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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

#91

Post by bricej13 »

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.

For a small peek watch this simple farmer dig a hole, put a seed in, and put dirt on top: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As

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

#92

Post by greenie_beans »

I’m not “silicon valley,” but only a single programmer who has an interest in agriculture. The author is talking about large scale farms. What about small scale farmers? In my experience with those farmers, they don’t typically have the access or money to afford tech. Do you not think there’s an opportunity to create cheap tech tools—automation and robotics—for small scale farmers?

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

#93

Post by kickout »

rudolph9 wrote: post #38

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.…

Yes, Land Institute is excellent. I follow their work closely. They are on the right path.

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

#95

Post by hef19898 »

gpanders wrote: post #68
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 revelat…

I met a startup where I live during an event. The develop a solution for famers to integrate all their data in one system instead of spreadsheets, think of a farming ERP.

One of the founders worked since his early teens driving large machines during harvest season. He said that agriculture is already now able to be fully automated, from GPS controlled tractors and such to milking and feeding robots. I had the same revelation, modern farming is way more tech heavy automated than I thought.

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

#96

Post by kickout »

wbazant wrote: post #5

There's only so much that can be grown and mechanically harvested, and the US surely excels at producing maize, wheat, or soybean, but vertical farms don't try to compete with those. The production of other crops does not happen in the US that much, but it also operates at a rather spectacular scale - instead relying on poorly paid laborers abroad.

This is correct. But the crops they target (veggies mostly) are also grown outdoors. But the higher margins on these veggies give the indoor people and hydroponic people an opportunity to compete (also year round veggies command a premium as well)

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

#97

Post by nostromo »

c54 wrote: post #55
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…

This is what happened in Soviet Russia (productive farmers were deemed class traitors, shipped off to siberia, and obviously net farming productivity collapsed), Ukraine leading up to the Holodomor (knock on effects from russia’s actions), and in Mao’s china (government mandated agricultural actions forced farmers away from their evolved / cultural practices and caused food production collapse). Systems like this are…

Mao's Four Pests Campaign was particularly disastrous and ended killing millions in famine.

He decided that sparrows, which ate some fruits and seeds, should be destroyed. He didn't realize that they also eat locust larva and other pests, which exploded in population without sparrows. Those pests ended up killing massive amounts of crops after the people were ordered to eliminate all sparrows and their eggs -- it ended in widespread starvation.

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

#98

Post by Skunkleton »

logicNSci wrote: post #14
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…

Specialization sure, but science is universal. Unless agriculture is built on trade secrets or art, you can contribute. This is one of my criticisms of Medical. It's not a science or the barrier to entry would be significantly lower, and as a result cost would be lower. Degrees are good, but not necessary if you can do math and get experience.

There are lots of not-fully-understood processes in the world that only work because we lucked into some way of doing them. If you come at these problems with a scientific mindset but with no real experience, you are going to have a bad time.

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

#99

Post by fred_is_fred »

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"…

How did you support yourself economically when setting this up and ongoing? Was it economically viable and sustainable?

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

#100

Post by kickout »

dx034 wrote: post #24
Justsignedup wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Save land? Most land in the US is doing NOTHING, or has little potential for anything other than carbon sequesteration
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