What I want: an autonomous, EV brush mower to take care of the scarily steep slopes of our native upland prairie restoration project.
You mean... Goats?
What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
131–140 of 321 posts
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#132The 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…
Efficiency and land use is indeed an issue in India as with the struggles to feed an increasing population with a higher protein intake requirement as well.
Instead of natural gas -> Fertilizers route, a solar or renewable energy -> LED route can help for certain crops provided they do grow efficiently.
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#133I’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?
There is. But its hard to recoup any profit for the same reason you don't hear about iPhone's/premium tech in poor countries/region. Money just isn't there. Also, as pointed out, most farms are larger and getting larger. Small farms and small farmers will (in general) be aggregated (according to history at least).
I think (hope) there are opportunities around connecting small farmers directly with customers for both produce and value-added prepared food. There are a few "virtual farmer's market" services already.
But this is much more an issue of marketing and communication than technology, eh?
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#134I thought that this was a great & succinct article.
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, greenh…
Indeed, if the market is remote and energy rich (e.g. remote Canada with lot of surplus hydropower but lack of sufficient sun) the economics changes
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#136Around 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 would like to transition to this in the next 5-10 years. Starting off with a garden on a plot of land I just purchased.
That syntropic agriculture video was powerful.
Any way to contact you to understand how you've made the transition?
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#137Weirdly, the thing I find missing most from this discussion is finance.
If we take the premise that information is valuable (decrease inputs, improve yields) and that equipment is valuable (automation), then there's a very real return to be gained by using these valuable products. What's nuts to me is that we would ever ask the farmers to bear the risk of these products. I mean, sure they could I suppose (better returns overall!), but it concentrates all the risk in the worst places.
I feel like there's a much better opportunity here for a targeted financial product. "Implement our methods with our data, and we'll skim a percentage of your profits." Imagine if the risk of buying a new tractor was gone, because it was provided by the company. The risk of data integration was also gone, because it's guaranteed to work with the provided tractor. And the risk that the data is crap is also gone, because the financing and return risk is borne by a diverse number of institutional investors. Almost like weather / crop insurance, but much much bigger.
For the farmer, the sale is simple: Do our thing, and you don't have to worry about paying for stuff that may not be valuable. You might make slightly less total profit in the good years as the price of offloading that risk.
For the investors, it's also a great story: look at these great startups! Wouldn't you like a piece of that productivity and return?
...and maybe the startups are wrong, and the equipment doesn't work, and everyone learns a lot while they go bankrupt. Everyone except the farmer, who offloaded the risk.
Surely this is a thing that someone is working on?!? I'm sure it's available in bits and pieces, but a unified financing and operational solution seems like it would be a slam dunk.
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#138Earlier 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…
>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…
If your nos are correct and if desalination was done at the scale of Israel in US, it would mean it would be able to provide 10% of the irrigation needs via desalination.
This is off course not a big deal in USA and desalination and economics of certain agri crops if reassigned can lead to better outcomes. However i am sure India can do with the level of desalination Israel has (scaled up to its population size) as can other middle Eastern countries. If not today, then may be a decade or 2 in the future. This can enable habitation in many areas in land and water scarce countries.
Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
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Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello, also a developer who's interested in agroecology. I actually also left development (as a job, not as something I do) in order to pursue a more human-centric approach to agriculture. With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now, which is already alarming; small farms with synergistic crops & forestation seems like a no-brainer to achieve food sustainabi…
I am skeptical that "more farm workers" is a trend that anyone really wants. Maybe at small scale you can sell produce at vastly higher prices to make up for the higher costs, but I don't think that what you're suggesting would be good for agriculture if adopted broadly.
Might not be good for agriculture economy, but more farmers means more people with the means to feed themselves. Sounds like something I want.