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What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

thinkingagriculture.io

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Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#31

Post by Ericson2314 »

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 ------

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.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#32

Post by pvaldes »

julianeon wrote: post #18
Brajeshwar wrote: post #11

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…

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…

There are lots of really expensive products that can be cultured indoors, are perfectly legal, and aren't drugs

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#33

Post by dzdt »

vkou wrote: post #27
dx034 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I had the impression indoor farming is heavily hoping to pivot to marijuana.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#34

Post by quacked »

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #12
akajakaj wrote: post #6

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 jo…

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…

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.)

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#36

Post by Valgrim »

cyberbanjo wrote: post #16
Valgrim wrote: post #10

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…

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...

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.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#37

Post by xxpor »

Justsignedup wrote: post #20
coderintherye wrote: post #3

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…

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 c…

>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.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#38

Post by rudolph9 »

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/

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#39

Post by [deleted] »

snarf21 wrote: post #7
coderintherye wrote: post #3

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…

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 hi…

[deleted]

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#40

Post by AndrewKemendo »

protomyth wrote: post #21
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

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.

Can you explain this "disastrous logistics chain"? I am a bit confused given all the effort that goes into logistics by farm companies.

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.

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