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.
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
#12Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#13We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup. W…
> they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves.
I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#14Most, if not all, companies involved in the sector are unprofitable in what is still a relatively nascent industry requiring scale and investment to remain viable and compete with traditionally grown crops. Many countries think food security is national security, so it will continue even if it requires government subsidy.
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.
It's not that they're "forced" too, it's that farmers in those countries want to make money, to invest in the future. And the way to make money is to grow cash crops and sell them on the world market, not grow barely-profitable staples. Their governments can and do provide subsidies to make growing staples profitable, but that's on the individual countries.
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#15Indoor 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 investing in ideas that leverage services provided by nature for free than trying to recreate complex systems that we don’t even really understand from scratch.
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#16Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#17Here is the interesting problem that vertical farms never ever tackled...
The amount of actual sunlight that drives the typical tree is more than the amount you can estimate via just a math calculation of the surface volume of the leaves. How does natural sunlight and leaf combination allow this to happen and not non-natural light?
Or in short words the non-natural light the vertical growers were using has more than one problem...
I wonder what if we use more effective wave guides(tubes) to capture the wanted wavelengths:
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#18We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup. W…
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 always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.
> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#19Indoor 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…
Going by that logic, no technological progress would take place at all.
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#20Minor nitpick; the title might be better as Upward Farms closes ten years after starting their vertical farm business.
As it stands the title reads a little as though Upward Farms was the OG progenitor of vertical farms, whereas, from the article:
> The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms.
As prior art in the vertical farm game though, consider verticalfarms.com.au [1] in Queensland Australia that started out back in 2009.
Also Australian based stackedfarm.com [2] is building out and expanding in size ATM with future plans so there's still life left in the domain.
[1] https://verticalfarms.com.au/about-us