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Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

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Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#101

Post by smackeyacky »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #99
smackeyacky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can answer this one. I have an AgTech startup that deals with sheep. The industry is incredibly conservative (which I knew, having worked in it for over a decade) but on top of that, it's also incredibly insular. You get one shot to get something right. You get one short per year due to seasonality. You better be prepared to travel a lot. In-person training is not negotiable for farmers using a piece of new technol…

Good to see you here David! Yeah sheep is the last frontier of the last frontier of digitisation. Makes cattle look like the airline industry.

Heh. The cost of the individual animals means that all that dairy tech isn't really useful for sheep which is why I think renting tech in that space is the way to go. Distribution is still a problem for us though.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#102

Post by gamblor956 »

agtech_startup wrote: post #38

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 ha…

You appear to have a successful, working product that does not rely on regulatory arbitrage to suck up profits from existing market participants.

Thus, your business is not appropriate for YC. That's a good thing. Outside of the Valley, YC and YC companies have a horrible reputation and would hinder your growth and mission more than it would accelerate it.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#103

Post by fijiaarone »

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…

They don’t even eat the alfalfa sprouts they praise and they think chicken nuggets grow under Golden Arches.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#104

Post by EdwardDiego »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #44
EdwardDiego wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wanted to look into AgTech (grew up chasing sheep in Canterbury) but people I've talked to in that space say that it's incredibly hard to grow sales, farmers are inherently conservative on new expenses, what was your experience of that?

Nice, I'm on the west coast surrounded by farms. My commercial knowledge of this is all second hand, but I hear it's driven by a few big customers - essentially people with huge commercial farms who are willing to experiment. The idea of selling an expensive AgTech system to your local farmer at the pub doesn't really happen.

Ah, I'm jealous! Cheers mate. :)

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#105

Post by __d »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #60
prottog wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Caveat: this is totally pub talk level speculation, read at your own risk.

There's a bunch of stories about how pissed the users of farm equipment are with everything being controlled by computers that are totally locked down to the manufacturer. They're the kind of "easy agreement" story that flourishes. I don't doubt that they're true.

What I suspect is that this segment of the market is too small and too conservative to support a new manufacturer. The end result being not enough sales.

If you're buying a product that lasts 30+ years, and there's relatively little follow-on revenue after the initial purchase, then the market needs to be pretty big to support a manufacturer. And if you're new to the game, who's going to trust you for a 30+ year product life, when you've got no track record?

I'd love to see someone try though: you could try to promote the openness of the system as a counter to the "untrusted manufacturer", I suppose.

Meanwhile, "big Ag" is perfectly fine with an equipment-as-a-service model, since it gets capital costs off their balance sheets, and manufacturers are happy to play along, because they can get a much simpler and more consistent revenue model?

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#106

Post by __d »

azinman2 wrote: post #75
hristov wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I imagine that's a question that interesting food-tech startups might try to answer?

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#107

Post by __d »

richiebful1 wrote: post #85
musasabi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/a…

Perhaps you can collect light vertically as well? And deliver it to crops either via the conversion to electricity and back, or even by some sort of optical/waveguide/handwave thing?

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#108

Post by mcbits »

__d wrote: post #107
richiebful1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/a…

Perhaps you can collect light vertically as well? And deliver it to crops either via the conversion to electricity and back, or even by some sort of optical/waveguide/handwave thing?

There's only so much sunlight that reaches any point on the Earth throughout the day. You could build something really tall to collect more light from the sun at more angles, but that will cast a shadow and reduce what's available for other collectors. So you end up with a lot of collectors receiving little sunlight or fewer collectors spread far apart.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#109

Post by hristov »

azinman2 wrote: post #75
hristov wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For the first question, one answer is the high price of organics. For your second question, there are many options. One promising option is targeted pest and weed control using cameras and image recognition and maybe even lasers. A system like that was actually mentioned on HN a couple of weeks ago.

Another is using biochemistry to make pesticides that degrade and disappear before the food gets to market.

Another is to bury seeds individually in the soil without plowing the soil, thus protecting the seeds from pests and giving them advantage over weeds whose seeds have to start on top of the soil.

So there are many ideas out there.

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