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Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

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Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#141
post #71

There really are different 'cliques' on HN, depending on which subject is posted. And this one seems to be the 'not so positive' clique. If framework is bench marked, or if people create a great CSS suite and animations, you get (mostly) constructive criticism. A company is actually doing something about bigger issues which could positively affect the lives of many people in a sustainable way ... and we get this. I'm…

HN is full of developers. It makes sense that developer-oriented products receive constructive feedback while posts for products in completely unrelated fields don't.

Talking about farming on a developer website is like demoing salon tools to a group of plumbers. You may get opinions, but they probably won't be the most informed or helpful.

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#143
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have troubles in computing the BOM (Bill Of Materials) of such a thing. 1) a container 2) a tin shed leaning on it on one side 3) a small plastic? nursery/seeding house on the other side 4) a 3 Kwh solar plant (including batteries, etc.) 5) a bunch of pumps (and I presume pipes) for drip irrigation 6) web connectivity 7) possibly a bunch of hand farming tools do not sum up to costs that justify the US$ 50,000/60,00…

I was trying to do the math here too. Here's what I came up with. 1) Shipping Container - ~$2,000 2) Tin Shed - Maybe another ~$1,000 3) Hoop Greenhouse - ~$400 [1] 4) 3Kwh Solar Plant with Batteries - ~$8,500 [2] 5) 2 Acre Drip Irrigation System - ~$3,000 [3] 6) WiFi Access - $1,000 (I have no idea what hardware/capabilities they're delivering here, but it seems like that's a safe number) 7) A Bunch of Hand Farming…

Profits: $22,000.

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My scam senses were tingling before I got to the comments. Most likely this is a routine NGO/EDU/Gov scam backed by an aggressive and shiny sales approach.

This is not a scam. This is the real deal, with years of research and testing behind it. Disclaimer: I know one of the principals directly.

You should ping them to get them to answer some questions on here.

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#145
I'm having a difficult time finding what is included in the box from the official website. "Sensor Technology", "Basic Tools", these trigger alarm bells in my head. The biggest cost component seems to be for the solar power, which I believe is used to power the irrigation system. Overall this sounds costly, has few details about the components need for farming, and shows off bells and whistles like "solar power, micro-drip irrigation, wi-fi and cloud, and data mapping".

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#146
post #139
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> food doesn't need to be grown in urban areas with expensive real estate. It doesn't need to . But there's an increasing push towards looking for ways to cut the environmental effects of farming, and there transport is part of the challenge. There's also an increasing push for cutting time to market, despite traditional farms being further and further away from most consumers. Hydroponics in urban areas is likely to…

I so sympathize with this view. I used to hold it. After experimenting with the hydroponics, vertical growing, etc. I've come to realize the best way to cut the environmental effects of farming is to make traditional boring broad acre farming restorative and regenerative. Moving farms into cities simply won't produce enough calories profitably enough to make any meaningful positive environmental impact. Amazingly eno…

yet

Maybe it never will, but we won't know without trying.

> I've come to realize the best way to cut the environmental effects of farming is to make traditional boring broad acre farming restorative and regenerative.

But none of that can fully counter the massive land use, nor does it address the increasing effects of transport necessary to handle increasingly urban populations and increasing expectations of short delivery times.

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#147
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few of us here with some farm experience that simply don't think this product ads up. Its like posting an article about a $50k Linux distro aimed at coffee shops.

I understand this, and maybe it's an opportunity for you to find out more about them considering your expertise. Following your fact finding quest you could then post a detailed blog about your analysis for other HN'ers to read. I would be glad to read such a review with facts and figures explaining objectively what is wrong (or right!) about the proposed product. Keep us posted!

One side of my family comes from a farming background, and I've been around working farms half my life, the impoverished near-subsistence type.

This product wouldn't be all that useful. The hard part of running a farm is knowing the local growing conditions, crops which work in these conditions, and then, the harrowing amount of work involved in getting the thing productive.

Drip irrigation is cool once set up, but it's not durable and you need to replace it frequently as it gets damaged, breaks down due to weather, some animal chews it, whatever. Their solar driven pump is indeed a labor saving device, but it's a low power low volume pump useful for drip irrigation. I can guarantee you that nobody's going to be supplying affordable drip irrigation gear in a poor area. However, given a well, a powerful irrigation pump would be a huge help, particularly if it can move enough volume to fill traditional irrigation ditches for the times drip tubing is unattainable.

The IoT metrics stuff isn't very useful. The sort of person who farms in the places targeted by this isn't very tech savvy, and what's more important than temperature and water delivery statistics is walking the field and inspecting for weeds and pests.

