This place is pretty cool, based in Boston: indigoag.com
Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
131–140 of 149 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#132we need sustainable systems. a system that exploits cheap labour or one that destroys soil/environment or is overly dependent on fossil fuels will fail the sustainability test. i see swarms of robots in the future doing automated tasks. having said that, all tasks cannot be automated. harvest automation, for example..is very tricky.
the age of farmers is going up and very few young people get into farming. they are farming. there are smaller sustainable farms, but the burn out rate is going to be very high.
land is getting scarce and we have a need for urban farms. it will be easier to automate many small urban farms because of connectivity. also..concentration of large farms in some areas will cause leaching, soil degradation, environmental pollution etc. when you distribute these, the damage is easily managed and can be rectified. already, central valley and gilroy/salinas areas in northern california have very compromised water tables. the sacramento politics is very subtle, but powerful.
at some point, we might have robots that are connected to the cloud and will be able to make decisions based on weather or soil conditions or even demand. but right now, making small manual tasks automated and create robots that will work with smaller farms is better than automating 1000 acre farms.
eventually, we must form grids and the entire food system will have to be local.of course, exotic produce can be flown in, but they are that..and should be priced as such. designing agriculture systems need a paradigm shift.
to take care of all the needs of 1000 people, i would say about 50 acres. Maybe even less, but sustainable agriculture would mean leaving some parts of the land fallow for a season and rotate crops. it wouldnt be possible to grow all the grains and cereals you need. you cant farm every inch of the soil every day. water management is also important. even if the customer is vegan, it would be good to have some animals in the farm for grazing. it is an effective weed management system and the manure can be used to feed the soil. it should also include an orchard. in my farm(which some people who are not from california call a large 'garden'), i grow food, medicine, herbs, flowers, lavender and i have an orchard. i could easily do a 30 person CSA from just 1 acre, but i didnt because the sheer labour was overwhelming for a single worker-farmer. i keep bees and would like to have some chicken or goats. (but cant currently because i lease some fo it). in the last two years, my only inputs are kelp and fish solution that i use in the greenhouse. the farm is mostly reduced-till. i am a big believer in mulching. i do buy compost, but eventually i hope to create my own compost and make it a closed loop farm with all the inputs being created at the farm itself.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#133I was looking into this a while ago, i do remember there being a farm bot being kick started(1). I was wondering about doing something like that myself, but for a hydro solution for indoors - i am about to start at a new restaurant, so that has to go on hold at the moment though :) Note: That farmbot i linked is open sourced, so i will personally be looking more into that when i have more free time. (1) https://farmb…
thats a raised bed bot. not a farm bot.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#134>an entire one acre farm The way you wrote this reads as if you consider one acre to be a very large tract of land. I have family that farm and I can tell you that one acre is actually quite petite as farms go. The average size of a farm in North America is something like 400 acres.
One of the farms I run has a small 2.5 acre section of the main farm divided by a ditch. If that chunk were much smaller, I'm not sure it would be even worth pulling the equipment into it. If it were any smaller, some of these large implements you can buy nowadays wouldn't even fit. But perhaps what he means is that with more automation, the new tools would make utilizing small pieces of land up to 1 acre more attrac…
i agree. its not worth it for me to buy large equipment to do just one kind of farm task. however, smaller machines that do a variety of task with minimal supervision will be immensely useful. large farms grow commodity crops. small farms(a 100 acre farm is considered a 'small farm')grow cash crops/food we eat.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. What I imagined was that if a single acre could produce a high yield, balanced diet, then they could simply be placed in places where it before wouldn't make sense: e.g. interspersed within the suburban sprawl. And since it's just an acre, a few people or a single person could take care of it, no heavy machinery required.
But an acre of land in the suburbs costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, whereas an acre of land in a normal agricultural area far from a city costs a few thousand dollars.
maybe there has to be a certain chunk of land set aside in urban areas for green and open spaces? concentrating massive food production centers is a terrible idea. not just because its an easy target for bio hacking but also because of the impact on environment and water especially. small distributed food production centers makes much more sense.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're mostly about producing leafy greens right now for two reasons: proof of concept and profitability . I look forward to the technology expanding to other plant types: tubers, legumes, and the like. The efficiency of solar panels is improving but not ideal. The advantage is that the energy can be stored in batteries and the light from specialized LEDs only emit the spectrum of light that is useful to the photosy…
An argument from the market: do you realize that current vertical farms should demonstrate crazy margins to justify the move to less profitable crops? According to [1], you can sell a cup of micro greens for $5. You will likely need a few times more space (and likely ten times more time) to grow a single soybean plant. The plant will produce a few soy beans that you can sell for less than a cent. How can this be prof…
The obvious counter to this is to not use solar panels and LEDs, and just pipe the light with pure optics--mirrors, prisms, light-pipes, etc. Split off the green light for some other use, and direct the rest onto the plants. When the sun isn't shining, feed the optics system with a large, efficient plasma lamp.
