12 ms·

Rise of the High-Profit Micro Farm (2016)

209 points by saycheese 10y ago

faitswulff 10y ago
I'm not a farmer, but this reads like an advertorial to me.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
codingdave 10y ago
We're sharing some of our land this year to someone trying to make this concept work for them, on a spare acre we've never developed. I don't know if it is as viable as books and articles claim or not, but I'm absolutely willing to share my land to let people try.
- louprado 10y ago
  In case you or the farmer post about the experience can you share a placeholder link now ? Regardless, I am always amazed by the HN community. You aren't even the original poster and yet have a direct connection to this random non-tech story. It is so humbling.
  - Vivtek 10y ago
    Oh, it's a tech story. Food is the industry we will literally never grow out of.
rfdub 10y ago
Hope these "micro farmers" enjoy the good times while they last as their days are numbered. Sensors, automation and intelligent, intensive and most importantly organic, vertical farming is going to ultimately decimate the small producer farming industry. The thing is produce is a commodity, not a branded good, and people ultimately don't care what "label" is on their vegetables and won't pay a premium for a given label when they can get reasonable analogs for the same or a lesser price. Consumers just want quality produce at a reasonable price. When technology driven high intensity automated farms are able to output yields orders of magnitude greater than these people digging in the dirt with hand-tools are able to output, at a commensurate if not substantially higher quality, they'll be able to undercut the prices of these "micro farmers" by significant amounts and all consumers will care about is that their organic heirloom greens taste just as good but cost half the price. Not the mention they'll do so with a substantially reduced environmental impact, requiring less water per unit of output and requiring substantially less space allowing formerly agricultural lands to be returned back to their natural state. Small scale agriculture is a fantastic solution to the problem of disaffected young people who want to be farmers, but doesn't really offer any practical solutions for the rest of the world.
- gloverkcn 10y ago
  Are you really familiar with the industry? I ask because in the steel industry the opposite happened. Minimills started by making limited easier to produce steel goods. They improved their process and mills to be able to offer more difficult types of products and could compete against the larger mills. My assumption is that as the technology improves and gets cheaper, the ability for someone to enter the market will go down. Getting higher yields with less expense will lower the cost, and will allow smaller plots of land in/near the city to provide for a more local customer base. People around the world have phones because the tech has become so cheap. If micro-farming tech continues in that same path, then around the world, micro-farms can be installed by local entrepreneurs at a much cheaper star-up cost with an higher yield. Though I suspect government regulations will play a more limiting role in a lot of countries. As a side note one of the things I've always wondered is how cheap does crop production need to get before the food can just be given away. If it gets to where it costs $0.05 to produce a head of spinach on the city lot down the street, is there a point it's free.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >As a side note one of the things I've always wondered is how cheap does crop production need to get before the food can just be given away. When marketing and selling the thing is more expensive than just giving it away while making money on something else.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    You can't compare value-add manufacturing to agriculture because former is demand-driven while the latter is supply-driven. If a mill has a customer, its ability to make money depends on expertise and equipment but a farmer can only sell what nature allows them to grow. Modern agriculture is a balancing act between the forces of nature and financing so if a farm's output one year is bad enough they are almost certainly doomed to bankruptcy within a few years unless they have a miraculous turnaround. The vast majority of farms take on debt every year for fertilizer, seasonal labor, maintenance, etc and if they have a bad year, the extra debt makes it much harder to make a profit the next year when they again take on even more debt for the growing season. The rise of industrial farming can be attributed more to transportation than automation because it allowed corporations to form that could finance hundreds or thousands of farms across a region or continent. A disease or drought impacting the yield in one area no longer meant that those farms were doomed to bankruptcy because the profits from successful farms paid for natural volatility. In this sense, agricultural conglomerates are essentially insurance companies. Automation and other technology would have to help farmers deal with the financially ruinous harvests to really help local farming become competitive.
willholloway 10y ago
I've become entranced by the Youtube videos of Urban Farmer Curtis Stone. I played around with the idea of starting a farm like this and the labor involved turned me against it, but I can listen to his vlogs for hours while doing yard work or painting through my wireless headphones. There is something very human about one person teaching another person to produce food in the kind of detail he goes in to, and I think time farming lends itself to quality thinking and reasoning for a philosophically inclined intelligent person. They are essentially rediscovering the way humanity grew greens before tractors and herbicides, but there are some new innovations that are making these farms work: 1) Growing things like romaine lettuce in holes cut in landscape tarping is eliminating weeding. 2) They are cutting time from harvest to plate by a few days, and the resulting quality is much better, and they are not using toxic chemicals to control pests and weeds. 3) They are using no-till methods, the only input is compost and earth worms do the tilling work. I wish that there were more farms like this in my area, because I really hate the selection and price of organic produce in my supermarkets. It is very much lacking, or insanely expensive.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Setup a square foot garden, and get a couple of earth boxes for Tomatoes. It doesn't take a ton of time, and is very rewarding.
