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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

#241

Post by mespe »

mespe wrote: post #233
newyankee wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

Hi - coming from a PhD in agriculture (focus on sustainable ag), graduate level courses are going to be tough to jump into unless you have a strong background in ecology. Most of my grad-level courses assumed years of training in e.g. genetics, soil science and chemistry, plant physiology, ecology, weed science, entomology, etc. Agriculture is a very broad life science field. That said, if you want a quick primer, "C…

One last thing - to be a successful farmer has very little to do with growing crops. Take business classes - the rest is relatively easy to figure out.

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

#242

Post by kps »

jfb wrote: post #112

Why did the title get changed from the article's title ("What Silicon Valley Doesn’t Understand About Agriculture")?

Because Silicon Valley thinks nowhere else matters, and likes to pretend its parochial local monoculture is never a problem.

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

#243

Post by solomonb »

chrisco255 wrote: post #67
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #51

Farming is not a sustainable use of land. The article of the author assumes the massive scales of land use for farming is an invariant, but it is a massive contributor to species extinction and global warming. Vertical farming is as important as solar is to the future sustainability of the human race.

Other than soil depletion, it's perfectly sustainable. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. Of course, we also figured out how to revitalize soil a long time ago, vis-a-vis ruminant fertilization and crop rotation. But the soil nutrients are supplemented with artificial fertilizer these days for efficiency.

We haven't been farming as we do today for 10,000 years. The green revolution was exactly that, a fundamental revolution in the way to grow crops.

You can't be farming sustainably if you are depleting the soil. Preserving soil health is a fundamental aspect of sustainable agriculture..

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

#244

Post by primroot »

sushisource wrote: post #227
primroot wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) grows on the sidewalk already, and often next to some wild amaranth (Amarathus Hybridus). What is the point of more efficiently producing specific crops, when there are all these underutilized nutritious plants growing without any human input (or should I say growing despite human input)? This is another problem that I see…

I think this is the type of magical thinking that pervades a lot of these ag startups. Just because you noticed "Hey, this unpopular grain grows so easily it's popping up from the sidewalk!" does not mean you can actually then go and scale that to providing food for hundreds of millions of people. We developed modern agriculture the way we did for a reason . Some of those reasons are no longer valid, true, but a whol…

Yes I agree with you, but maybe I did not express my point with enough clarity. I mentioned this two species because they count as food of negligible caloric value (sidewalk amaranth is mostly useful because of the edible leaves). As far as I understand, human caloric needs at present population levels require the large scale conventional methods of production (including the Haber-Bosch process). But caloric needs aside, there are populations, which are not consuming enough greens or fruit, even when it grows in front of them. I have seen it in the (warm and tropical dry) countryside here, they think they have to eat lettuce, when they have lots of hibiscus plants growing in their garden. It turns out the leaves of hibiscus aren't just edible, but their nutritional value is similar lettuce (I suspect higher in Mg since it's a lot greener). The answer of some technologists to this problem is to grow more lettuce. Another plant that grows plentifully here certain months of the year is Ipomoea Triloba. I don't think anyone should try to produce them at scale following the conventional methods. In the case of cities I imagine there could be gardens with a synergistic diversity of plants, which try to keep a high total yield, but not a high yield of any specific plant.

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

#245

Post by worik »

No, this is untrue.

I cannot speak to "Vertical Farming" and silicon valley types, but I live in the heart of a modern agriculture zone. It is catastrophic.

The environmental devastation is breath taking. Yes there is a lot of industrialisation, but of the wrong things and at a very high, and completely externalised, price. Instead of innovating farmers are using technology to do what they have always done, just more of it.

The enormous cash flows generated (but not profits, land prices take care of that) have corrupted the political system and farmers use their power to fight off any innovation that would reverse this catastrophe.

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

#246

Post by alextheparrot »

Spooky23 wrote: post #230
alextheparrot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase "It builds forests" is so powerfully, simply descriptive. I think that framing agriculture's transition (hopefully) away from mono-culture into a more ecosystem focused idea seems like a tractable optimization problem. If we look at the reasons for mono-culture, I would argue part of the reason is that traditionally bigger yield is linked to bigger tools -- tractors are much larger than horses, spraying a…

It’s pretty amazing what the land can do if you’re clever. I have a friend from college who makes a decent living as a flower farmer who also does horse boarding, etc. When he slows down for retirement, he has a few million bucks worth of hardwoods that he planted right out of college on land that wasn’t good for other purposes. Mostly black walnut and maple, which he also produces syrup with and may start making boo…

I grew up in a scenario more similar to this, though my parents didn't have the foresight to plant hardwoods for harvest (Though we did chop firewood to keep the house warm in the winter from our woods). My father still sends a supply of maple syrup each year, which is important because the syrups sold in stores are pretty questionable (The texture is too thick and the sweetness is one-dimensional).

