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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

#231

Post by SuoDuanDao »

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 have so many questions. Do the rows run north-south or east-west? Is there a formula for how widely spaced the rows need to be? Is the pruned wood buried or left on the surface?

Looking forward to the product you mentioned in another post too! :)

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

#232

Post by gdubs »

adammunich wrote: post #210
gdubs wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, that’s great. Would love to have grazing animals in the future but we’re not quite ready to take care of them yet. Also involves decisions on fencing etc. I have been warned a LOT about goats and their ability to destroy everything, and evade even the tallest fences.

You're right, goats can be trouble makers. We use sheep to mow our lawn and they are very easy to deal with. They won't go over a 2 foot fence and don't need a lot of maintenance. Water, occasionally some mineral rich feed, and a shear.

Sheep is what I’d like to get eventually. I LOVE that Hawaii’s giant solar farm incorporated sheep into their design, as the method of keeping the panels clear of vegetation.

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

#233

Post by mespe »

newyankee wrote: post #124
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 )

Hi - coming from a PhD in agriculture (focus on sustainable ag), graduate level courses are going to be tough to jump into unless you have a strong background in ecology. Most of my grad-level courses assumed years of training in e.g. genetics, soil science and chemistry, plant physiology, ecology, weed science, entomology, etc. Agriculture is a very broad life science field.

That said, if you want a quick primer, "Crop ecology: productivity and management in agricultural systems" is a good primer on most of the basic ecological systems in agriculture. I've read it cover to cover many times.

However, you don't need a grad-level education to farm (believe me, I have been reminded this endlessly) - this is more for people doing research. For applied/actionable specifics for cold climates, your best friend is going to be local crop-extension services (in the US, most land-grants run an extension service). They will have tested techniques for your area and will be able to point you to good resources for farmers, not people researching agriculture.

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

#234

Post by hosh »

Several weeks ago, I finally looked up what "permaculture" is all about, and it blew my mind away.

It works even better than modern agricultural processes. The ideas are inherently distributed and decentralized, and when implemented along the ethical principles, bypasses many of the wealth inequality. It builds up resiliency through diversity (something the tech world is only starting to explore with Kubernetes and containers). It goes beyond mere "sustainability" and into regenerative processes. These are very practical ideas that have had 50 years of implementation proving out those design patterns.

It requires a different way of thinking about how we grow and get our food.

My techie friends all love it when they see these ideas, and yet, the development of permaculture design tracks the development of the personal computer, internet, and smartphone. But it is also big blind spot. Many of the design patterns are low-tech or no-tech (which, not depending upon a supply chain, is much more resilient).

Dwarf Fortress is a lot of fun, but I have found that applying and implementing permaculture design is a lot more challenging and rewarding.

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

#235

Post by tathougies »

mtgp1000 wrote: post #193
kumarski wrote: post #158

My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years. I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now) Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd. - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinat…

So you can't grow potatoes vertically? Can you elaborate? Is it a function of physiology, i.e. calorie dense vegetables need far more leaves and supporting stems than can be practically stacked vertically?

Amateur hydroponicist here. It depends on what you mean by 'vertically'. You can certainly grow potatoes in containers that are stacked vertically. You can also grow them hydroponically. However, the issue I've noticed in the hydroponics community is that no one is interested in growing potatoes. That is really the problem with these vertical ag startups and such. They focus on ridiculous foods like greens, which -- while nutritious and easy to grow -- cannot form the bulk of a human diet.

As a community, vertical agriculture need to focus on high calorie crops like potatoes or sweet potatoes or at least something useful like beans.

But circling back to the beginning. You can't really grow a potato with less industrial input vertically than you can with regular land, so unless you are really out of land (and the United States at least is not running out of land anytime soon), it doesn't really make sense to do so. Potatoes are really easy to grow -- you stick them in the ground and dig them up a few months later. Anyone can just buy a few acres of land, fertilize it, stick in some seed potatoes, and get a pretty decent crop that more than covers their costs. This is currently way easier than the amount of setup it would take to use containers. If you were to use conventional growing containers, you would need to import large amounts of soil / substrate. If you were using hydroponics, you'd also have to buy large amounts of hydroponic substrate or expensive nozzles for aeroponics. Either way, it's more expensive.

