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Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

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Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#41

Post by EdwardDiego »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #35

I used to specialize in Agtech as a consultant. It's a weird space. [Disclaimer, this is my experience of the Australia and NZ scene, not much Silicon Valley involved] The gap between "people who know ag" and "people who know tech" is just vast. And I sensed no great urgency to bridge the gap. I tried myself - talked to every farmer I could, moved to a working farm, even had a go at weighing cattle and applying treat…

I've often wanted to look into AgTech (grew up chasing sheep in Canterbury) but people I've talked to in that space say that it's incredibly hard to grow sales, farmers are inherently conservative on new expenses, what was your experience of that?

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#42

Post by whalesalad »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #39
coin wrote: post #3

> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) This is done all the time. When evaluating a new seed variety, a different seed spacing, a new nitrogen application, farmers will do a test plot next to the control. If things looks good then they'll expand the new change to more acreage.

Some of the newer farm equipment can actually apply different amounts of fertilizer (or whatever) to different parts of the same field, based on GPS and a grid of soil samples.

This is precision ag and it’s been around for quite some time.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#43

Post by golemiprague »

nradov wrote: post #10
radicalbyte wrote: post #8

Silicon Valley is great at tech because it has a high concentration of tech companies and top universities. It doesn't have that for agriculture. The "Silicon Valley" of agriculture is in Wageningen, a small university town in The Netherlands. In the surrounding area you have a huge number of food/agri-tech firms.

There is a huge amount of agriculture within driving distance of Silicon Valley. The main obstacle is culture, not distance. Most people I meet in Silicon Valley have zero clue how food is actually produced, and lack the proper respect for farmers and ranchers.

[dead]

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#44

Post by LAC-Tech »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #41
LAC-Tech wrote: post #35

I used to specialize in Agtech as a consultant. It's a weird space. [Disclaimer, this is my experience of the Australia and NZ scene, not much Silicon Valley involved] The gap between "people who know ag" and "people who know tech" is just vast. And I sensed no great urgency to bridge the gap. I tried myself - talked to every farmer I could, moved to a working farm, even had a go at weighing cattle and applying treat…

I've often wanted to look into AgTech (grew up chasing sheep in Canterbury) but people I've talked to in that space say that it's incredibly hard to grow sales, farmers are inherently conservative on new expenses, what was your experience of that?

Nice, I'm on the west coast surrounded by farms.

My commercial knowledge of this is all second hand, but I hear it's driven by a few big customers - essentially people with huge commercial farms who are willing to experiment. The idea of selling an expensive AgTech system to your local farmer at the pub doesn't really happen.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#47

Post by throwaway98797 »

agtech_startup wrote: post #38

I launched a self-funded startup to focus on technologies I developed that have the potential to deliver significant benefits to indoor farming operations. We launched in 2019, yet, the pandemic put everything on hold for almost two years. This year we finally completed our first installation (paying customer) at a farm in Singapore. Yes, we are US-based. Due to circumstances and opportunity our first installation ha…

your pitch doesn’t fit into three bullet points that’s why it ain’t working

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#48

Post by hammock »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #34
sethammons wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an argument that agriculture is highly inefficient because we can't track externalities well. US topsoil in our bread basket was 14 inches a hundred years ago. It is down to 4 inches now. When it goes, we go.

I'm under the impression that an acre inch of soil weighs ~170k pounds. So if we're losing .14 inches of topsoil per year - you only need to replace ~23k pounds of topsoil per year. Probably less than half of that needs to be compost. I'm also assuming loss was worse in the past than it is currently. So you'd need even less compost. This sounds bad, but not like something that can't be worked around. And honestly, it…

Compost works but it is very expensive at the moment

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#49

Post by SteveGerencser »

As someone with a foot in both worlds, I have been in tech for 30+ years and we also own a small cattle farm (can't even call it a ranch), there is a staggering amount of distrust in technology of any kind in the ag world. Every new piece of tech comes saddled with some license, or dealer only issue, or the old tractor/equipment could break down and I could fix it in the field on my own in a few hours, vs my new equipment broke down and now I have to wait for some service tech (there are never enough when you need them) to come out and reset some computer or replace a piece of software/tech at a ridiculous cost. And I can't work on it on my own.

Add to that, many farmers have been farming the same piece of ground for generations and they know everything they need to know about their land to at least break even most years and no piece of tech or software will improve those numbers enough for them to justify the cost/risk or the developers to justify the minimal profit growth.

Re: Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

#50

Post by flopriore »

agtech_startup wrote: post #38

I launched a self-funded startup to focus on technologies I developed that have the potential to deliver significant benefits to indoor farming operations. We launched in 2019, yet, the pandemic put everything on hold for almost two years. This year we finally completed our first installation (paying customer) at a farm in Singapore. Yes, we are US-based. Due to circumstances and opportunity our first installation ha…

Honestly I seriously doubt YC uses algos to evaluate applications and automatically reject companies
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