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How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

johnnybowman.org

81–90 of 93 posts

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#81
post #33
post #27

The startup mentioned is an urban indoor farm for lettuce. As a manufacturing process, it's a good case. One product. Few changes. No need to retool for the 2017 Lettuce. Few operations. (In a manufacturing plant, an "operation" is one step in the process.) This is the best case for classic mechanization. You just need to do the same thing over and over while holding the process parameters within tolerance, and do it…

Google Streetview sometimes shows photos that are a year or more out of date, FYI.

While true in general, you can see the date. In this case, it's from August 2016.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#82
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lettuce can be grown at full blast and harvested in a month. For seasonal fruits there has to either be a way to trick the plant into skipping the dormant period or a dormant period. The marijuana thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me, it's not fragile and has relatively high value compared to the cost of shipping.

It won't be legal in all the states between NY and wherever you grow it. And transporting it across state lines opens you up to interdiction/legal trouble from the Feds. That's why they have to grow it near the consumers.

Yeah, I overlooked that, good point.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#83
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the main product being developed is a tangible system, redos are way more costly. Even when primarily doing software, this can come into play. I know of a customer who had about 5000 card readers in an access control system, where bugs in the card reader firmware required a firmware update. Doing this required walking to a reader, unmounting it from the wall, updating the firmware, re-mounting the reader. Rinse…

> Lesson learned: always make secure remote firmware updates possible on your devices. Lesson apparently not learned: get it right first time. Software isn't special http://www.gettingitrightfirsttime.com/report/

Software IS special. Compared to hardware, software is (usually) so easy to update that it's (usually) cost effective to not do it right the first time. NASA etc is different, and they work differently.

Everyone knows this and act accordingly - which is why we have to live with ever changing requirements for projects.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#84
post #28
post #27

The startup mentioned is an urban indoor farm for lettuce. As a manufacturing process, it's a good case. One product. Few changes. No need to retool for the 2017 Lettuce. Few operations. (In a manufacturing plant, an "operation" is one step in the process.) This is the best case for classic mechanization. You just need to do the same thing over and over while holding the process parameters within tolerance, and do it…

>> "...No need to retool for the 2017 Lettuce." These indoor farm outfits have nothing to do with lettuce. There's a reason they're building them in/around NYC, aka in the densest concentration of pot smokers the world has ever seen, far from Humboldt county's fields and Colorado's manual hydroponics. The business model is just to get the automation figured out with some low-value crop, e.g. salad greens, while waiti…

I think if they were planning for pot, they'd move to Massachusetts now. Our state legislature is trying to delay implementation, but we did pass the ballot measure legalizing home growth and recreational consumption of marijuana.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#85
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "...No need to retool for the 2017 Lettuce." These indoor farm outfits have nothing to do with lettuce. There's a reason they're building them in/around NYC, aka in the densest concentration of pot smokers the world has ever seen, far from Humboldt county's fields and Colorado's manual hydroponics. The business model is just to get the automation figured out with some low-value crop, e.g. salad greens, while waiti…

Growing ganja is a very different thing to growing lettuce. It takes much longer, there's a lot more considerations around lighting and temperature and the physical size of the crop is vastly different. Harvesting is a totally different process, too. I'm sure some of the stuff learned doing this would be useful, but why not just start an actual robot ganja farm in Colorado now and get growing?

Because it's not legal in all the states between NY and CO. Crossing state lines opens them up to trouble with the Feds.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are millions of acres of farmland sitting dormant in the USA. However in the higher energy cost future the production, processing, and distribution of that farm product to a far away base of consumers is not viable. The various direct and indirect subsidies and availability of relatively cheap fuel, which is itself subsidized, make it possible to get fresh foods to urban consumers. It seems like a smart play…

As I understand it, the whole aim of agriculture is reduced energy per unit output. The reason some US farmland lies dormant is, its slightly less productive per unit effort. Further, any other high-tech food solution (electric boxes that grow lettuce under lights etc) is more energy-expensive. Can't bean letting Mother Nature do all the work, and just driving by later and picking up the food. Also there is a surfeit…

There are a bunch of complicating factors here, though.

