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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

#171

Post by hogFeast »

newyankee wrote: post #166
hogFeast wrote: post #161

Look at the Netherlands. Tiny country (slightly bigger than MA), basically underwater, and the second largest exporter of agriculture in the world. Denmark is similar although at a far smaller scaled. The reason the US is inefficient is because it has massive scale. Huge country, basically no-one lives there in population density terms (tbf, Australia is the same size and even less dense though...so not an outlier).…

US agriculture is one of the most advanced in the world, its agricultural incentives and economics however ... are not. Subsidy to certain crops over others and do not even want to get into the health impact aspects.

Yep, I left that out and it is definitely a huge factor.

Europe definitely has the same issue with subsidies but the CAP program actually works on the volume planted, so Netherlands gets royally screwed (and the big inefficient producers in France/Spain and, more recently, Eastern Europe...where there is huge corruption in CAP...get the lion's share) because they minimise resources (and don't have many to begin with).

I understand a certain level of subsidy to boost security...but the unintended consequences are huge.

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

#172

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

What this article doesn't understand is that some people like myself would like to have fresh vegetables that are bred for nutrition and taste, not something that's been bred for maximum shelf life.

From big Agg, When those big optimized over fertilized tasteless tomatoes arrive, I'm not excited.

But, those local farmers markets sometimes come up with superior tasting products. I once tasted an early girl tomato from a local farmers market and it tasted like nothing else.

some people want quality of quantity.

Besides when it comes to freesh produce there's not much choice right now. I mean, we have gazillion different varieties of frozen stuff in the freezers, but only 1 kind of cucumber to choose from,etc.

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

#173

Post by michaelscott »

rmason wrote: post #87

With twenty years previous experience as an agronomist I can tell you that this article is right on. You want to know cropping ag's biggest problem? Too much data. Farmers are collecting all sorts of data - soil samples, weather station data, aerial infrared photos and yield monitor data to name a few. But there are few tools that give actionable information from all that data. Actionable in prescribing something tha…

Out of interest, what kind of prescriptions would you hope data could make? Are you talking about coming up with new ideas for production or further optimisation for what already exists?

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

#174

Post by chx »

kumarski wrote: post #158

My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years. I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now) Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd. - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinat…

> 1MWh/capita annum

Oh this is fascinating! I never thought of this but of course energy consumption per capita is going to be an indicator of how industrialized a country is. I briefly checked the two countries I am a citizen of (Canada, Hungary) and counterchecked with one of the poorest countries I know of (Chad) and the numbers are as expected: 14.6, 4.1, 0.013 (oof).

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

#175

Post by trophycase »

kumarski wrote: post #158

My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years. I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now) Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd. - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinat…

I guess I was always under the impression that vertical and urban farming would be done for "specialty" crops like herbs or kale or something, never for high volume cash crops like potatoes or corn. I can see a benefit for these "specialty" crops because they aren't done to the same scale (maybe I'm wrong about that)

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

#176

Post by DataGata »

antocv wrote: post #122
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"…

Hey man no way, you have been living my dream! First I wanted to just grow berries, then I realized, pesticides and so on, so add another plant to fight that attacker instead of pesticide, then add another plant to protect that plant by being attractive for those other bugs which kill the bad bugs. Then I realized, this would eventually be a forrest with just more berries and edible fruits than normal. Thats where th…

Why wouldn't the pay-off in money not be worth it? You can charge a "responsibility premium" to local hipster stores.

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

#177

Post by markbnj »

trophycase wrote: post #175
kumarski wrote: post #158

My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years. I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now) Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd. - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinat…

I guess I was always under the impression that vertical and urban farming would be done for "specialty" crops like herbs or kale or something, never for high volume cash crops like potatoes or corn. I can see a benefit for these "specialty" crops because they aren't done to the same scale (maybe I'm wrong about that)

Yeah that was my take as well. I think there's some sort of trade-off point here, though I don't know where it is. Yes modern outdoor agriculture is hyper efficient, although I think the author's comments about cash flow self-sufficiency gloss over a lot of government subsidies and bank bridge loans. In any case, indoor ag should be able to exploit the lower weather/pest risks, lack of need for damaging pesticides, consistent conditions, 365 day growing season, proximity to markets, etc. at least for some combination of products.

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

#178

Post by hamzahc »

A lot of the points around efficiency of traditional farming vs vertical farming are valid points. Over time however, you would expect vertical farms to catch up to the level of sophistication of traditional ag. The two practices are not like for like and shouldn't be compared as such - vertical farming is still in the 80:20 phase of development where as traditional agriculture is now in the hyper optimisation phase after 000s of years squeezing for incremental improvements. The primary benefits of urban vertical farming come from things like:

- Reduced transportation costs and emissions to people buying them due to being located close to urban centres

- No dependency on natural climate/weather, you can never have a bad yield!

- No need for pesticides that can get into the water table and damage local environments

- Allows for high accuracy estimations of yields that can build better forecasting models for supermarkets etc.

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

#179

Post by alisson »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #99
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?

I had a small reserve, and I cut my living costs a lot. I wasn't trying to make money from agriculture in the beginning, was all about learning, I volunteered a lot and did a few courses later. This year we started actually selling produces and I get lots of calls to pruning jobs which I do decline because 2 years down this line I started working with development again because I got out of money. We would be able to live from the land today for sure, but also having economic security and being able to invest in better tools and such is also very good.

I'm now looking to merge this two worlds and work as a developer on solutions for agriculture/forests. I have a product in mind which I'm currently working on, lets see :)

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