111–120 of 236 posts
[flagged]
“Strangled by fascism?” Care to elaborate what you mean?
Fascism has a simple definition that can be found in dictionaries.
“Fascism is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen.”
SOURCES:
- https://world101.cfr.org/historical-context/world-war/what-f...
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.
EDITED TO ADD: This is the reason why agriculture before the advent of chemical fertilizers (in the 1900s) was even possible. You'd simply rotate your crops so that they'd create a balanced nutrition profile in the soil without the need to add a lot of external fertility. Edge cases like the Nile floodplains excepted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)
> I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says: > Our pricing model is based on the principle that we…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Once a certain level of manufacturing competence is distributed throughout the world this need no longer exists. Information travels faster than freight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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).
Yeah, but a natural ecosystem isn't agriculture, and the concept of a "pest" doesn't even make sense in one. Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus. "Pests" are non-human organisms that want to take advantage that unnatural surplus for themselves.
> 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).
That's kind of off topic, but I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques. Either the "high productivity" is quite a bit less that the productivity for traditional farming, or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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…
It's mostly non-sense in North America. In places like Japan, Korea, it makes a ton of sense. High population density, with relatively little arable land.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC?locat... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0712/top-agricul... [3] https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/foodstuffs
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 life that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant, if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture. If fertility isn't free, who the f*ck would something like suc…
> 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 example being legumes (in symbiosis with bacteria) fixing atmospheric nitrogen into a form essential for plant life.
However all plants have complex nutrient needs. So even those that contribute something to the soil will remove other nutrients.
In the example of legumes, to simplify, if the whole plant is harvested, they will have made a net contribution of nitrogen, but the soil will still be depleted of e.g. Phosphorous and Potassium.
> if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture.
It's not a dumb approach, it can make sense. And it does not "destroy" the soil. Yes it _can_ cause leeching, soil erosion and depletion of some nutrients, but all these ill effects can be dramatically lessened by good practice.
In Europe we have soils that have been tilled intermittently for millenia and are still productive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nature does not have great pest control, which is why we spray so much chemistry that gets into our food and water. Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
If nature wouldn't have great pest control, there wouldn't be any nature. The whole point of evolution is for living things to get better at resisting pests (also avoid being eaten and mate more successfully). Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitabil…
Much as I like these approaches, unfortunately mostly they are currently a long long way off the productivity of conventional agriculture by any metric (yield/area, yield/animal etc)
If you've got some specific examples of regenerative systems that out-perform conventional in terms of productivity please post some links.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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).