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

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

#31

Shame to hear this actually, even though ideas like "using solar panels to generate power for growing crops" sounds silly, the idea of isolating the farming business to a controlled environment w.r.t insects/pesticides/etc..., as well as grow more in less land area, sounds so attractive. Plus, those who want to live long term in space stations will need some tech like this.

I think in simpler terms these ideas are successfully applied in green houses

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

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

A little peppering of humour in the comments doesn’t hurt?

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

#33
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…

>pest control

The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.

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

#34
post #33
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…

>pest control The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.

and spending all your savings on fungicide instead.

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

#35
The pessimism here is just unwarranted. Vertical farming will transform the world by freeing up hundreds of thousands of acres of land. It will move farming closer to consumption cutting the logistics costs and wastage. It's hard to overstate the how much the positive impact on the environment will be. On the top of that, it will make all regions of the world much more self-sufficient than they currently are.

Sure, it's a little impractical right now chiefly because it's hard to match the free energy of the sun. But someday, we will solve it. It's one of those ideas which will be inevitable once energy becomes cheap and abundant

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

#36

The pessimism here is just unwarranted. Vertical farming will transform the world by freeing up hundreds of thousands of acres of land. It will move farming closer to consumption cutting the logistics costs and wastage. It's hard to overstate the how much the positive impact on the environment will be. On the top of that, it will make all regions of the world much more self-sufficient than they currently are. Sure, i…

How about retooling to specialize in crops that don't need sun, like mushrooms?

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

#37
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an interesting intro, but tell us more! What exactly do you offer / sell / solve? How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”? It’s unclear from your message.

> What exactly do you offer / sell / solve? It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos ). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been…

This is super interesting to me! Super cool balance between sustainability, biology, and tech.

Not to Shill, but are you planning on hiring anytime soon?

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

#38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pest control The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.

and spending all your savings on fungicide instead.

Tell me more.

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A little peppering of humour in the comments doesn’t hurt?

I've heard of raddish.com before, it's supposed to be spicy at times.
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