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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

#111

Post by ogre_codes »

I find this story odd because it seems like it's over-emphasizing the large scale/ low manual labor crops. In other words, the article is talking about inexpensive, long shelf life crops:

> The Midwest in the United States has close to 90M acres of corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat.

Maybe I've got this entirely wrong, but my understanding is most vertical farming focuses on producing highly perishable fruits and vegetables which often still require a fair amount of manual labor and where being close to market is a benefit.

I haven't yet seen large scale vertical gardens being commercially successful yet, but if they do, I'm certain they won't be producing corn, wheat, or soybeans.

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

#113

Post by jpindar »

Valgrim wrote: post #25
roenxi wrote: post #4

Not strictly relevant to the article, but I'm not excited by the efficiencies as much by the idea that it might offer a space-efficient option for me to have my food grown locally. Food production at the moment is very much out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I don't have a feel for what monoculture are developing in the food industry, I don't have a feel for what the supply chain risks are. If food ever stopped flowing in fr…

I'm not sure how prevalent this is around the world, but in my city we can register for produce baskets. In spring, I register on a website and I choose and pay in advance of the whole season a local farmer (less than 50 km away), who comes once every week to distribute his baskets a few streets away. The produced is freshly picked the same morning, it varies from week to week, it's a small family farm and I know it…

That's common in small town or exurban areas in the US.

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

#114

Post by dejv »

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?

decide what kind of agriculture you want to do and check what is time and money requirements and seasonality is. Next step could be doing internship to see what it it feels like. There are many options from wwoofing to more job like situations.

Well and then you are ready to decide. Being small farmer is tough: not a lot of money and a lot of work, but it is rewarding by many means.

I personally decided to be in more play farm: few acres of vineyards, small wine production. It is still professional operation but I don't expect to be making full living off it.

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

#116

Post by jcampbell1 »

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…

Soy is crushed into what Americans call vegetable oil, and meal. The meal is the protein source for pork and chicken production. If you get a piece of fried chicken from KFC, the chicken was raised on soy meal and corn, battered in milled wheat, and fried in soybean oil.

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

#117

Post by quacked »

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #50
quacked wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you're right to believe that because it is true and I skirted over why I believe it takes generations. It is not impossible but difficult to document how to do effective farming because every farm has its own individual needs. And what may be true for one farm will likely not be true for another. Hence relying on first hand knowledge, albeit extremely fallible, is more reliable than reading a book and then de…

That all makes complete sense, and the misunderstanding of "tech people" made obvious from your paragraph of questions that farmers have to answer. Computers always do what you tell them to. It sounds like farms do not, even when you give them the "right" instructions.

"No farmers, no food", after all, and yet for some reason the suicide rates stay high. It's the same among American farmers. Dairy farms are shutting down at high rates in Wisconsin, where I'm from.

What can the spoiled children of civilization to do help farmers? What can I do? I didn't even know about this plight until I was out of engineering school.

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

#118

Post by tankdoan »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #108

What's referred to as "modern farming" is in fact kind of grossly inefficient, destructive, and hopelessly dependent on subsidies as well as a handful of companies supply pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals needed to squeeze some life out of a dying and eroding soil. We "perfected" that over the last century or so and it's used to mass produce only a comparatively small number of staples. I grew up in an era…

> In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving themselves with shaving of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny margin on producing glorified pig food. There are no 10x returns doing that. It's a race to the bottom.

Full disclosure, current employee. Farmers Business Network (fbn.com) is in SV operating in this space. Farmers take on huge amounts of risk, and we're helping them better their bottom lines. We try to make them more efficient (you can spray less of X here), save the money on their inputs, and help them find better prices when they go to market.

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

#119

Post by disantlor »

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"…

your description reminds me of Jane Jacobs in Death & Life of Great American Cities

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

#120

Post by Someone »

infogulch wrote: post #85
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…

Most of these sound reasonable, but I've never bought into the "grow vertically" idea. It seems to ignore physics . Sunlight is delivered as electromagnetic power (watts) proportional to surface area . Plants naturally grow on the surface of the earth, and therefore receive a small proportion of that power which they use to convert CO2 into sugars and eventually plant mass which we eat. Stacking a bunch of plants on…

“Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much“

That assumes all light comes from straight up. That isn’t even true if the sun is straight overhead, and definitely not true close to the poles.

I don’t know whether it’s profitable, but I would think the economics of vertical farming on Iceland (sun lower in the sky, greenhouse heating cheap, imports expensive) are different from those in Equatorial Guinea.

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