The shipping container could make a usable shed, but so would a traditional shed, usually made from scrounged, cheap, local materials.

If you want to help poor farmers, I would suggest the following - A powerful irrigation pump, after helping to drill a well, solar driven is cool. - A small ride-on type tractor built to be dead simple to fix and reliable with plowing, seeding, and harvesting attachments. This is the major work of running a farm. Bonus points if this thing doesn't require gasoline, but that would be prohibitively expensive in terms of solar and batteries, since duty cycle would be very high. - Some kind of good, watertight and pest resistant grain storage containers, enough to store a few tons. - A bunch of lessons in the local language teaching people how to maximize food production from minimal resources in a given part of the world. What crops, how to plant, weed, and harvest them, how to store the harvest. - A bunch of fertilizer and pesticide. This will run out one day, so perhaps lessons on how to farm without it, but that drops production to like 1/4 of what's possible for a given unit of land. Modern high density farming requires a permanent supply of modern chemicals.

Now, A farm in a box is a cool idea, and the market may be affluent hobbyists, but this won't fix food shortage problems because the gear in it isn't particularly useful to a small farm, but also because food shortage problems are primarily political.

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#148
post #96
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain "pro-west"? I suspect it means somebody who says "I like West. West will help us", not a liberal mind. Liberal philosophy roughly means freedom and same rights to everyone, including very bad persons, in exchange to strict execution of written laws. So to be truly pro-west, person must advocate same right to everyone, including e.g. gays, and strong independent court for everyone, including e.g. top l…

Well, yes, "pro-west" is usually used to mean "compliant with US foreign policy", not "liberal". Regardless of whether this is a good thing by other standards. By your metric, even large parts of the "west" and United States aren't "pro-west". Sadly.

Yes, large parts of "west" are not "pro-west". Moreover, even most liberal liberals will use utilitarian philosophy in case of war or war-like situation. Usually, it takes about 3 years of war to convert a liberal country back to utilitarian. It's why USA and Britain bombed Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, which is a war crime, — because they are engaged in war for more than 3 years.

Liberal philosophy is luxury. NATO allowed to liberal countries to rise. Without NATO, a war with a strong neighborhood will quickly kick out any liberal minds from heads of people of a west country.

Liberal philosophy can be represented in mathematical logic by simple algorithm in a simple game. Game rules: player can make bad(+1,-1), e.g. war, neutral (0,0) or good (+1,+1), e.g. cooperation, moves. Optimal strategy: do a single good move to player neighborhood(s) and then copy their behavior, AKA "pay it forward". It's proven that this algorithm is optimal for growth when all players have equal size and power. For game with unequal players or when group dynamic is allowed (e.g alliances), it's good (not an optimal, because group dynamic is Turing complete, so it's impossible to prove that an algorithm is optimal) only for biggest and most powerful players, otherwise liberal algorithm will make the player to be the most valuable target very quickly. So, to win as liberal, player must be big and powerful, like USA, or be member of large defense alliance, like NATO. If you are liberal and you are nor USA nor in NATO, you are target (e.g. Kuwait - Iraq, Taiwan - China) and your life will be short, unless you will convert your country to utilitarian dictatorship or will create a mix of two, like in Israel, which is unstable.

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fun, I was looking at cheap (compared to San Francisco) land with no infrastructure in Wyoming. 1 acre of land, $10K USD. Drilling a water well that might work, $5K to $30K.

Wyoming?! That's our backyard. Drop by our office sometime! [1] Our CEO ran a CSA for a few years here in Wyoming. Places like Wyoming have cheap land, but there are some tricks to doing farming up here. 1: https://brightagrotech.com/

I'm in Colorado and the soil here is terrible trying to start a small garden behind my house. Even with purchased good quality dirt and fertilizer, it's still very very hard solid.

Re: Startup Puts Everything You Need for a Two-Acre Farm in a Shipping Container

#150

> All of those things affect the ultimate price of the box, and that’s why we have a range from about $50,000 to $60,000. If you were to a la carte all the different components that we put into this kit, it would end up costing you more than what we’re charging. I seriously doubt that. $50k for what appears to basically be 2 acres of irrigation equipment and a solar-powered raspberry pi is absurd. It also looks like…

In my experience, Raspberry Pis are nice hobbyist toys but tend to corrupt data on their SD cards at random and generally are unreliable. For 50k you could at least send them a somewhat rugged fanless PC with a SSD raid for added reliability.
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