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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

#101

Post by itsoktocry »

barney54 wrote: post #93
cyanydeez wrote: post #84

[flagged]

“Strangled by fascism?” Care to elaborate what you mean?

>Care to elaborate what you mean?

My non-American interpretation of the use of fascism in this sense is "any politics I disagree with".

>cities may have an imperative to deprive them of their subsidized agriculture

They are subsidized to provide agricultural products to the cities. Do you think rural America requires subsidies to provide for their own, if the population centres said we will no longer purchase food from you? They are small communities with lots of land.

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

#102

Post by tagami »

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…

Fertility isn't "free". You pull nutrients out of the soil whenever you harvest.

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

#103

Post by scythe »

hedora wrote: post #97
efields wrote: post #71

High tunnels are very efficient. Greenhouses are very efficient. I've visited https://district.farm/ and it's clearly the future (or the present if you're in Northern Europe). When I went there they were at 1/4 of grow space that they are now. Ready to expand? You just add more enclosures. You slowly recoup the capital cost of the structure. Might take a few years, but you will. Rinse and repeat. The US is not hurtin…

I call BS on their claim they cut resource usage by 95%. Traditional greenhouses (which the one at that landing site appears to be) are extremely energy intensive. This article explains why, and describes a common, practical alternative: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-gree... Also, people ridiculously overestimate the percentage of food’s carbon footprint that comes food transportation: https…

>the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane)

The last time I tried to advocate for replacing landfills with incinerators on HN, someone came along to insist that methane recapture from landfills was possible and preferable (methane is useful, if you can confine it). I haven't had time to study that further, but managing food waste — aside from the actual lack of food it causes — is a solvable problem one way or another, and doesn't have to generate methane.

Now, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizers...

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

#104

Post by Scoundreller »

luma wrote: post #53
weberer wrote: 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.

These are not clean rooms and invasive pests absolutely do make their way in and then have to be dealt with.

Usually soilless solves a lot of these issues. While the pests have lots to munch on, they don’t have their usual places to lay eggs.

Same for fungi: it’s usually brought, or becomes endemic, in with the soil.

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

#105

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cyanydeez wrote: post #84

[flagged]

> the rate the politics in rural America are being strangled by fascism, cities may have an imperative to deprive them of their subsidized agriculture

Our cities have better things to focus on than an identity political attack on the folks growing our food.

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

#107

Post by tfourb »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #72
tfourb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU, commercial pork production is almost exclusively done in large-scale indoor operations with hundreds to thousands of animals in one facility. These animals represent hundreds of thousands of Euros worth of investment for their owners and there are stringent laws and regulations in place that require everything that enters these facilities to be effectively sterilized. *Still* we get huge outbreaks of some…

Pigs can contract viruses from humans, which I don't think plants can. Pigs and the horrific conditions they're kept in also creates a perfect breeding ground for bacteria. Things are a bit cleaner in vertical plant farms as long as they dont use animal biproducts in their process.

Ingress of pathogens into pig farms almost always come through contaminated clothing, tools or fodder, not some fancy human to pig contraction. Vertical/indoor farms will need a lot of human supervision and interaction, as well as water and other inputs from the outside. Making sure that all of this does not lead to contamination (which includes sterilizing the entire facility on a regular basis) is prohibitively expensive in all but the most edgiest of edge cases.

And again: why bother? Market gardens are highly space efficient and can feed hundreds of people from the space normally occupied by a suburban house plot. Locating a market garden outside an agglomeration and transporting the produce an hour or so into the city is also very practical. And of course actual staple crops are shelf stable and can thus be transported anywhere at leisure. This fancy "vertical farming" stuff makes sense on a space station and desert cities flush with petro dollars but that's about it.

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

#108

Post by blincoln »

weberer wrote: post #33
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…

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

I've seen a decent number of agricultural areas where the crops are covered with a vast mesh tent supported by a wood or metal framework. Lets sunlight in, keeps insects out. That seems a lot more economical than building a vertical farm in most countries.

There are edge cases where the technology developed for vertical farms seems very useful: densely-populated, small countries; space stations, and off-world colonies. But for most of Earth? Look at how much of the US is farmland, and then imagine how many expensive towers and associated infrastructure you'd need to replace it.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

tivert wrote: post #86
robertlagrant wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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. > By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty? The GP got a couple things wrong (e.g. nature doesn't provide free pest control), but one thing ve…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by tfourb »

tivert wrote: post #86
robertlagrant wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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. > By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty? The GP got a couple things wrong (e.g. nature doesn't provide free pest control), but one thing ve…

Functioning ecosystems do provide pest control, otherwise there would not be ecosystems at all, because some pest would just destroy the entire thing. There are very well established agricultural systems that use that principle and employ it to enable commercial farming without pesticides and herbicides while retaining high productivity. Search for syntropic agriculture and New Forest Farm (Mark Shepard).
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