Definitely a tension I've found in life between working in an urban software world and a more bucolic, fostering atmosphere of a farm. I hope more people find a balance in life like your friend, seems they have found the best of a couple worlds.

It is still hard, though, to scale this approach in the way that modern factory farms (Or even small family farms, to be honest - harvesting 400 acres is still non-trivial compared to the average of 150 acres in the 30s [1]) have done with the monoculture.

I would probably assume your friend has a small family style farm, which is what 90% of the farms in the US are [2]. Total farm output has tripled [3], a top of the line tractor costs nearly half a million, it really makes the equation of making an integrated farm a much more complex scenario. If I start doing a more bespoke culture, these tools are probably much less effective - that's the core challenge I think that needs to be solved, how do we increase output of heterogenous cultures.

If I had to bet (And I don't go to Vegas often for a reason), there's likely an inflection point where micro-technologies come to farming in a more direct way, possibly supplanting the way we do a lot of things today. I hate the appeal to nature, but it does seem prescient, in that a bunch of small organisms (Bees, butterflies, and birds) contribute so much to the overall health and harvest of an ecosystem. Maybe there is some, excuse me, cross-pollination to be found between that world and the one we've constructed.

Postnote:

Interesting history of farming I found https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-american-agriculture-fa....

[1] http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/AgCensusImages/1969/02/...

[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/march/large-family...

[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

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

#247

Post by eloff »

evgen wrote: post #212
bgroat wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? I get that to store a calorie in a potato I need to supply a calorie of energy from somewhere else. But why is fusion power required instead of better UV lamps in my vertical farm? (Assuming I had enough electricity to run them)

I think the suggestion is that fusion power here is a stand-in for electricity that is too cheap to meter -- basically free power.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean, sorry for skipping a step in my logic.

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

#248

Post by goldenshale »

I was blocked as a suspected bot by the wordpress site, so I'll post here...

I think this discussion requires a bit more nuance. Of course classic row crops like corn, wheat, soy, oats, etc., are unlikely to ever make sense for indoor crops. But that's not what any of these businesses are tackling. Instead they are focused on high value fruits and vegetables, herbs, and fresh greens. You only have to look at the agricultural success of the Netherlands to see that these crops can be grown for profit at scale, indoors. During the winter months they augment the greenhouses with light, but they are also taking advantage of the sun as much as possible. In greenhouses you can grow with far less water, and you can produce fresh, local food that doesn't have to be cooled and shipped nearly as far. I'd like to see an honest comparison that looked at a tomato and a handful of fresh cilantro being sold in NYC or SF from a local greenhouse with augmented light versus comparable produce shipped in from Mexico or somewhere else warm.

I think there are also many good arguments for shifting our diets away from the commodity crops and towards more fruits and vegetables, so as the world gets wealthier and more people seek diverse, healthy foods, we might see new models that make increasing sense.

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

#249

Post by mespe »

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.

So, in my grad program in ag, we had a Bay-area ML startup come in to give a seminar on how they were revolutionizing agriculture. The presented their findings on how to increase yields (which they claimed could only be understood from their algorithm).

The problem they were diving into was well understood, and has been researched to death for the last 100+ years. And they had the relationship backwards, not understanding their "input" to increase yields was actually a response to low yields. They were the opposite of helpful, but rather a waste of our time.

As with anything, it helps to know the current state of knowledge before you jump into contribute. An understanding of math doesn't get you there.

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

#250

Post by logicNSci »

mespe wrote: post #249
logicNSci wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, in my grad program in ag, we had a Bay-area ML startup come in to give a seminar on how they were revolutionizing agriculture. The presented their findings on how to increase yields (which they claimed could only be understood from their algorithm). The problem they were diving into was well understood, and has been researched to death for the last 100+ years. And they had the relationship backwards, not understa…

ML is not science, it's barely math.
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