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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

#251

Post by m3047 »

saeranv wrote: post #194
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…

Re: Which brings up another issue, which is energy density/m2 of land. To support industrialization/high density urbanism the only fuel sources that do this are currently fossil fuels, or nuclear, but none of the renewable fuels have the energy density. So if these countries want to increase the amount of MWh/capita, the most efficient (only?) pathway is through high-energy density fuel sources, which right now is be…

I'm not going to provide a source, but my understanding is that one square meter can provide roughly 1 KW of electricity at noon on the equator. Looks like that's about 4MW per acre. Five acres for the "traditional" family farm. I bet where I live that irradiation equals 1MW per acre, and of course it varies seasonally. Sounds ridiculous, until you've tried to water any sizable amount of square footage, and contemplated the heat energy required to evaporate all that water which doesn't go into the plants and isn't runoff.

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

#252

Post by mespe »

carapace wrote: post #128

I've been thinking about this in the context of applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) It's undeniable that modern mechanized mass agriculture is incredibly efficient and already highly automated. It's kind of fantastic. (And very challenging to compete against.) The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and ecological ignorance. The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that will become end…

Fallow fields are essential to maintaining soil health, a successful practice going back 10k years. Additionally, some of the "barren" fields are actually being used to alternate crop - it is a technique to grow crops with limited natural water. Modern best-practices avoid a lot of erosion by using no-till or low-till systems.

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

#253

Post by mrep »

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).…

> Look at the Netherlands. Tiny country (slightly bigger than MA), basically underwater, and the second largest exporter of agriculture in the world.

Got a source, cause the world bank says they are 6th [0]?

[0]: https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Yea...

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

#254

Post by m3047 »

tikwidd wrote: post #240
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…

> - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms How about seeds and sprouts?

I grow sprouts on my kitchen counter. Mostly they require lavage. For the last day or two they require light to turn green and possibly develop flavor; they don't need much.

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

#255

Post by firethief »

d_burfoot wrote: post #155

As a consumer, I don't care a tiny bit about making my food less expensive (by making production more efficient). Food is already very cheap. I care very very much about reducing the suffering of farm animals. I do not want to become vegan (for health reasons), but the guilt I feel because of my contribution to animal suffering is one of the worst parts of my life. Please, please, smart young technologists out there:…

Not everything is a technical problem. No technical solution is going to make the cheapest way to get animal parts in our fridges involve the animals living fulfilling lives.

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

#256

Post by rossdavidh »

goldenshale wrote: post #248

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 agri…

I immediately thought of the Netherlands as well. As I understand it, they began vertical farming more crops thinking that they would be the R&D department for world agriculture, because they could get results faster, and then it would go into "production" in conventional farms, but were surprised to discover that they could (in some cases) compete for the production as well.

It makes total sense to me that this would not be the case for every crop (probably not corn, wheat, or soy for example). But I would also be surprised if vertical farming made sense for NO crops.

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

#257

Post by quantified »

alextheparrot wrote: post #81
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"…

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…

Keeping the soil productive with more fertilizer costs a lot in some ways- fertilizer production is a big energy consumer. Basically attempting to accelerate using fossil or nuclear what the sun or things that eat organic matter do more slowly.

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

#258

Post by tomnipotent »

tikwidd wrote: post #240
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…

> - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms How about seeds and sprouts?

> How about seeds

You need adult plants to produce seeds, defeating the purpose.

> and sprouts?

Alfalfa sprouts? That's very much a non-calorically dense food.

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