[flagged]
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35741655.
Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
231–236 of 236 posts
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#232When 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…
We don't have food scarcity issues.
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#233Earlier 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…
Isn’t is interesting that as a species we don’t have a way to understand where are we in our lifecycle? As a human I can understand life stages and where I am relative to other individuals. I can plan my life accordingly and of course there may be unexpected events but on average I know I have maybe 70-100 years to enjoy life. As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy… one thing that will pro…
You can compare to other species
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less? A concrete example would be New Forest Farm: about 40 hectares in Wisconsin farmed entirely without chemical fertilizers, pesticides/herbicides or external irrigation for more than two decades. The owner is arguably more commercially succe…
> Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less? Sorry, you mentioned regenerative systems as out-performing conventional. I'm not aware of a widespread regenerative system that even has similar or slightly worse yield. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% l…
>. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.
No it isn't if you are reducing your industrial input and commercial seed expenses.
The only guy on youtube I know who does regenerative agriculture has better soil quality and higher profits. Also even in scenarios where regenerative agriculture is behind, the difference comes from the fact that the soil has been depleted already and you start from less than zero. If you have been doing it for thirty years, you get higher yields than conventional agriculture.
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
A ratio of fuel calories to food calories isn't that useful a metric unless you have similar numbers for all the conventional methods of producing food at scale. It's not like 1 is a goal: we can't eat fossil fuels (or solar energy), and we know that eating either plants or animals is never going to yield all the energy they absorbed during their lives.
There are similar numbers for conventional farming, and historical estimates too. There's a whole field of study on the EROI of agriculture. And yes, for all of human agriculture until roughly the industrial revolution, the EROI was over 1. By definition. 1 unit of labor + sun better equal at least 1 unit of food! When solar energy is the only external input and all mammalian labor provides the rest (which must be fe…
Since the choice is not between these new types of farming and pre-industrial-revolution agriculture, that comparison doesn't matter much..
And even pre-industrial agriculture had specific elements which had a yield of less than 1 by this metric, in order to make specific things that humans wanted to eat. Since most humans don't like a diet of grass and oats, the huge excess calorie yield from those crops could subsidize low-yield farming of vegetables, meat and other delicacies.
Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It feels like the argument is upside down. Civilization scaled because increased agricultural productivity allowed a smaller number of farmers to feed the rest, freeing them up to do other things. These people also naturally congregated to cities because that enabled fast exchange of goods and ideas, i.e., it was more "scalable" than having everyone scattered throughout the country. In the modern world, it also means…
You might be interested in the book Against the Grain, which argues that people didn't naturally congregate into cities like we have thought for a while.
From the wikipedia:
> Scott then asserts that the reason why hunter-gatherer societies transformed into agro-pastoral societies was due to coercion by the state. He cites research on an archaeological site in Mesopotamia named Abu Hureyra. Scott concurs with other scholars in the field that "'[n]o hunter-gatherers occupying a productive locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons are likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...