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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

#61

Post by chrisco255 »

alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

I can see that being critical in Brazil, near the rainforests, but does this strategy work in the great plains?

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

#62

Post by Ericson2314 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #56
Ericson2314 wrote: post #31

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…

Basically anyone thinking agriculture disruption should read about the Hutterites[1] rather than get caught up with some vert ag thing. Hutterites have major capital expenses (unlike Amish), and yet they are farmers. Income-portion subscription model maybe doesn't so crazy if you consider employees can live off the surplus food on one hand, and so the subscription can largely go into capital and operational expenditu…

Final thing is remote work + medicare-for-all could make SNAP-for-all less inferior to $$-for-all, in that housing and healthcare, the big rent-seekers drains are decapitated, raising food costs as a portion of household budgets back where they should be.

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

#63

Post by asdf21 »

alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

After watching that video, it seems like you could just mulch large areas of "dry land" and it would have a similar effect more quickly. The pruning (and rotting of the wood) is what is fixing the soil right?

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

#64

Post by edoceo »

mathgladiator wrote: post #53
alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

what advice would you offer to another developer that longs to get into agriculture?

Start by getting your hands dirty. Grow some herbs in a window box or something simple. Once you reap the rewards, you may get the green-thumb itch and keep going. Getting started is easy: seed, dirt, water, sunshine

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

#65

Post by Loughla »

gdubs wrote: post #60

What I want: an autonomous, EV brush mower to take care of the scarily steep slopes of our native upland prairie restoration project.

Autonomous, EV mower/tedder/rake for hay fields with an integrated weather center. Would like that for my life. Bonus points for super low center of gravity, so we could get value out of the hills more than CRP checks.

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

#66

Post by BurningFrog »

quacked wrote: post #34
thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This may not be a high quality interjection, but I just want to point out that agriculture has been continuously disrupted for ~250 years.

Back then 90-95% of people worked in food production. Now it's 2-3%, and they produce vastly more food per person.

So it's not like farmers are not used to change.

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

#67

Post by chrisco255 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #51

Farming is not a sustainable use of land. The article of the author assumes the massive scales of land use for farming is an invariant, but it is a massive contributor to species extinction and global warming. Vertical farming is as important as solar is to the future sustainability of the human race.

Other than soil depletion, it's perfectly sustainable. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. Of course, we also figured out how to revitalize soil a long time ago, vis-a-vis ruminant fertilization and crop rotation. But the soil nutrients are supplemented with artificial fertilizer these days for efficiency.

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

#68

Post by gpanders »

degraafc wrote: post #13

I spent a few months at a consulting company working with a precision agriculture startup, and my mind was totally blown when I first learned how much technology goes into agriculture these days. I feel like a lot of tech people have a mental image of outdoor farming still being somewhat primitive (I certainly did!) which could cause the misconceptions mentioned in the article.

My graduate school advisor is a big name in satellite-based navigation (e.g. GPS), and I spent a lot of time learning about state-of-the-art advances in GPS techniques such as precise positioning. I was surprised to learn that many of the former students in our lab went to work for John Deere of all places. At the time, I also had an image of outdoor farming being fairly primitive, but this was an eye-opening revelation to me.

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

#69

Post by vsareto »

dzdt wrote: post #33
vkou wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's easier to secure vs. a field of marijuana so there might be other reasons besides growing.

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

#70

Post by skybrian »

This article is at too high a level of abstraction. It doesn't make sense to talk about the huge, almost almost entirely automated farms that grow crops like corn and soybeans in the same way as the farms that grow fruits and vegetables that are still mostly picked by hand.
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