hierarchy of needs enough to learn far more efficiently. So
| food indefinitely is actually pretty good personal capex from
| that perspective.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Final thing is remote work + medicare-for-all could make
| SNAP-for-all less inferior to $$-for-all, in that housing and
| healthcare, the big rent-seekers drains are decapitated,
| raising food costs as a portion of household budgets back
| where they should be.
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