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Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

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Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#71

Post by screye »

Animats wrote: post #53
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "artisanal" thing is mostly hype.

I strongly disagree. Food manufacturing is a process with a massive amount of variables, which we can neither model nor control for in a factory.

Every batch of supplies is slightly different. The flavor trends vary by season, and even in the most controlled environment, things go wrong. Additionally, cooking/food manufacturing often involves extra 'learned' steps that aren't properly documented or understood.

It is not that cooking/food-manufacturing can't be automated. But perfect automation of it requires so many sensors, so much multivariate optimization, incredible amount of manual verification and so much modelling.... that it quickly becomes cheaper to just have manual labor balance those all by feel. As someone who worked in highly automated manufacturing lines, the machines we work with all are all faulty in their own little ways. Being able to have an intuition for what just-right looks like and being able to reproduce it manually, has continued to be a difficult problem for all manufacturers. This is doubly true with food, where the scientific processes for certain things are still unknown.

I have tried aged American Parmesan cheese blocks and they are objectively worse. Barbeque seems like the most automatable process, yet nothing comes close to a a real pitmaster's brisket. Sometimes the main task of food preservation is simply keen inspection & disposal of bad batches, which remains economically un-automatable.

Artisanal products aren't always better (sometimes you need steel extruded dried spaghetti & dusty parmesan), but they are often different & hard to reproduce with a machine.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#72

Post by HPsquared »

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.

It's hard to have a truly controlled experiment though. The result will be valid for that farm, on that year - but next year the conditions will be different, etc.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#73

Post by 8note »

jeffbee wrote: post #64
paganel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do tech people really believe in the vertical farming hype? Genuinely asking.

I ask myself this. Are the vertical farm fans really this ignorant? Or is it an act? But there are also people who will pop up and advocate for "personal rapid transit" (they are known as "pod people"), hyperloops, NFTs, and all types of other things that are impossible, nonsense, or pointless. Vertical farms are just the latest of these: a stupid idea with no future whatsoever, but with a vocal army of online booste…

Personal rapid transit as in e-bikes is doing great

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#74

Post by LAC-Tech »

laingc wrote: post #70
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…

Hey Lewis, I’m pretty interested in learning from your experience - I’ll email you at the address in your profile, if that’s ok?

No worries :)

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#75

Post by azinman2 »

hristov wrote: post #33
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 the…

What makes you say the organic market is so inefficient? And what room for improvement is there outside of the kinds of tactics that would make the food non-organic?

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#76

Post by jcampbell1 »

musasabi wrote: post #58
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 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.

GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions. The savings come in other ways, such as no manual weeding with glyphosate resistance (or higher yields compared to letting the weeds rob NPK), or less insecticide use and spraying for BT corn. As a rough estimate, yields are about 6-10% lower for GMO seeds, but labor savings can be huge. GMO cotton cuts labor costs by 90%.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#77

Post by Kamq »

HPsquared wrote: post #72
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.

It's hard to have a truly controlled experiment though. The result will be valid for that farm, on that year - but next year the conditions will be different, etc.

That's true of all A/B testing for real world things isn't it?

You could have measured increased traffic because something was trending on twitter/HN instead of the UI changes you just deployed. Might be completely different tomorrow.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#78

Post by jeltz »

HPsquared wrote: post #72
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.

It's hard to have a truly controlled experiment though. The result will be valid for that farm, on that year - but next year the conditions will be different, etc.

That is true for A/B tests too in tech.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#79

Post by dragonwriter »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #76
musasabi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions. The savings come in other ways, such as no manual weeding with glyphosate resistance (or higher yields compared to letting the weeds rob NPK), or less insecticide use and spraying for BT corn. As a rough estimate, yields are about 6-10% lower for GMO seeds, but labor savings can be huge. GMO cotton cuts labor costs by 90%.

> GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions.

If, as is true of the most commom GM crops, the specific GMO trait at issue is a non-yield trait like, say, glyphosate resistance, sure, that’s what you would expect. (Though the yield is substantially higher in the intended conditions; real crops rarely grow in ideal conditions.)

Of course, there are crops modified for yield specifically, too.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#80

Post by jcampbell1 »

jeffbee wrote: post #64
paganel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do tech people really believe in the vertical farming hype? Genuinely asking.

I ask myself this. Are the vertical farm fans really this ignorant? Or is it an act? But there are also people who will pop up and advocate for "personal rapid transit" (they are known as "pod people"), hyperloops, NFTs, and all types of other things that are impossible, nonsense, or pointless. Vertical farms are just the latest of these: a stupid idea with no future whatsoever, but with a vocal army of online booste…

I think they are really this ignorant. The tech suburbanite ideas about farming are insane.

Vertical farming is just one of the cringy ideas. Farm underneath solar panels instead of putting the panels on one side of the farm, monocropping is pure evil and farmers are simply stupid for doing it. Grow cover crops so we have to dedicate 50% more land for agriculture.

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