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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

#41

Post by szundi »

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…

This is a misinterpretation of the parent comment. He states a lot of these services are free outdoors.

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

#43

Post by szundi »

datpiff wrote: post #22
UpToTheSky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And adding new ones

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

#44

Post by lyu07282 »

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…

There is a profound disconnect between what makes sense to do as a rational, long-term thinking species and neoliberal free market ideology that we should not loose track off. Monoculture farming with fossile fuel based fertilizers, cancerous chemical pesticides across vast spaces of land using fresh water in excess with zero regard for the local ecological system in any way and shipping food across the world from poor to rich countries using cheap fossile fuel powered gigantic ships IS the most profitable way to make most of the food we eat, BUT that doesn't mean it also makes the most sense to do it this way.

There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.

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

#45

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> 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.

Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.

Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.

Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.

We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.

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

#46

Post by mschuster91 »

orwin wrote: post #7
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.

Did you meant WTO? I don't think the IMF can force a country to specialize, but a 'free' market will (at least according to Smith).

> I don't think the IMF can force a country to specialize

Oh they absolutely can and did that as a result of the obligations that came with accepting IMF emergency loans.

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

#47

Post by davehcker »

ImPleadThe5th wrote: post #37
davehcker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Thanks. My email address is in my HN bio.

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

#48

Post by Ekaros »

afshin wrote: post #42

A self-contained solar powered cargo-container-sized box that can create calories with minimal top-ups of material might make some marginal areas habitable.

I wonder comparatively. If you just filled the container with let's say canned goods. How long would you need to run it to get same output.

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

#49

Post by piva00 »

narrator wrote: post #36
shubhamjain wrote: post #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, i…

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

Mushrooms are very very poor in calories per volume/weight.

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

#50

Post by mikro2nd »

actionfromafar wrote: post #38
guerrilla wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and spending all your savings on fungicide instead.

Tell me more.

Not the original commenter, but I guess they were referring to the fact that closed (indoor) grow environments universally suffer from fungal (and algal) disease problems.

A lovely example of this is the germination rooms/tanks of malting plants where Barley gets germinated over a few days (2-3) before being dried/kilned to make brewing malt: they all have an on-going battle against fungi and algae, much of which battle takes the form of fungicides/algacides, chlorine washes, strong acids, etc. and they never "win" a permanent victory.

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

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