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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

#131

Post by hosh »

When I first heard of the concept of things like vertical farming, or shipping container farming, or even farm bots. I thought those were a great ideas. That tech like this will solve for food problems, such as urban blight.

Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this.

It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas.

What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology.

With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools.

Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans.

You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.

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

#132

Post by hosh »

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…

It’s not always about efficiency. Sometimes, it is about resilience, anti-fragility, and food source locality. And maximizing efficiency tends to lead to trade off in those other areas.

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

#133

Post by biorach »

tfourb wrote: post #125
biorach wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Fertility isn't "free". You pull nutrients out of the soil whenever you harvest. > Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil live that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant, That's inaccurate and simplistic. _Some_ plants generate _some_ nutrients in the soil. The most common ex…

It is dump enough that it is now actively discouraged by German ag-extension services, if an alternative soil preparation/seeding method is available.

Again, "dumb" is not a great word to use here. Up until recently there were not realistic alternatives that would provide any kind of decent yield for many crops.

Yes, with modern tilling machinery there are now alternatives available in some situations (min-till, disc only etc) which can avoid some of the potential ill effects of tilling.

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

#134

Post by tfourb »

biorach wrote: post #123
tfourb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus. If that is the case (and there were no other alternatives) the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative sy…

> the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted. agreed > Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an in…

Mark Shepard's system has been reproduced/used as inspiration in many other places, I could name at least a few here in Germany from the top of my head, all of them commercially successful (tough I admittedly do not have calorie production figures for those and am not sure if they exist). But I'm not sure why the example of his farm warrants so much skepticism. He isn't in a special location, on the contrary: his soils were a corn farm previously, degraded and according to the generally accepted advice at the time unusable for Walnuts, one of his main crops. He didn't use any special technology, etc.

> It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.

But farming is not a free-market enterprise in "modern" societies. It is the most subsidized and among the most regulated among all enterprises in industrialized economies. German farmers derive half their income and all their profits from government (mostly EU) subsidies. I don't know the figures for the US, but I'd bet that they are similar. Farming, by who and how farming is practiced is basically entirely defined by political priorities, which at this time are mostly still based on the technological and scientific developments of the 1930s-1970s, which have created some very well established commercial interest groups (chem-ag concerns, farmers unions, etc.).

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

#135

Post by steve_adams_86 »

hosh wrote: post #131

When I first heard of the concept of things like vertical farming, or shipping container farming, or even farm bots. I thought those were a great ideas. That tech like this will solve for food problems, such as urban blight. Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this. It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related…

The key thing people don’t realize or understand is that hardly any agriculture is sustainable, and even less is restorative. Permaculture is extremely interesting because of that.

The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.

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

#136

Post by hosh »

scythe wrote: post #103
hedora wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

Food is thrown away because grocery stores want to sell uniform looking produce with no blemishes, and consumers came to expect that. That is the largest reason they get sent to the landfill, with growers have been sending it there before they get shipped.

There is a lot of waste going on here because:

- Consumers turn their noses on perfectly edible food that looks ugly. (There are volunteer organizations that intercepts such food at the landfill sites, and as food prices goes up, they have become more popular)

- Consumers living in the city typically don’t have chickens, pigs, goats, or rabbits, that will happily eat any of leftovers that haven’t rotted

- Consumers typically don’t have vermicomposting, black soldier fly composting, or even just regular composting, so unless the municipality has an industrial composting site, it goes into the landfill.

I think people get too obsessed over carbon dioxide and methane metrics, and become narrow minded about such solutions … because atmospheric carbon dioxide is an easy metric to carry a call for action. It’s like that comfortable illusion I used to have that, if I put in the effort to recycle, I am doing my part. That’s all wishful thinking.

Take landfills. The problem with putting food waste into landfills is not an increase in methane (and atmospheric methane isn’t as big of a deal as say, soil depletion, soil temperature, oceanic acidification). Landfills trap the methanes produced by decomposing food waste. They need some kind of vent or capture, or the landfill will eventually explode from the accumulated methane.

But more importantly, the biggest issue is that the trapped methane in landfills is no longer bioavailable, and participating in the ecologies in the carbon cycle.

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

#137

Post by tfourb »

biorach wrote: post #133
tfourb wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is dump enough that it is now actively discouraged by German ag-extension services, if an alternative soil preparation/seeding method is available.

Again, "dumb" is not a great word to use here. Up until recently there were not realistic alternatives that would provide any kind of decent yield for many crops. Yes, with modern tilling machinery there are now alternatives available in some situations (min-till, disc only etc) which can avoid some of the potential ill effects of tilling.

The type of intensive and regular tilling currently practiced in industrialized agriculture is part of a system that relies on the cheap availability of chemical fertilizers and pest control, which in turn were supported by the political and social developments at the time. Research and development of alternative farming systems were almost abandoned for decades and crops that took advantage of the chemical fertilization/tilling approach were prioritized to the point that we now essentially farm only a handful of different crop strains. Within this system, you are correct, no alternatives existed. But that doesn't mean that it made a lot of sense and that there weren't plenty of early warning signs that other approaches should be explored.

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

#138

Post by ch4s3 »

tfourb wrote: post #122
ch4s3 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those systems never seem to produce very many calories per acre. They're interesting as biology labs, and would probably be fine for subsistence agriculture for a small number of humans. However, we're trying to feed 8 billion people and we need the raw calorie to arable land ratio to work.

Actually we are trying to feed 8 billion people, 21 billion chicken, 1.4 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, etc: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/livestock-counts The systems I have highlighted have demonstrated commercial-grade calorie surpluses over decades. Kindly da a tiny bit of research before simply claiming the opposite. Regenerative agriculture has also demonstrated that it can bring degraded and marginal…

This isn’t the gotcha you seem to think. You’re still talking about significant inputs of land and human labor for lower calorie outputs.

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

#140

Post by echelon »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #135
hosh wrote: post #131

When I first heard of the concept of things like vertical farming, or shipping container farming, or even farm bots. I thought those were a great ideas. That tech like this will solve for food problems, such as urban blight. Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this. It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related…

The key thing people don’t realize or understand is that hardly any agriculture is sustainable, and even less is restorative. Permaculture is extremely interesting because of that. The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.

> sustainable

While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.

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