Anyway... wish me luck, I'm starting some potato growing experiments this summer to see if I can develop new container, vertical, and hydroponic techniques. I'm particularly interested in growing potatos without a substrate and without expensive aeroponics. Currently investigating 'aeroponic' drip systems.

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

#236

Post by rmason »

michaelscott wrote: post #173
rmason wrote: post #87

With twenty years previous experience as an agronomist I can tell you that this article is right on. You want to know cropping ag's biggest problem? Too much data. Farmers are collecting all sorts of data - soil samples, weather station data, aerial infrared photos and yield monitor data to name a few. But there are few tools that give actionable information from all that data. Actionable in prescribing something tha…

Out of interest, what kind of prescriptions would you hope data could make? Are you talking about coming up with new ideas for production or further optimisation for what already exists?

Farmers were told to collect all this data back in the early nineties at the beginning of what was called the precision farming movement. They bought the sensors, collected the data and they're still waiting.

They're looking for the data to point at problems that could be solved to make them more money.

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

#237

Post by tathougies »

pmontra wrote: post #214
bgroat wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? I get that to store a calorie in a potato I need to supply a calorie of energy from somewhere else. But why is fusion power required instead of better UV lamps in my vertical farm? (Assuming I had enough electricity to run them)

The total amount of electricity to power those UV lamps should be on par with what the Sun sends to the potatoes fields. Maybe that's the reason for fusion. It didn't do the math.

Actually no not really. Plants only absorb two wavelengths of light. It's currently more efficient to convert sun into solar power via panels and then to light LEDs supplying only the wavelengths that plants use. Despite the seeming inefficiency here, the fact is that plants are even more inefficient at absorbing light not at the right wavelengths than solar panels.

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

#238

Post by gen220 »

alisson wrote: post #189
mahaganapati wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's so cool. I have long been interested in permaculture, which this seems quite similar to — how would you describe the difference? Answering my own question I'd say that immediately the focus on automated harvest of non-monocrop is very important, ad the main arguments against permaculture that I've come across (here and on e.g. Reddit) are that it's not scalable with automation. Thanks so much for sharing

They are very similar actually, but permaculture is about more than just agriculture, agriculture is one of the sides of permaculture. For me syntropic agriculture is that side, some people also call it agroforestry but this term is used for other kinds of agriculture, which builds forests but differently. On syntropic the main difference is very high density of plants and extensively pruning. The video I posted in t…

Introducing an idea, in case you haven't encountered it elsewhere already. There are some estate-farms in England that are arriving on the same conclusion of permaculture/syntropic ag, albeit from a different angle.

They were spending a lot of money to extract marginal agricultural products from soil that wasn't well suited to monoculture, and some eccentric estate managers decided to stop spending the money, and allow the estates to "re-wild": no more shrub pruning, earth-moving, etc.

One of the "big ideas" they had, which might be useful to you, is to reintroduce "mega-fauna" to their ecosystems (in their case, ponies, "wild-ish" bovines, pigs, goats, and deer. They found that these fauna did an excellent job of pruning the wilds, but they had a new, second-order problem in pruning the fauna; they'd like to reintroduce wolves, to do the culling for them, but can't for somewhat obvious NIMBY reasons. :)

They're at the point where the estates more or less run themselves; they mostly make income from selling flowers, culled remains, and ecotourism. Anyways, all this to say that you might consider leveraging some organic automatons to do some of the "extensive pruning" for you. Herds of goats in particular are very efficient pruners, and they can pay for themselves.

Sources (great reading/listening): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma... and https://www.econtalk.org/isabella-tree-on-wilding/

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

#239

Post by rmason »

nostrademons wrote: post #168

If you haven't read about the Green Revolution [1], you probably should. Basically, this is was a series of technological developments in the early 50s and 60s that completely revolutionized agriculture. High-yielding seed varieties, fossil-fuel fertilizers, chemical pesticides, etc. During the Green Revolution, the proportion of common feedstocks that are edible grew from 4-5% to 40-50%, and the number of humans tha…

Norman Borlaug was my hero. A man most Americans never heard of did more to help people in the twentieth century than any other person. He was more impactful than Elon Musk without all the publicity.

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

#240

Post by tikwidd »

kumarski wrote: post #158

My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years. I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now) Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd. - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinat…

> - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms

How about seeds and sprouts?

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