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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

#151

Post by lyu07282 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #54
lyu07282 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

That ship has sailed? The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc. Techno-farming cost more, in fuel and resources. And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century. It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egreg…

> The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc.

Its of course impossible to argue with neoliberals about this, but my entire point is that sometimes we have to step back and look at the overall picture and consider if what we are doing really makes sense. The ecological destruction in land, fresh water, the depletion of finite resources vs. renewable, the sustained poverty in developing countries for the last century combined with subsidized farming in the western world combined with a globalized liberal food market, etc.

> And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.

Is it really so impossible to imagine any other measure of cost than what has been determined by the liberal market? Finite resources, the cost of the destruction of biospheres, the human toll this all has, none of this is calculated into your holy all knowing invisible hand of the market. Meanwhile people are suffering, poverty increasing, air and water become scarce resources and children starve to death all over. Whatever you imagine works so great, doesn't really for a LOT of people you never see or think about.

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

#152

Post by xyzzyz »

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…

How do harvesting machines work with this mixed planting approach? Do you need to redesign existing machines completely for this novel planting scheme? Won’t it be extremely hard to harvest from one type of plant without damaging other plants that are “occupying different canopy layers”?

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

#153

Post by tivert »

tfourb wrote: post #134
biorach wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 soi…

> 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.

Because if it was that good, I'd expect to have been seeing all kind of articles about the massive revolution in agriculture. If there wasn't some kind of catch, why isn't it seeing wider adoption?

As far as what counts as "commercial success." It'd really have to be something that can compete with commodity agriculture to be a solution. If it's a "commercial success" because it's some boutique thing that can charge 10x commodity prices to make up for 5x costs by selling to self-consciously "ethical consumers" and elites by marketing its good local green permaculture vibes, then I don't think it will be anything but niche producers.

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

#154

Post by lifeonlars »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #85
lifeonlars wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century. This is a very distorted view of technological and human progress. A huge factor in improvements in global standards of human living over the last century has been improvements in health care: hygiene, vaccination, antibiotics, basic medication, birth control and health education. Far from bei…

The distribution of goods is vital to every part of that? Making it cheap enough to reach every citizen of Earth is what shipping containers have made possible.

Obviously every human activity is somehow related to 'the distribution of goods'.

Are these healthcare advancements closely related to either private enterprise or modern globalized logistics? Clearly not, as in many cases they took place without either, due to local conditions. For around half the world these advances took place before shipping containers.

Health education, hygiene and birth control generally rely on the transmission of information and ideas but not of goods. The other three have been successful, in at least some cases, as public goods, advanced outside of the private sector. In many other cases they have happened because of, not despite, local rather than globalized manufacturing and distribution.

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

#155

Post by mdf »

No mentions in this thread of biodiversity loss[1], which I've always considered one of the main reasons for vertical farming. We are (and have been) destroying immense swathes of land to make more room for human activities, killing numerous species to their extinction[2] in the process. This increased human land use includes farming.

Now, there are of course other solutions such as reducing meat consumption. I think those should be applied as well. However, the theory of vertical farming is simple: with land area A, you actually get the output of A multiplied by the number of floors, saving the number of floor minus one times A land elsewhere.

Maybe we should tax the externalities, i.e. land use, more, in the same way we tax carbon emissions (at least here in EU). With the externalities properly taken into account, vertical farming could prove to be more economically viable when compared against the highly-tuned competition. Of course, food prices would become higher, but maybe that's required in order to avoid doom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

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

#156

Post by kdmccormick »

hosh wrote: post #143
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think nothing will work without some kind of change to the way of life. Urban living has taken people away from the land, so there is this illusion that we don’t have to participate in the ecology. Like water infrastructure, people growing up in cities expect food-on-demand … if you have the money for it. The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an ali…

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't like how you're going after urban living. I can rewrite what you've written, but from an urbanist perspective regarding transportation sustainability:

Rural living has taken people away from one another, so there is an illusion that we don't have to pay the true costs of travel. People growing up in towns expect cars and on-demand access to roads and gasoline and airports... if you have the money for it.

The idea that if you want to go to a friend's house you need to walk or bike there is an alien ideas. (Kids think we travel in cars, not on foot). How simple is that, riding a bike through your neighborhood? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like hybrids and EV cars and "eco-conscious" airlines and it misses the point. When I personally walk, bike, or take the train to my destination, I am directly participating in a sustainable transit network.

There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-travel. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.

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

#157

Post by MichaelZuo »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #96
mikeryan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m all for farm to table but both NY and LA don’t need farms within city limits. All you’re saving by forcing that is a few hours of driving in a truck. If there’s an emissions concern then most farming regions are also good places for renewables like solar and wind. Electric or other carbon neutral vehicles seem like a more reasonable solution. Just a short trip outside of a city can probably get enough land for a…

If it made sense, they would still be in business and thriving. I'm only offering one conjecture. Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn't make the case that it makes _zero_ sense; only that they couldn't prove the use case and find the right products and market. Definitely with a more high-value product that couldn't be sourced reasonably locally or even from the US, there may be a better economic case. It reminds me of t…

The odd thing is I haven't heard a single one of these startups target the luxury market. What you say makes a lot of sense.

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

#158

Post by Alupis »

abakker wrote: post #148
hosh wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know there are people who see it this way and feel like this. It presumes a couple things: - that intelligent thought (or in other belief structures, spirit, consciousness, etc) are the only thing of value worth propogating - that by escaping the gravity well, we can also escape the problems we wrought by bad design. We’re more likely to carry the problems forward. Our so-called “intelligent thought” have problems…

because fixing things costs money. Even when it saves money. Money is the catalyst that allows anything to happen, and not enough people have enough of it to turn good ideas into good designs into good products.

And flying to another planet that happens to be completely inhospitable is somehow cheaper or easier?

When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided.

There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.

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

#159

Post by metalspot »

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.

> hardly any agriculture is sustainable

humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.

there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.

the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.

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

#160

Post by delecti »

crooked-v wrote: post #139
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I find myself extremely doubtful that the second group actually exists in any numbers big enough to matter for anything.

I think you're probably right, but at the same time, I'm finding myself a member of that second group now that it's been framed that way.
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