The first is that fallowing isn't exactly equivalent to supply control. It's partially an inertial, special-interests effect, and partially an attempt to maintain high productive capacity for bad seasons - food is vital, and has a long production cycle, so funding unused capacity is a sensible hedge against bad conditions.

The second is that nature works almost as hard to kill crops as it does to keep them alive. Indoor/greenhouse farming solves the problems of insects, frost, drought, and heat at a stroke. Hydroponic farming roughly solves soil depletion (and fertilizer runoff) issues, and relocating to the northeast circumvents water shortages. That last point is particularly significant - a lot of arable land in the western US lacks the water rights needed to farm it cost-effectively.

I agree that the fundamental economics of indoor, semi-urban lettuce farming are laughable for bulk products. No one is going to outprice Iowa on corn, and I doubt lettuce - even avoiding transport costs - is cost-effective without a lot of specialty markups. My first guess is that this is "pesticide free, sustainable, locally grown lettuce" being sold out of season to people who pay extra for those traits. Even so, indoor farming does have some traits to recommend it when dealing in crops less fundamental than grain.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#87
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've wondered about all the interest in lettuce and kale. I'd expect more interest in growing higher-value seasonal crops such as blueberries or strawberries.

Lettuce can be grown at full blast and harvested in a month. For seasonal fruits there has to either be a way to trick the plant into skipping the dormant period or a dormant period. The marijuana thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me, it's not fragile and has relatively high value compared to the cost of shipping.

The marijuana thing shouldn't make sense, you're right - intensive lettuce growing systems don't translate to hemp well at all. Height, root structure, nutrient needs, schedule, and practically everything else vary and mess up your structure.

As other people here have pointed out, they really are growing lettuce. If they wanted to be ready to switch to hemp, they'd be using a closer analogue like tomatoes.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#88
Putting aside for a moment the author's experience, our own experience at http://8-food.com/ has been somewhat similar in its difference from conventional startupry but quite distinct in its apparent relationship to conventional manufacturing.

We are producing a series of vending-machine-like service locations which automatically prepare and retail hot meals from fresh ingredients. We have of course the manufacturing process for these machines to keep in mind, but in addition the machines themselves are essentially miniature factories and so all of the theory, literature and best practices of the manufacturing economy proper apply - albeit scaled down in time, space and (usually!) cost - to our machines.

So far it has been very interesting to read the literature of other engineering disciplines and to translate concepts between them and our experience in software. Thus far I believe there are some great processes that software can teach manufacturing, but also vice versa.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could raise them to deal with this kind of language from day 1, we do this in germany and it works out fine. Swearing is just an rhetorical device that's appropriate in some situations and not appropriate in others, like calling somebody by their last vs by their first name. I have never understood the americans obsession with swearing (I am just guessing, sry if your not an american).

Thanks for the idea. I've considered it. Unfortunately, some of my kids have a propensity for repeating what they read/hear, without consideration for our rules regarding coarse language. So it wouldn't work well in my case. As far as it being "just a[n] rhetorical device", I think we probably have difference in values, which I don't think can be fruitfully discussed in this forum.

i think i have to apologise a bit, i might have posted the comment without thinking to much about it.

the step "just a[n] rhetorical device" -> "just raising it" is quite natural, but if you don't agree to the premise the next step does not make sense, then it's not just something your kids have to learn to only use in appropirate situations and how to detect them.

Re: How to not fuck up your manufacturing startup

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are millions of acres of farmland sitting dormant in the USA. However in the higher energy cost future the production, processing, and distribution of that farm product to a far away base of consumers is not viable. The various direct and indirect subsidies and availability of relatively cheap fuel, which is itself subsidized, make it possible to get fresh foods to urban consumers. It seems like a smart play…

> distribution of that farm product to a far away base of consumers is not viable Can you source this? My understanding of academic research in this area was that the energy used for artificial lighting by far outweighs the energy used for production and transportation for conventional produce. Eg: If you're interested in climate impact or energy use, warehouse farms burn significantly more coal to keep the lights on…

Who said they needed to exclusively use artificial lighting? They do have the sun over there, right?
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