Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business • Hacker News Board

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#71

Post by efields » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

High tunnels are very efficient. Greenhouses are very efficient. I've visited https://district.farm/ and it's clearly the future (or the present if you're in Northern Europe). When I went there they were at 1/4 of grow space that they are now.

Ready to expand? You just add more enclosures. You slowly recoup the capital cost of the structure. Might take a few years, but you will. Rinse and repeat.

The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best we can, and we don't have the capital in enough hands to make basic, boring, but efficient methods like this work at larger scale.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#72

Post by PretzelPirate » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

tfourb wrote: post #59

weberer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pest control The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.

In the EU, commercial pork production is almost exclusively done in large-scale indoor operations with hundreds to thousands of animals in one facility. These animals represent hundreds of thousands of Euros worth of investment for their owners and there are stringent laws and regulations in place that require everything that enters these facilities to be effectively sterilized. *Still* we get huge outbreaks of some…

Pigs can contract viruses from humans, which I don't think plants can. Pigs and the horrific conditions they're kept in also creates a perfect breeding ground for bacteria.

Things are a bit cleaner in vertical plant farms as long as they dont use animal biproducts in their process.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#73

Post by pif » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

tfourb wrote: post #15

Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…

> sun light for crying out loud.

Spot on! Plants without solar lights are for labs, not for food.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#74

Post by George83728 » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

mikeg8 wrote: post #68

Alex3917 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows are usually started outdoors and then finished indoors. There's no reason why farming couldn't follow a similar hybrid approach. That way you could e.g. grow tropical crops in New England, but still not have to pay for the majority of the required resources.

Explain how you create a tropical environment in New England that doesn’t require an incredible amount of resources to mimic the temperature, humidity, soil conditions, required to bear profitable products

Traditional 19th century greenhouse technology accomplishes this just fine; tropical fruits grown in temperate climates isn't wizardry. The problem is transportation of foods actually grown in the tropics has become much cheaper, so the economic niche for greenhouse grown tropical foods has narrowed considerably. And of course, using LEDs and solar panels instead of plate glass roofs makes it worse...

(Incidentally, most tropical soil is notoriously poor, so getting the soil right is one of the easier parts.)

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#75

Post by perrygeo » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

netbioserror wrote: post #39

Let me know when truly calorie-dense foods like potatoes, corn, and wheat are finally profitable to grow indoors. All I see thus far is lots of LED-fed salad.

It would be interesting to see the EROI on these vertical farms. My guess is that dozens of calories (mostly originating from fossil fuels) go into every food calorie produced. If you want to convert petroleum to food, there are far more efficient ways to do it.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#76

Post by riffraff » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #20

Minor nitpick; the title might be better as Upward Farms closes ten years after starting their vertical farm business. As it stands the title reads a little as though Upward Farms was the OG progenitor of vertical farms, whereas, from the article: > The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms. As prior art in the vertical farm game though, consider verticalfar…

of all places, how does vertical farming make sense in Australia? Surely there's an enormous amount of horizontal space that you could use?

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#77

Post by George83728 » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:43 PM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #13

davehcker wrote: post #5

We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup. W…

> they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)

They've told their investors that everybody else does it wrong, to deliberately divorce their own valuation from reality. They don't want to be valued like a regular greenhouse company, they want to be valued as a cutting edge company with huge unbounded potential. Turning around and using COTS solutions undermines that narrative.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#78

Post by lifeonlars » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:47 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #54

lyu07282 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a profound disconnect between what makes sense to do as a rational, long-term thinking species and neoliberal free market ideology that we should not loose track off. Monoculture farming with fossile fuel based fertilizers, cancerous chemical pesticides across vast spaces of land using fresh water in excess with zero regard for the local ecological system in any way and shipping food across the world from po…

That ship has sailed? The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc. Techno-farming cost more, in fuel and resources. And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century. It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egreg…

> The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.

This is a very distorted view of technological and human progress.

A huge factor in improvements in global standards of human living over the last century has been improvements in health care: hygiene, vaccination, antibiotics, basic medication, birth control and health education.

Far from being dependent on either the profit motive or global trade, they are largely public goods, have overwhelmingly been provided outside of private enterprise, and do not in the main depend on goods being transported globally.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#79

Post by saalweachter » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:48 PM UTC

mikeryan wrote: post #67

CharlieDigital wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bit odd that they picked up steam first in the U.S. for this reason My sense is that it was riding a wave of "local" and "farm to table". If you're in a city like LA or NY where there's a lack of space AND local demand for a premium priced product that can be delivered year round AND more awareness/marketability for such products (local + sustainable), the economics are different than versus growing a commodity p…

I’m all for farm to table but both NY and LA don’t need farms within city limits. All you’re saving by forcing that is a few hours of driving in a truck. If there’s an emissions concern then most farming regions are also good places for renewables like solar and wind. Electric or other carbon neutral vehicles seem like a more reasonable solution. Just a short trip outside of a city can probably get enough land for a…

For NYC, it's not even "few", it's a couple hours drive at most. Hell, you're still within the commuter rail radius and closer to the city than its main reservoir.

Re: Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

#80

Post by George83728 » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

millzlane wrote: post #61

I had an idea for "Vertical farming" years ago. And when I started seeing it in the headlines I thought finally someone has executed the idea of using parking garage like structures and mirrors to direct the free sunlight to the different levels to grow food in vertical structures. Maybe the Egyptians did it, maybe not. ( https://www.ehow.com/facts_7391989_mirror-egyptian-lighting-... ) But I always wondered why stuf…

> But I always wondered why stuff that literally grows on trees isn't cheap and abundant.

American grocery stores sell bananas grown outside on trees for literal pennies each. Dirt cheap tropical fruit, arguably the CIA's finest contribution to American society..

Anyway, mirrors. Mirrors don't multiply light, they only bounce it. 1 square meter of mirror can only bounce a square meter of sunlight. If you have a 5 level parking garage, each level 1000 square meters, then you need 5000 square meters of mirror. What did any of this accomplish, vs simply building a single layer regular old greenhouse? Remember that most surface areas of most countries is not urban so in most cases there's no reason to grow food in urban areas.