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Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

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Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#51
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.

Yeah sure at 1.5 million watts per acre of grow surface in LED lighting. The average American eats 2.5 acres worth of food and produce per year, which is a 3.75 million watts of lighting for 12-16 hours a day per person.

Now sure that number can be improved, but it also isn't accounting for additional HVAC costs, and you are still looking at atleast 2 million watts per person.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#52

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.

RFS[0]: PageDuty for AgTech

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#53
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go 1 level deeper than that. Agriculture isn't a real market at all. It is closer to govt infrastructure contract work, than selling a commodity. There are no wins, juts minimized losses. Govts decide farming subsidies, allowable environmental damage & even exploitative immigrant labor practices based on the prices their voters would be willing to pay. This means that an order of magnitude improvement in efficien…

What is so labor intensive about making cheese? I was under the impression some cheeses were produced with a lot of automation in giant factories. Why can't Parmesan or Reggiano or Burrata be made like that?

Yeah, the whole "artisanal" thing is mostly hype.

From a bakery equipment maker: "To meet the burgeoning demand for products that look and taste hand-crafted, bakers had to go back to the drawing board with their ingredients and OEMs had to retool their equipment to handle the different types of dough used to make these products. The success of this effort can be seen in the bakery department of your average grocery store."

How artisanal bread is really made.[1]

I didn't know Tetra Pak made machinery for artisanal cheese automation, but they do.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbwI_UcdhaU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh-79uCy0wo

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#54

Naive question: why can't A/B testing work by implementing the tech on a few fields and not on others?

Farms and farmers have been doing A/B testing for generations with seeds, fertilizers, weed/pest control, feed, medicines, and on and on. And it's a PITA. Running 2 different, smaller, operations takes a lot more time and money than just one larger operation.

My wife is 100% engineer and it took me 6 years to even try something different on our (her) farm.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

Note that vertical farms have about 3-4x yield compared to an equal area of land. They also require significantly less pesticides, water, or fertilizers. Though currently they struggle with many types of vegetables.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#56

As someone with a foot in both worlds, I have been in tech for 30+ years and we also own a small cattle farm (can't even call it a ranch), there is a staggering amount of distrust in technology of any kind in the ag world. Every new piece of tech comes saddled with some license, or dealer only issue, or the old tractor/equipment could break down and I could fix it in the field on my own in a few hours, vs my new equi…

I hear the same about new tech-enabled equipment. I've always been curious, is there a market for continuing production of old-school, simple tractors and the like? Or is it one of those things that people complain about a lot but won't actually spend their own money to buy dumb equipment that may be less convenient or productive?

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#57

> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) Pretty sure you can subdivide a farm however you want and use different methods across them. Iteration cycles are in the year time frame but otherwise seems pretty easy to test whatever you want.

A buddy of mine works at Simplot and does exactly that. He works on a team that designs experiments and run them on crops.

Now smaller farms probably don’t, but then again smaller startups often don’t have A/B infrastructure setup either.

Edit: Come to think of it, despite this being an article on what SV doesn’t get about AG they talk of A/B testing as some special SV only thing. In every other field they’d just call it “scientific experiments”.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#58
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 farming can grow micro-greens pretty well but it will never produce 90% of our calories, even with optimistic assumptions. It would also be an environmental disaster.

Transportation is a teeny tiny fraction of the environmental cost of food as well.

I'm also not aware of any GMOs that are 10x better than their non-GMO counterpart although there are certainly improvements to be had here.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#59
I think most people have no idea how thin agricultural margins are to start with. They see that some farmer bought a $500,000 combine and think they got money just to throw around, but that combine is expected to last the next 40+ years and work near flawlessly for every harvest while performing multiple different functions simultaneously in a dirty and uneven environment. There is no alternative to a combine harvester since it is replacing the work of reaping, threshing, and winnowing all at once which without a combine would take thousands of man hours to do by hand every harvest. They might not expect for it to pay itself off for 30+ years.

Nearly all farms operate on single digit percentage returns, a large number of them have been floating along on 1% or less for decades hoping to hit a bumper crop once or twice more in their life time. If they throw a million dollars at fertilizer, fuel, seeds, maintenance for their tractors, barns, silos, dryers, and any other specialized equipment for their particular crop, then earning $50,000 on that million dollar investment would be considered a great success. Earning $10,000 would still be considered some success because it is not uncommon to run multiple negative years in a row.

Yield can vary 30% in a year from normal weather patterns, and the market can vary just as much or more, and they don't always align in a farmer's favor.

So if your tech can't handle 99.99% uptime, and be fixed in the field when it does break on short notice with basic hand tools, farmers don't want it. A single failure at the wrong time can dump half of your million dollar investment down the drain which you were only hoping to make a couple dollars from to start with. It could set them back a literal decade or more financially because some shitty widget or sensor failed and they either couldn't repair it or the fault wasn't detected until it was too late.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#60
post #56

As someone with a foot in both worlds, I have been in tech for 30+ years and we also own a small cattle farm (can't even call it a ranch), there is a staggering amount of distrust in technology of any kind in the ag world. Every new piece of tech comes saddled with some license, or dealer only issue, or the old tractor/equipment could break down and I could fix it in the field on my own in a few hours, vs my new equi…

I hear the same about new tech-enabled equipment. I've always been curious, is there a market for continuing production of old-school, simple tractors and the like? Or is it one of those things that people complain about a lot but won't actually spend their own money to buy dumb equipment that may be less convenient or productive?

I'm more curious about why there isn't a market to offer what farmers want. Why not make modern, serviceable equipment with open code and published APIs and schematics? This just screams "market failure" to me.
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