Of course, you still need to occupy surface area to collect the free solar light, but you don't need to do it over fertile soil. And you're still going to have efficiency losses, no matter what. The primary benefit of growing indoors is not in the lighting, though. It's in the other factors, like water conservation, pest management, climate control, and pollination control.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
You are wrong. If you're buying a house it might have taxes attached but not side lots if you read the site I referenced. The city is literally giving side lots away so that they are added back to the tax rolls. Also absolutely no one is going to buy a house with $50,000 of taxes attached! Instead you wait until the land bank owns it and either buy it directly from them or wait for the yearly auction. Rarely do housi…
I encourage you to explore the difference between property taxes within the Detroit metropolis and in rural Michigan. Whether the back taxes have been forgiven or not does not obviate the future tax bills to the new owner.
The $50000 bill is the average code to bring buildings up to code. You are correct that this would not apply for side lots. But people can and have purchased houses for "$50" that included a ~$50000 obligation, for use as low-income rental properties. Such houses can be made profitable by leaning heavily on the federal Section 8 voucher program. And that's why those properties sell.
As for lead contamination in urban soil...
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/07/lead-urban-gardens/
https://soils.org/discover-soils/soils-in-the-city/soil-cont...
Urban gardening only makes sense for the most lucrative of cash crops, and those intended for consumption by rich humans. You could certainly feed yourself and your family with a well-managed plot, but you're going to have some trouble selling to anyone else, unless you serve an incredibly specific niche and have some loyal friends in the restaurant industry. The business simply doesn't scale. After the restaurant buys all it needs, you're back to the farmer's market, where even the top-shelf local CSA group can match your quality and your price, at 100 times your volume. Your only advantage is that you can deliver fragile-but-unbruised produce by hand with a bicycle fifteen minutes after harvest, rather than after an hour on a delivery truck. But in practice, hardly anyone needs that enough to pay the extra cost for it.
The guy growing fingerling potatoes on a 10 acre plot just past the suburbs is going to pay off their loan and then enjoy the profits, as the urban gardener works their ass off barely doing better than break-even.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]…
Where do you think all the water from your septic tank goes? Right back into the water table, and back up your well pump to drink again.
You are correct, except aquifers like the Ogallala don't replenish in years or even decades. It takes millennia.
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, I've heard the Western narrative on Norman Borlaug and the "Green Revolution". I'd highly encourage you to read through the work of Vandana Shiva. [1] She'll provide a well-researched, critical view as an actual stakeholder in India's food system. I look down upon petro-chemical fertilizers because of their disastrous effects on the environment and food security. Happy to elaborate, but Dr. Shiva work does it…
You keep throwing the phrase "petro-chemical fertilizers" around but I can't see how it can make sense except for denigrating the concept and spreading FUD (which is counterproductive). Ammonia is just NH3 and there is nothing "petro" (i.e. hydrocarbons) in it, that hydrogen can be obtained anywhere and the nitrogen is literally around you. Can you please elaborate on how fixing nitrogen on industrial scale is "disas…
> You keep throwing the phrase "petro-chemical fertilizers"...
Given that most fertilizers are composed of chemicals derived from petroleum, it's accurate. I don't use the term "conventional farming" because these techniques are extremely modern.
> Can you please elaborate on how fixing nitrogen on industrial scale is "disastrous"
To be clear, fixing nitrogen is fine, bacteria do this already naturally. The problem with fertilizers used at the industrial scale is that they end up ruining local water supplies + killing local ecosystem of bacteria and insects [1]. After a few years of using industrial fertilizers, famers end up ruining their soil and end up being dependent on fertilizer suppliers for future crops.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fertilizers-h...
Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is spot on. There's good reason to believe that the low-hanging fruits in improving agriculture are non-tech changes in farming. For example, a province in India was able to improve rice yields by 45% by transplanting seedlings earlier in a grid pattern [1]. I doubt that eliminating human labor costs would move the needle, automating farms seems like a low ROI move. If you follow the money, it's easy to…
>I doubt that eliminating human labor costs would move the needle, automating farms seems like a low ROI move If that were true, the farms in California wouldn't be filled with illegal immigrants.
Ah, looks like you're right:
USDA: "Wages, salaries, and contract labor expenses represent roughly 17 percent of total variable farm costs, and as much as 40 percent of costs in labor intensive crops such as fruits, vegetables, and nursery products." [1]
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/back...