Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

Two observations: 1. Drones are currently offering good heuristic tools for farmers to be better aware of what their fields really look like. Multi spectral cameras, cheap drones, and rudimentary tool sets have really opened the door to optimize. However, not enough is currently being done to turn those visual heuristics into data that can be acted upon. (No double blinds, poor color calibration, limited software platforms that don't allow time-series data to be used well.) We are still in the observation phase, no measurement, statistics, or predictions are really happening yet.

2. I've heard from several farmers that they desperately want a good sensor that indicates free carbon in the soil so they have a proxy for microbial content. Just as gut bacteria has been a major topic of research on humans, soil microbial content serves that same purpose on farms. Significant effort is going into adding organics and microbes back to specialty farms, however, the measurements to observe how this is done are very limited.

I am currently working for a fertilizer company. First off, I have never worked in the Ag industry until a few years ago. It's an interesting business plagued by snake oil salesmen who try to push every whacky idea they can dream up.

Our company is very focused on the science of the plants and the soil and have developed products that do some amazing things with plants. We have seen potato fields go without pesticides by using one of our products that uses an extract from another plant. It doesn't kill the bugs, but makes the plants not desirable to the bugs.

Plant physiology is still in its infancy. Plants are very much like the human body and so many respects (immune system, nutrient requirements, cell structures, growth needs, disease prevention) and there are so many things we don't know about the plants. For example, plants need zinc to process calcium, yet we don't know why.

In terms of technology,

1) our Phosphorous product allows a grower to reduce their phosphorous inputs by 20-50X. Another one of our products allow for water reduction by up 25%.

2) Hyper-spectral imaging is in its infancy but possibly being used to diagnose problems in plants before they are visible with the naked eye.

3) Drones is a big one right now being used for imaging, spot treatments of fertilizers. I can definitely envision a day when they will use these for picking crops.

4) For every crop, there is an inventor who has created a gizmo to make their jobs easier. For the most part, these are all designed to reduce labor costs (usually their #1 expense). Almonds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0UAbuUW2Lw Cherries - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX_t1hkqTVQ Blueberries - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt73GOk4JRY

Odds are many of those companies doing vertical farms are really planning on moving from lettuce to much more profitable leafy greens, like pot.

Oh god. This times a million. Big Agra is just slamming in N-P-K 10/10/10 and using center-pivot irrigation[0] during peak sunshine hours because hey, the water table's only 15 meters down! Then to stay competitive average farmers have to beat their land just as hard.

Here's a guy who runs a mini-vineyard in CA who saved almost half a million gallons of water in one season for his grapes using pretty trivial means[1]. I bet if he incorporated some recent 'best/alternative' practices he could get that significantly lower too.

The good news is universities (particularly Australian unis[2]) have conducted pretty thorough analysis w/r/t efficient watering for healthy plant root systems. You have lay new sub-surface irrigation drip system with textile enclosures[3] which is an initial expenditure, but you end up saving a boatload of money on water in the long run. (Drip irrigation[5] in general is alright, but you have tons of water loss via gravity[4] as shown here.) "Permaculture"[6] is a DIY-sociological movement of farming by 'efficient/sustainable/whatever' means.

The bad news is the last time the US had a radical shift in farming was when farmers beat their land so hard we ended up having the Dust Bowl. Conditions had to get so bad that you'd get 'dust days' like 'snow days' from school/work for people to change their farming habits. It wasn't until FDR appointed Henry Wallace(unsung national hero) as Secretary of Agriculture that things started to change. If I could buy futures in water 50 years from now, I'd put my entire savings in it. The botanists and horticulture scientists have made massive advances since the 1930s. We can sustainably farm on land every season if you don't plant corn every dang season and then pump nitrogen in there to make up for the lack of nutrients.

Grey water[7] can very easily be treated and reintroduced into your local garden. We can even use refuse from septic tanks, treat it on-site and re-introduce into your your lawn/garden to produce 100% safe edibles (subject to your local regulations; also, if you're on any sort of medication such as antibiotics, you don't want to introduce that into your ecosystem). No land? No problem. You still can save water. Get a dual-flush toilet[8] which uses half the amount of water to dispose of urine.

I'm not a 'save the earth' kind of guy. The planet was here long before humans and will still be around regardless of all disasters we can possibly throw at it; that's a certainty. Will your grand-children have congenital defects from rampant pollutants, poor air quality, and tainted water is the real question. (I'll end this on a good note - the good news is reforestation can be done in a generation or two![9])

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[0] http://www.lindsay.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/0/6ab577c195d6...

[1] http://hackaday.com/2015/12/11/vinduino-full-irrigation-with...

[2] http://www.unisa.edu.au/Research/CWMR/Students-and-researche... - These guys are doing some interesting work. Most of the Aussie unis are actually. U of Kansas is doing some great work too.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_textile_irrigation - They mention PE and PP but there are alternative materials available which aren't hydrocarbon based

[4] http://www.intechopen.com/source/html/45153/media/image4.png... Effects vary on type of soil (and subsequent density that determines the rate at which gravity pulls water away from the root system), the micro-culture that exists, how water-hungry your plant is, and a boatload of other factors...

[5] http://www.sswm.info/category/implementation-tools/water-use...

[6] https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/diy-instructions/how-to-bu... Water rights will vary from state to state, especially in the Mountain/Pacific zones. It gets as extreme as "you're not allowed to collect rain-water on the land you own, sorry" which is insane because such legislation doesn't even apply to oil/gas/minerals. If you hold full title to an estate (i.e., you didn't just purchase surface rights, or a split claim) and you find diamonds on it, you are issued full rights to it.

[7] "Greywater Reuse" - Amit Gross, ‎Adi Maimon, ‎Yuval Alfiya, 2015

[8] https://www.amazon.com/K-3987-0-Wellworth-Two-Piece-Round-Fr...

[9] https://www.ted.com/talks/shubhendu_sharma_how_to_grow_a_for... I hate TED talks, but this former Toyota salaryman learned about biodiversity from some 80 year old Japanese guru, applied the Toyota manufacturing techniques to make the system efficient, and is doing some amazing work with basically no funding behind him.

That $50 also comes with obligations to pay back property taxes, renovate existing buildings to meet current code standards, and improve the street-visible appearance of the lot. You're paying $50 for a property that has a $50000 debt stapled to it.

Also, urban soil frequently has chemical contamination. If nothing else, it often has high levels of lead contamination from mere proximity to the streets used by cars that burned leaded gasoline before it was banned.

Buying multiple distressed urban lots to use as farmland is a horrible, horrible idea. If you want to buy land for traditional farm, do it in a rural area. Urban land does not make sense unless you are experimenting with vertical farming, where the grid power and piped potable water is already available, and the local soil (if any) is not going to be used anyway.