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Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

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Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#31

Post by lostlogin »

ijoijiuiuni wrote: post #15
Animats wrote: post #5

The key insight Silicon Valley lacks about agriculture is that there is little potential for a big win. Major improvements mean 10% of something, not 10x. US agriculture is already highly efficient. On the down side, there's potential for a big loss if you screw up.

Vertical farming can do 10X, GMOs can do 10x, urban farming can cut out 90% of transportation costs, (not exactly what you mean but getting people to eat less meat would 100x our efficiencies) there is still room for improvement.

Vertical farms have their own issues and it turns out that they are incredibly vulnerable to electricity prices.

It seems an obvious route to take but it isn’t all sunshine.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/vertical-farms-energy-crisis

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#32

Post by itsyaboi »

boomanaiden154 wrote: post #22
Teever wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in a place like Canada where so much food is imported, transportation only adds up to about 12pc of the total energy cost. I'm not aware of any vertical farm that is 10x as efficient as a regular farm.

It depends upon what you're defining efficiency as. In terms of yield per acre, there are estimates that yield per acre can increase by a lot more [1]. I haven't seen anything more efficient energy or cost wise (outside of a couple types of plants, really just microgreens). [1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002655117

Land is cheap. Efficiency in this context is units of product per dollar spent.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#33

Post by hristov »

Animats wrote: post #5

The key insight Silicon Valley lacks about agriculture is that there is little potential for a big win. Major improvements mean 10% of something, not 10x. US agriculture is already highly efficient. On the down side, there's potential for a big loss if you screw up.

This is actually the big insight big time agriculture lacks about agriculture. They are obsessed with volumes and consider their farms to be large spread out factories making commodities and the tons of commodities produced to be the only metric that matters.

There are big wins to be had in making better food -- both healthier and better tasting. Most food in America tastes kind of bad and is very bad for you, so there is huge room for improvement. US agriculture is very efficient at making bad quality food. There is also a sub-industry of US agriculture-- organic farming -- who are very inefficient at making good quality food. Furthermore, there is a relatively large wealthy class in the world which have realized that health and a long life is the only thing that they cannot outright buy and every opportunity where you can trade money for some extra bit of health is worth taking. So there definitely is a market for good quality food.

There are other issues that are not considered critical yet but very soon will be. These are quality of soil and water. You can get good improvements if you make land that was previously unfarmable farmable.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#34

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

sethammons wrote: post #16
Animats wrote: post #5

The key insight Silicon Valley lacks about agriculture is that there is little potential for a big win. Major improvements mean 10% of something, not 10x. US agriculture is already highly efficient. On the down side, there's potential for a big loss if you screw up.

I think there is an argument that agriculture is highly inefficient because we can't track externalities well. US topsoil in our bread basket was 14 inches a hundred years ago. It is down to 4 inches now. When it goes, we go.

I'm under the impression that an acre inch of soil weighs ~170k pounds.

So if we're losing .14 inches of topsoil per year - you only need to replace ~23k pounds of topsoil per year. Probably less than half of that needs to be compost.

I'm also assuming loss was worse in the past than it is currently. So you'd need even less compost.

This sounds bad, but not like something that can't be worked around. And honestly, it sounds like it could be a good thing for there to be huge demand for compost.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#35

Post by LAC-Tech »

I used to specialize in Agtech as a consultant. It's a weird space.

[Disclaimer, this is my experience of the Australia and NZ scene, not much Silicon Valley involved]

The gap between "people who know ag" and "people who know tech" is just vast. And I sensed no great urgency to bridge the gap. I tried myself - talked to every farmer I could, moved to a working farm, even had a go at weighing cattle and applying treatment [0] (yes I am wearing slacks here!) but I didn't see a lot of people around me really interested in understanding the "other side".

There's also reluctance to address the connectivity issues. For most software developers internet connectivity is an ever present resource and it's a fault if it's gone. That doesn't really apply if you're deploying rurally, but multi-master distributed systems are hard and few people want to accept that's what they're dealing with.

In the end I came to the conclusion that no one appreciated my industry knowledge in AgTech (I must be one of the most experienced livestock identification software professionals on planet earth...) and it wasn't really worth investing my time in. That's not to say I would never work in the field again, but it would be in the capacity of working in offline systems, not my fairly extensive knowledge of cattle identification tags.

[0] https://lewiscampbell.tech/img/CattleTreatment.jpg

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#36

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

lostlogin wrote: post #31
ijoijiuiuni wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical farming can do 10X, GMOs can do 10x, urban farming can cut out 90% of transportation costs, (not exactly what you mean but getting people to eat less meat would 100x our efficiencies) there is still room for improvement.

