Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable • Hacker News Board

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#71

Post by mikepurvis » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

mikeg8 wrote: post #31

_2d30 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read closely their response is basically a Luddite, anti-tech response. Their problem with the parent was that it suggested using technology.

I'm definitely not anti-technology as a whole, but I very much think many of the environmental problems we're facing in agriculture were caused by an over reliance on technology in the first place. We abstracted ourselves out of the process too much and it has had horrible consequences.

Biointensive gardening and earth-centric/organic/whatever methods definitely have their place, but it would be a huge shift to grow everything that way, and it's far from clear that it's even workable for the volumes needed for the big staple crops like corn, wheat, and soy.

The idea of bringing companion planting, cover cropping, etc to conventional agriculture by way of increased automation is a fascinating one, in part because of how pragmatic it is. It could allow those methods to scale much more than they do today, and allow a conventional farmer to adopt them incrementally, realizing the savings piecemeal (better yield here, reduced fertilizer use there, etc). This is going to be way more realistic than trying to reboot the whole system from scratch, especially to a method that requires 100x the labour inputs.

And it's definitely closer to the land than the other high tech direction, which is closed loop indoor hydroponic/aquaponic system— essentially doubling down on the monoculture approach by isolating the whole operation even more from unwanted natural inputs (pests, weather, and so on).

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#72

Post by reginaldo » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

Ever since watching the video on syntropic agriculture which I bumped into by reading a comment here in HN [1], I've been doing some research on the matter. The practice seems promising. It seems to work at both small and large scales, so it enables small farms, which are very hard to defend as a business in the US. It also has a component of improving the value of land, by making marginal (sandy) terrain into productive agricultural land. The other interesting fact is that the productivity per acre for the individual cultivars when planted together is higher than if they were the only thing being planted. I can see those things combining to drastically increase products.

The part of the video that was the most interesting was the farmer saying "this works. If I don't sell, I don't live, and I do sell" (not an exact quote).

Intriguing indeed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23631196 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#73

Post by dkarp » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #64

freeqaz wrote: post #16

I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the…

How long until we can deploy fleets of microdrones capable of killing pests with computer vision and lasers?

Don’t forget those pests to us are food to other organisms.

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#74

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

> and investor financing to help add trees and tree crops to agricultural models.

Wow, sounds profitable I suppose.

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#75

Post by reginaldo » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

konschubert wrote: post #62

freeqaz wrote: post #16

I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the…

Wouldn’t it be easier to just plant something else every other year? I thought this was solved literally 1000 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system

The three-field system has the problem of leaving the soil uncovered which leads to erosion, which aggravates the nutrient depletion problem.

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#76

Post by greatgib » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #32

This seems like a scam to me. The reason VCs don't fund "normal" crops like wheat etc. is that commodities don't generate the high profits that make "unicorns" possible. There have been fewer people employed in agriculture in USA every year for the last 150 years. The only long-term successful firms are selling "picks and shovels", and even they have to resort to evil to generate reliable profits (Monsanto, etc.) All…

I think that something the article tries to not to be explicit is that the reel business model is:

Lots of company greenwash and pretend to "compensate" their CO2 emissions by paying farms like that to plant trees.

And that is very profitable as costs to plant a tree compared is a lot lower than the income received from a companies in compensation.

And now, vulture funds realized that they can make a lot of money on the back of the carbon reduction market!

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#77

Post by yaktubi » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

freeqaz wrote: post #16

I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the…

Tree farming and automation: rm -rf /

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#78

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

freeqaz wrote: post #26

Fiahil wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a short explanation on why heterogeneous cropping is not the norm : Harvesting is just extremely difficult. It's not just a software automation problem, it's building the machinery and tractors, training people, gathering feedbacks... Even if you manage to repetitively grow successful combinations of produces, that's only the beginning of the journey. Farming is an far older industry than software engineerin…

It is a hard problem. Historically, people often grew plants in heterogeneous environments because they grew their own crops. Even if it wasn't _all_ of their food, it was still a subset of their food. But it was very labor intensive. The scale of monocrop farming today with modern tractors is a very new field as well (no pun intended). With machine learning specifically, I can see a robot arm being able to farm a lo…

[deleted]

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#79

Post by reginaldo » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

jrumbut wrote: post #22

freeqaz wrote: post #16

I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the…

I think this is a problem seen in many fields, that they are designed around our ability to model them.

That, and the fact that we don't really revisit the modeling approaches when the constraints that led to them no longer apply. For instance, incremental evolution based on a branch where work was done "by hand" into animals, simpler machines and then very complex machines might lead to a very different result than evolution from a branch where the ability to design some types of complex machines is there "from the start".

Note that this is different than saying "let's completely ignore the past".

Re: Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

#80

Post by akiselev » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

freeqaz wrote: post #16

I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the…

From [4]:

Three kinds of evidence point toward declines of some nutrients in fruits and vegetables available in the United States and the United Kingdom: ... 3) recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect.

I think more automation is only going to make the nutrition content problem far worse. Industrial agriculture has optimized the strains largely based on consumer preference - consumers vote with their dollars for fruit that look consistently like their ideal vegetable or fruit (i.e. round, bright red tomatoes). They pay a lot of money for produce out of season so it's far more profitable to ship long distance so they have to look good and have a decent shelf life after a long transport too. We've been running breeding programs to optimize for those variables for a century or more without ever considering their impact.

These evolutionary pressures combined with yield optimization seem to strongly select against nutrition, sugar content, and flavor. For example, my parents only started planting their homestead a year or two ago but already this year the peaches, raspberries, and apples are leagues better than anything I can find in stores or farmers markets and bring me back to the food I remember before I moved to the United States. I can't easily test the nutritional content but I bet it's much better, even with the over-fertilization that they have to do (despite being in California).

Once we start optimizing for automation requirements as well as everything else - to justify the extra capital expense - I'm afraid the quality of the food will get even worse. Every operation, even the "organic" ones, falls prey to loss of quality beyond a certain size and it's largely because of economic pressure that I suspect will only get worse.