Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

just-food.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 236 posts

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#21

Post by aaron695 »

> We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex

It breaks the laws of physics, which a smart child can work out.

Sure you can make food for the rich, but do the rich care enough to pay for the vertical-farming surcharge. Is it the type of signaling they pay for?

The 26 story Chinese pig farm however works because they haven't filled their universities with imposters who can't do science and fatting animals vertically using energy harvested from horizontal farms is not insane.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#22

Post by datpiff »

UpToTheSky wrote: post #19
tfourb wrote: post #15

Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…

Going by that logic, no technological progress would take place at all.

Progress is part keeping-the-things-that-work, part dropping-the-things-that-don't

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#23

Post by xtian »

dukeyukey wrote: post #14
Guthur wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many countries have been forced into mono culture plantation crops by IMF and World Bank, due BS globalisation comparative advantage policies. There is plenty of arable land it's just devouted to non staple production. And so they're stuck buying food with dollars they have no control over.

It's not that they're "forced" too, it's that farmers in those countries want to make money, to invest in the future. And the way to make money is to grow cash crops and sell them on the world market, not grow barely-profitable staples. Their governments can and do provide subsidies to make growing staples profitable, but that's on the individual countries.

The strings attached to IMF/World Bank loans, known as structural adjustments, do typically include ending agricultural subsidies. The US and collective West notably do not subject themselves to the same policy. Coupled with structural adjustments which mandate market liberalization, this means farmers in developing countries have to compete against heavily subsidized food staples from the collective West. The end result of this is well understood.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#24

Post by mensetmanusman »

tfourb wrote: post #15

Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…

Nature does not have great pest control, which is why we spray so much chemistry that gets into our food and water.

Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#25

Post by logi2mus »

tfourb wrote: post #15

Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…

Yes so true, I guess there is more money in autonomous robots for additional control like weed suppression!

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#26

Post by karmakurtisaani »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #16
cwillu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out founder bullshit is not a viable substitute for manure.

The tribbles began sprouting when the founders talked about plant plant plans.

[flagged]

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#27

Post by EntrePrescott »

makeitdouble wrote: post #13
davehcker wrote: post #5

We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup. W…

> they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)

> I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ?

My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:

> Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#28

Post by robertlagrant »

tfourb wrote: post #15

Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…

By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?

If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them.

E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm.

If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually nature vs vertical farm, it's flying them in vs vertical farm. Your incredulity at people not just growing things where they're easy to grow should possibly diminish when you remember that we grow them where they're good to grow and then engage a global commercial, legal and freight industry to get them to us. That combination is what vertical farms are competing against.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#29

Post by Ekaros »

robertlagrant wrote: post #28
tfourb wrote: post #15

Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…

By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty? If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them. E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm. If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually natu…

It is not even flying them in vs vertical farm. But vertical farm vs more traditional greenhouse solutions. Where you can do all the circulation control, but also can use natural light and don't need large concrete structures.

There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#30

Post by marginalia_nu »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #24
tfourb wrote: post #15

Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…

Nature does not have great pest control, which is why we spray so much chemistry that gets into our food and water. Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.

Nature does have decent pest control, but the way we do farming does basically everything to circumvent it.

If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.

Post reply on HN