Vertical farms have their own issues and it turns out that they are incredibly vulnerable to electricity prices. It seems an obvious route to take but it isn’t all sunshine. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/vertical-farms-energy-crisis

It takes 9 acres of solar panels to light 1 acre of vertical farm crops.

Theoretically, you could cover all of Nevada (~70M acres) & Arizona (~73M acres) with solar panels.

That would only give you enough vertical farm space for ~16M acres, and apparently the US only has ~10M acres for farmland for fruits & vegetables.

Point being - this seems implausible - and I'm not sure how you work around that.

IIUC, it takes about 1 acre to produce ~.12MW solar (obviously differs based on where the panels are). The world installed 168GW of solar in 2021 - so that's 1.4M acres of solar.

It'd take 100 years of solar production to cover that much area with solar panels.

And for what?

Cattle uses 4.5x more land by itself. We use 3x as much space to grow most of our calories (grains and oils) - replacing that with vertical farms seems like something from an alien civilization that is way to far away to imagine.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#37

Post by devwastaken »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #35

I used to specialize in Agtech as a consultant. It's a weird space. [Disclaimer, this is my experience of the Australia and NZ scene, not much Silicon Valley involved] The gap between "people who know ag" and "people who know tech" is just vast. And I sensed no great urgency to bridge the gap. I tried myself - talked to every farmer I could, moved to a working farm, even had a go at weighing cattle and applying treat…

I recall my father hating technology because the irrigation systems for crop circles would call him when they stop functioning at night. Likely could just wait until morning for a motor or solenoid to be replaced.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#38

Post by agtech_startup »

I launched a self-funded startup to focus on technologies I developed that have the potential to deliver significant benefits to indoor farming operations. We launched in 2019, yet, the pandemic put everything on hold for almost two years.

This year we finally completed our first installation (paying customer) at a farm in Singapore. Yes, we are US-based. Due to circumstances and opportunity our first installation happens to be abroad.

I applied to YC for multiple batches (I don't remember if it was three or four times). Rejected every time. I think it was an algo-rejection far more so than someone explicitly rejecting the company. We have shipping hardware and software products, a sizable first sale and at least one happy customer. This isn't an idea, it's a validated opportunity with solid execution. Our customer is looking to expand and wants more of our product. Lots more. We also have a product plan that will expand into other related domains.

I don't know if I have a solid opinion about SV and agriculture. Starting 2023 I will be out there making a solid effort to seek funding to be able to press on the accelerator. I think $5MM would be about right. I will also be focusing on IP, which, like it or not, can be crucially important when dealing with hardware that could potentially unlock a billion dollar business.

My only attempt at fund-raising has been applying to YC, conversations with our customer (who might be interested in investing) and a good friend of mine with deep and wide business experience in globally recognized companies. I guess I will soon learn what SV has to say about indoor farming startups.

Being self-funded is great in that you can just drive and not worry about anything that might compromise your ability to focus on the mission. That said, at some point, if you are going to grow, you either need a series of massive (and profitable) sales to supporting customers who will wait for you to deliver (hardware takes time to build, etc.) or a strong cash infusion to front-load development and manufacturing.

In looking at this industry I see companies who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, even over a billion, and are flaming out. As an SV outsider, I see this as a syndrome of sorts. I view it as companies who might not have a reasonably solid business or product plan just trying to, in a way, force their way into a market position by burning cash. This is very, very different from self-funding a startup, doing all the R&D, manufacturing and shipping product, having a satisfied customer who wants more and, at the same time, walking away with a ~33% gross profit margin. I can understand burning cash to accelerate, yet, I think, the fundamentals have to be there in the first place. If I were to guess, I might say that this could be the part a lot of SV startups get wrong.

Anyone can pretend they know how to sail with good, gentle, plentiful and steady wind.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#39

Post by Turing_Machine »

coin wrote: post #3

> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) This is done all the time. When evaluating a new seed variety, a different seed spacing, a new nitrogen application, farmers will do a test plot next to the control. If things looks good then they'll expand the new change to more acreage.

Some of the newer farm equipment can actually apply different amounts of fertilizer (or whatever) to different parts of the same field, based on GPS and a grid of soil samples.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#40

Post by Turing_Machine »

robbiep wrote: post #21
jvm___ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's farms near me that have a field of corn, every 5 rows has a different sign up with some sort of code and a logo for a seed company. I'd always assumed thats what they were testing.

Those are field trials of different varieties. It’s not at scale

Could also be producing hybrid seed.
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