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What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

thinkingagriculture.io

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Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#121

Post by cycop »

alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

Nice to hear it can be done .... after 20 years in technology I am on the same path to get into the agriculture sector.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#122

Post by antocv »

alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

Hey man no way, you have been living my dream!

First I wanted to just grow berries, then I realized, pesticides and so on, so add another plant to fight that attacker instead of pesticide, then add another plant to protect that plant by being attractive for those other bugs which kill the bad bugs. Then I realized, this would eventually be a forrest with just more berries and edible fruits than normal. Thats where the problem appeared, reaping it would be hard to scale, indeed even planting such a forest would be hard to scale with current mechanical means.

I have a few designs for robot-like planting and pickery, yet all I currently have in realization is 2sqm dirt with potatos, carrots, strawberries and another pot of blueberries. :-/

Then another depressing realization, even if I made this on 100ha of land and produced a lot of nice fruits, berries, roots, the pay-off in money would probably not be worth it.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#124

Post by newyankee »

alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

I am thinking of a similar route, as a data scientist i am eager to know what graduate level courses would you recommend ? Especially for agriculture in cold climate (Canada )

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#125

Post by tomatotomato37 »

xxpor wrote: post #37
Justsignedup wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to build on top of your point: - Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power. - Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously. - Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water c…

>Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power. Are you aware of how much water it takes to produce the output of the Midwest or Central Valley? We'd be talking about the largest desalination project in human history by orders of magnitude. As of 2013, Israel had a desalination capacity…

You know if we are already going through the effort of transporting & stacking dirt vertically for these things we might as well go all the way and integrate them into the pylons of offshore wind turbines, which'll guarantee them a viable support structure, an infinite amount of available seawater & more than enough power to desalinate it locally. Heck, the harvest logistics means it'll give fishing boats something to do off-season too.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#126

Post by fataliss »

antocv wrote: post #122
alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

Hey man no way, you have been living my dream! First I wanted to just grow berries, then I realized, pesticides and so on, so add another plant to fight that attacker instead of pesticide, then add another plant to protect that plant by being attractive for those other bugs which kill the bad bugs. Then I realized, this would eventually be a forrest with just more berries and edible fruits than normal. Thats where th…

The good and the bad news is that eventually, when the rest of the land goes infertile from overuse, your method will be worth the money :)

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#127

Post by dustyleary »

lm28469 wrote: post #110
stelonix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, also a developer who's interested in agroecology. I actually also left development (as a job, not as something I do) in order to pursue a more human-centric approach to agriculture. With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now, which is already alarming; small farms with synergistic crops & forestation seems like a no-brainer to achieve food sustainabi…

> With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now I fully support the underlying message, but automation has been happening at large scale for 70+ years now, unemployment rate doesn't follow automation, jobs are just shifted to other industries/sectors.

In other words, "Automation hasn't increased unemployment in the past, even though some pesky scientists and economists said that it would eventually be a problem. Some of those people were wrong in the past, therefore automation will never increase unemployment, ever."

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#128

Post by carapace »

I've been thinking about this in the context of applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) It's undeniable that modern mechanized mass agriculture is incredibly efficient and already highly automated. It's kind of fantastic. (And very challenging to compete against.)

The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and ecological ignorance.

The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that will become endangered if we do not mitigate the severe erosion problems that stem from single species field that are barren (re: nothing actively growing) for 30-40% of the calendar year (in North America)."

(Imagine installing millions of acres of solar panels and just switching them off for 1/3 of the year.)

Broadly speaking, if our agriculture destroys topsoil rather than creating it we're gonna have a bad time.

An interesting challenge would be to automate food forests. For concreteness, check out what these folks are doing: https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance

This is one family working on their home plot in a suburb who have converted it into a really cool food forest with chickens and lots and lots of different crops.

Imagine replicating this across millions of acres, without involving hundreds of thousands of people (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but it couldn't compete with mechanized agriculture.) What kind of automation could help with that?

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#129

Post by infogulch »

Someone wrote: post #120
infogulch wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these sound reasonable, but I've never bought into the "grow vertically" idea. It seems to ignore physics . Sunlight is delivered as electromagnetic power (watts) proportional to surface area . Plants naturally grow on the surface of the earth, and therefore receive a small proportion of that power which they use to convert CO2 into sugars and eventually plant mass which we eat. Stacking a bunch of plants on…

“Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much“ That assumes all light comes from straight up. That isn’t even true if the sun is straight overhead, and definitely not true close to the poles. I don’t know whether it’s profitable, but I would think the economics of vertical farming on Iceland (sun lower in the sky, greenh…

No, it assumes that power is delivered based on surface area with respect to the sun. Vertical/3d farming can't work more than ~2 plants deep, where "depth" is measured as the number of plants between a given plant and the sun. Sure, build it vertically on the north pole, but it's still gonna be essentially "flat". You can't magically get power deep into a 3D farm when there 20 other plants on every side that would get the light first.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#130

Post by hyko »

mathgladiator wrote: post #53
alisson wrote: post #42

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy"…

what advice would you offer to another developer that longs to get into agriculture?

Buy a copy of Farming Simulator.

Agriculture is a brutal, pitiless world of perfect competition, commoditisation, and winner-takes-all consolidation. There’s an old farming joke: “What would you do if you won the lottery? I’d farm until it was all gone”.

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