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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

#141

Post by Vysero »

I currently work as a developer for a company that develops a "black box" (as we call them in the business) for the AG industry. We develop the systems the author was referring to that provide: auto-steer/guidance, and application control for tractors.

I am not sure if that makes my perspective unique or not, but as a general rule of thumb I would tell anyone looking to get into the "dirt work" (growing) of the AG business to change their minds. In fact, I would tell them to run for the hills. Most farmers in America (aside from the huge co-ops) operate at a loss each year, and only survive due to subsidies, at least here in America.

That being said, if you are interested I can say for sure there is a LOT of money to be made developing the systems I currently work on and/or contracting yourself out to companies like mine for existing work we can not handle in house.

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

#142

Post by BurningFrog »

chungus_khan wrote: post #84
BurningFrog wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The term disrupted isn't really appropriate here IMO, it is more of a continual and rapid evolution, which actually even better captures the dynamism of technological change they have to follow. To stay as productive as possible, farmers have to keep up on and integrate new innovations on the fly, often without definitive singular signals one would describe as "disruptive" in tech.

Sure, "disrupted" is a bit hyperbolic.

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

#143

Post by newyankee »

Aunche wrote: post #49
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.

Rain forests are being burned down because these areas are poor and farming is the simplest way to make money starting from scratch. Multi-million dollar vertical farms don't help.

Forget even about money, sometimes if you cannot participate in the 'official' economy and have no prospects, you need bare minimum capacity to cultivate land and feed yourself and your family. This is what happens in developing countries.

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

#144

Post by mixedCase »

feteru wrote: post #140
neltnerb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trade is fairly efficient at that too.

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

#145

Post by bb2018 »

This article compares growing food like wheat locally and rightfully points out how insane that would be in terms of land required. Growing some specialized foods locally is what others have suggested but I still find this extremely misguided.

First, as a citizen of a large city, if we are going to give valuable land to a large building is it really beneficial to make it a farm? Making space for housing (whether affordable or regular apartments) seems more appropriate for most cities.

Second, as a consumer, would I really prefer the building crop to a the crop of a farm about an hour or two away from the city? Probably not (and especially not if tower fruit is more expensive).

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

newyankee wrote: post #124
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 am thinking of a similar route, as a data scientist i am eager to know what graduate level courses would you recommend ? Especially for agriculture in cold climate (Canada )

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by Retric »

jedberg wrote: post #78
xxpor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Israel coastline: 171 miles US coastline (not including Alaska): 5,800 miles So the US has 33 times the coastline. It sounds like we're only one order of magnitude off to meet those desal needs. ps. If we include Alaska, which is another 6,600 miles of coastline, we could again halve that need.

Coastline distance is irrelevant, you could use a single mile of coastline to extract this much water. The issue is infrastructure and energy costs. Traditional irrigation is about 3 orders of magnitude cheaper than desalination.

All those rivers dumping into the ocean demonstrate how rarely it’s needed. Long term pumping water from the eastern US to the Midwest is vastly cheaper than the kind of massive and effectively pointless desalination effort required.

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

#148

Post by newyankee »

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…

I was actually thinking if an open source project to do this 'if then' predictive analytics that works across the world is available. It would be a great contribution to humanity if someone can work it , but like every complex problem i do not think it is that easy to distill all the information especially without sufficient profits.

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

#149

Post by carapace »

bricej13 wrote: post #91
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

That's basically a robot, eh? A farm mecha.

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

#150

Post by tom_mellior »

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.

I thought the common idea (and implementation) of indoor vertical farming used artificial lighting at each level. Possibly only using light in the wavelengths actually used by the plant, not "wasting" power at other wavelengths like the sun does.

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