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Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

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Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#111

Post by rectangletangle »

I did some interesting work in this space. With several thousand seasons of data I used an MLP network to visualize phenotypic plasticity (how plants react to a range of environmental conditions).

Accurately cleaning the input data proved to be extremely important, because there's a tremendous amount of "noise" at the individual level when dealing with living organisms, so lots of high-quality data is necessary to tease out relationships. Establishing causality was also important, considering the potential for confounding variables.

It also gave me a chance to brush up on my React/front end skills, but that was more ancillary.

https://sproutling.ai/blog/harvest-simulations?jm2

https://sproutling.ai/blog/growth-simulations?jm2

Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#112

Post by biofrack »

I'm a co-founder of biofrack: https://biofrack.com

We use fracking techniques to restructure and amend soil at shallow depths with biochar. This improves drainage, allows for deep application of slow release fertilizer, and is a carbon negative process that sequesters carbon deeper than would ever occur naturally.

Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#114

Post by tankdoan »

jasode wrote: post #3

FBN was recently started in 2014 by 2 guys from the Silicon Valley area. So far, they focus on data analytics (e.g. seed yields). There are various articles about them and youtube videos: https://www.google.com/search?q=FBN+"farmers+business+networ... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fbn+farmers+bus... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oML9yLjTfk8

I’m an engineer at FBN.

We do more than data these days; it’s best to say we do anything we can to help farmers’ bottom line.

In the past year or so we’ve started offering health insurance, started a seed company, and brokerage.

That means we can help farmers with their inputs before the season, decisions during the season with data analysis, and selling outputs afterwords.

And of course we’re hiring!

Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#115

Post by hbrundage »

colechristensen wrote: post #108
hbrundage wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a bunch of time modelling out the unit economics for autonomous greenhouses and struggled to find any combination of technologies that could even come close to competing with the current costs of field agriculture, including labor. Do you folks need something key to change in the competitive landscape (like climate change or very different immigration laws in the US) to become profitable? See https://www.eate…

Did you model the cost of transportation and logistics to grow things in the opposite hemisphere out of the local growing season or months of cold storage?

I did! Transportation only accounted for 22% of the cost of a head of lettuce in my local Walmart, which wasn't really enough margin to justify the cost of the artifical lighting necessary to grow in Canada (even in dense southeastern Ontario). I think right now the most realistic application of these technologies is for premium products that are branded as such, like hot house tomatoes or living plants that can command 2-5x the standard barebones import price. Do you have different data?

Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#116

Post by hbrundage »

davidhunter wrote: post #75
hbrundage wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a bunch of time modelling out the unit economics for autonomous greenhouses and struggled to find any combination of technologies that could even come close to competing with the current costs of field agriculture, including labor. Do you folks need something key to change in the competitive landscape (like climate change or very different immigration laws in the US) to become profitable? See https://www.eate…

There’s a significant efficiency difference between high-tech greenhouses (glasshouses) and warehouse (aka vertical) farms. High-tech greenhouses will not compete with field farms for staple crops, but they are already profitably supplying fresh produce in many countries.

Oh of course, and to be quite honest, I really hope you folks can succeed in your mission. But, I still found that at least locally (in southern Ontario), the unit costs of importing from California still make sense compared to growing locally because of the cost of artificial lighting and the difficulties growing year round. The big greenhouse operations locally grow a premium product that can command a much higher price in order to justify the capex compared to field agriculture or just importing. I assume that premium price would have to go up even more to justify a big investment in automation, right? That's why I was asking if expensive robotics are viable now vs reliant on some change in the market dynamics.

Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#117

Post by samcodes »

jmc734 wrote: post #66

Indigo Agriculture (indigoag.com) - Boston/Memphis/Remote Shameless plug for Indigo Agriculture (indigoag.com). We're expanding on a number of different fronts with the central goal of increasing farmer profitability while reducing the environmental impact of production. Here are some of the groups at Indigo that are hiring: - Marketplace: matching growers producing high quality crops with buyers who need that qualit…

None of the jobs are explicitly remote - any heuristics for identifying which roles are remote friendly?

Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#118

Post by quixoticelixer- »

frereubu wrote: post #83
davidhunter wrote: post #20

I am the founder of Optimal: http://optimal.ag . We are a team of engineers and scientists from DeepMind, Palantir, Oxford and MIT. Our mission is to grow safer, healthier food by deploying fully autonomous greenhouses outside every city on earth. We are backed by leading deep technology funds, including Founders Fund. We believe that high-tech greenhouses will be an important part of our agricultural future, for imp…

How do you envisage the impact that these greenhouses will have on the environment surrounding them? I often wonder about polytunnels and how they shut out quite a bit of wildlife. Something like this view in Almeria, Spain - https://lh6.ggpht.com/-IHVqCZRVzzo/UiGekR4rgEI/AAAAAAAAr6M/e... - concerns me given broader issues such as the collapse in the number of insects - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/ins…

That's an enormously productive piece of land though and any sort of food production is going to be bad for the environment.

Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

#120

Post by wcchandler »

The worst part about startups and agriculture is trying to bridge the two. I spend a LOT of time thinking about the shortcomings in agriculture and how I'd do it better. So many areas for advancing a current technology. But then I'm often hindered by a simple question -- "Can I turn this into a startup?" I use Paul Graham's definition [0] as a litmus test and always fail to complete the necessary circle.

I've recently decided "to hell with it" and am diving in. I'm hustling as a hemp farmer now. Learning a lot. Especially about how to actually become a farmer. The different types of farmers. How other conventional farmers can actually make it.

I'm coming up with lots of ideas, but still no silver bullets. No unicorns. I see all these companies posted here and agree that most will be very beneficial and influential in the future. But will any see 10% weekly growths? Unlikely. But I'm always enthusiastic and hopeful that they will.

Right now the average age for a US farmer is 59 [1]. Assuming they can make it to retirement, we'll begin cresting in farmer turn-over in 5 years. The problem is many will be selling out to the highest bidder if they don't already have somebody lined up to take over the reigns. That will be the already established, large, industrial scale commercial farming operation.

So back to my original point, how can we bridge the startup world with agriculture? No idea. But I'm hopeful one of these companies do.

0: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

1: https://modernfarmer.com/2018/06/by-the-numbers-state-of-the...

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