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Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

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Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#81

Post by jcampbell1 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #79
jcampbell1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes perfect sense from a biological perspective. I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process? I am aware of accelerated mutations by irradiating seeds, though I think this is rare and I only know of red grapefruits that successfully used this technique.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#82

Post by dbg31415 »

> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet)

On the ranch I grew up on, we would "A/B" test new bulls all the time. Literally the first year we would try a new bull, we'd only give him access to 15-20 cows. If the calves came out easy, and grew fast, he'd get put into circulation with the larger herd.

We also tried different things with crops... plant one side of the field one way, plant the other side a different way.

Different kinds of fencing in different pastures... I can't remember a year when we didn't test a new kind of fence. Fencing takes so much labor, even something that shaved a few days off the maintenance each year would have been welcome improvement.

I remember we tried moving gates to the corners one year, just to see if it made moving cattle between pastures easier. It did!

We tried a lot of different rotation patterns, too. Mostly to try and reduce bugs and have to spray for flies less.

Perpetually testing new medicines. "This pill costs more, but you don't have to give it as often, vs. that pill costs less, but you have to give it every day..." turns out there's benefits to being out among the herd every day.

Ranchers aren't very technical folks, but they tend to know their profession extremely well. Above all else, they need things that reliably work.

I remember switching to electric branding irons... like they made branding faster, gave a more consistent brand, and had faster heal times -- but it wasn't just a decision to switch the whole herd, we had to test them out on a small group... and learn and then apply what we learned to the larger herd the next year.

A ranch was, honestly, a sort of perpetual experiment. There's very little "We do it this way because that's the way it's always been done..." If you talk to one generation of cattlemen vs. their fathers, the sons will inherit a bunch of the equipment, but they almost always want to change things up. I'd wager no group of fathers and sons on the planet butt heads more.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#83

Post by SteveGerencser »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #67
SteveGerencser wrote: post #49

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…

Question - how well known is US Cattle Trace? (Industry lead cattle identification scheme, for traceability). I followed it with interest - they had leap-frogged the state mandated scheme in AU and NZ by pushing UHF RFIDs instead of the LF ones we're stuck with down under - but it's hard to tell if most US cattle farmers have even heard of it.

Cattle Trace is great for people with 10s of thousands of acres to manage. But that's not all that many cattle operations in the grand scheme of things. Most of us are small operations that don't interact with major processing plants and so on. We all know when someone has a sick cow and we all talk to each other.

I was part of a pilot program using drones and RFIDs in Brazil some 10 or 15 years ago. It was cool, but the ranchers still ended up having to go out and put eyes on cows when some went missing or died so it didn't really solve a problem, just narrowed down the area a bit.

I have a small drone here that I use so I can sit on the deck and still check water tanks and cows, or look for babies so I don't have to go out in the mud. But I don't know anyone else in 20 miles of me that does that.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#84

Post by drewcoo »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #40
robbiep wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could also be producing hybrid seed.

This. The big clue is signs for a seed company.

As a teen I detasseled corn for a couple of summers - pulling the male tassels off the female rows of corn to create hybrids.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#85

Post by richiebful1 »

musasabi wrote: post #61
elcritch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3-4x yield for which crops exactly? They are only used for growing leafy greens and low volume high cost fruits such as strawberries. Do they produce 4x corn and soy? 4x potatoes?

The capital investment required to grow corn indoors would be enormous relative to the per bushel cost. I reckon the operational cost would even outweigh the revenue.

Average corn yields in Iowa were 205 bushels per acre in 2021. Let's say corn is $10 a bushel (trading around $7 on the spot market right now). So $2050 per acre for conventional ag.

Let's assume 4x yield for indoor production, so roughly 1000 bushels/acre. Or $10k per acre at $10.

I had trouble finding any good information on energy consumption in an indoor cropping system, but I'd bet lighting energy consumption would eat up the additional revenue from higher yields.

Edit: Please let me know if anyone has access to scientific literature/experience on indoor farming energy use, I'm genuinely interested to know

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#86

Post by ecshafer »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #66
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My primary tractor is 4 years old and it has been in the shop more often than my 35 year old tractor. Most of us, especially the smaller guys, run equipment until it is quite literally gone. The biggest issue that bringing new equipment to market is incredibly expensive and you are competing with all of the green, red and blue (and now orange) guys that have been building equipment for generations. The new issue is l…

I am not in manufacturing or anything. But I really think there could be a market out there for No-Frills appliances and equipment. Tractors that are just a tractor that work well and easily serviceable, long tail money made on replacement parts. Expand this to Refrigerators, Washers / Dryers, etc. So many products are made worse but cheaper, and have unused extra features that most people do not actually want.

A big part of this I think is using electronic components and no chips / pcb, so you don't need to have specialized skills to repair and service.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#87

Post by jcampbell1 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #40
robbiep wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could also be producing hybrid seed.

I have worked on a corn seed farm detassling odd rows of corn. It is every other row for seed hybridization. The rows were marked, but it was pretty obvious because the two heirloom varieties were distinct. If there were more that two varieties, it is not seed production.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#88

Post by mcbits »

paganel wrote: post #63
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.

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

Yes. But it requires nuclear power, ideally compact fusion reactors on site.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#89

Post by dragonwriter »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #81
dragonwriter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It makes perfect sense from a biological perspective. I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process? I am aware of accelerated mutations by irradiating seeds, though I think this is rare and I only know of red grapefruits that successfully used this technique.

> I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process?

Not sure that anything particularly CRISPR-like is involved (there are other transgenic techniques), but:

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-genetically-modi...

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#90

Post by skybrian »

Agricultural experiments play a prominent role in the history of statistics [1]. Yes, everything varies, so they do trials using different squares of land in the same field.

So I think it's a little much to say you can't do A/B tests, but it's a good point that they have to be pilot studies, not testing things "in production" on people's farms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments

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