  - imaginenore 10y ago
    Tomatoes are truly one of the easiest things to grow, but they seem to be too cheap to bother with the large-scale production. They also get infected sometimes, we lost all of our plants at the end of the season a year ago. But then 2016 had been fine.
    - internaut 10y ago
      I have become convinced I must start a small tomato patch. I encountered a dreadful tomato last week. It contaminated my BLT sandwich to a luricious point where even the bacon was no longer enjoyable. I don't think I'll ever buy a tomato under plastic wrap ever again.
GuiA 10y ago
I'm assuming this was posted in reaction to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610. Interesting to see the contrast - on one side, the funded Silicon Valley "everything you need in a (very expensive) box"; on the other, just a few people sharing knowledge they've acquired through decades of practice without using any significantly new technology. My money's on the latter when it comes to long term impact.
- nadezhda18 10y ago
  >> a few people sharing knowledge they've acquired I also failed to see much of new knowledge in this article. it is not very clear from the article how these people managed to achieve such high profits. Because of a big demand for organic food? And due to their proximity to a large metro area? As of the technology they are using, it is not that special... my parents used to have an extensive vegetable garden (as a consequence of living through a very hungry period of the USSR collapse). When I was still living with them, about 20 years ago, they already had these technologies: walk-behind tractors, vegetable pairings, composting, hand tools. They could feed 4-5 ppl family but that was it. I remember it required A LOT of manual work non-stop all year around. We, their grown-up kids, were highly suggesting them to stop brother and simply go to the local market and buy the food there. Pretty much the same price, much less labor. I want to say people left farming for a reason and it looks like now the new generation either does not know or forgot how hard it is to grow food.
  - crewshon 10y ago
    My mum still messing up in garden and bringing to my home some vegs. Because she just has no job and nothing to do.
morley 10y ago
The article is a little light on detail of how those high profits come to be. Is it maximizing the amount of produce you can grow, or is it choosing the highest-margin produce, or is it something you do on the sales or marketing side? Is it some combination of these things? Where does most of the margin come from?
- leepowers 10y ago
  High-margin crops, minimal overhead, and intensive cultivation (i.e., greenhouses) to get the most out the available space. Pretty much be the only way to go on a small acreage: > Though his book The Urban Farmer still similarly emphasizes minimal machinery and biointensive growing, Stone sticks to the highest profit crops—baby greens, microgreens, and tomatoes, for example. The other part of this is having a strong local customer base willing to pay a premium for fresh ingredients. A fresh tomato, ripened on the vine, and picked and eaten the same day is much tastier than a store-bought one shipped a thousand miles. Taste-wise it's almost a completely different foodstuff. But location is key for this type of business. If there's 200 restaurants within 20 miles of the microfarm the customer base is good. If there's only two it's going to be much more difficult.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tjic 10y ago
There seem to be more and more "high tech farm" threads on news.yc over the last few months, and I've got several friends who are doing the same thing I'm doing: making a living as a coder, but running a farm as a hobby. I set up a slack a few months back for a few friends to chat on this topic, but we didn't have critical mass. If anyone wants to chat about coders who farm at https://codefarmers.slack.com/ https://codefarmers.slack.com/ send me an email at tjic@tjic.com and I'll invite you in.
aaron695 10y ago
Technically not a farm since a most of their profits are from the religion of organics I'm guessing. More a church. Says me who earns less money than they do, religion pays big I guess.
mmjaa 10y ago
I love our house garden, which regularly provides us with daily sustenance/delight for the most of 8 - 10 months of the year (depending on yields and canning..) .. to me, it seems really strange that folks don't grow things in the city. A human being that doesn't grow something is truly missing out on a valuable experience - even if you live in an apartment, you can grow food. Its truly a quality of life booster.

209 points by saycheese 10y ago

faitswulff 10y ago

I'm not a farmer, but this reads like an advertorial to me.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

codingdave 10y ago

We're sharing some of our land this year to someone trying to make this concept work for them, on a spare acre we've never developed. I don't know if it is as viable as books and articles claim or not, but I'm absolutely willing to share my land to let people try.

louprado 10y ago
In case you or the farmer post about the experience can you share a placeholder link now ? Regardless, I am always amazed by the HN community. You aren't even the original poster and yet have a direct connection to this random non-tech story. It is so humbling.
- Vivtek 10y ago
  Oh, it's a tech story. Food is the industry we will literally never grow out of.

rfdub 10y ago

Hope these "micro farmers" enjoy the good times while they last as their days are numbered. Sensors, automation and intelligent, intensive and most importantly organic, vertical farming is going to ultimately decimate the small producer farming industry. The thing is produce is a commodity, not a branded good, and people ultimately don't care what "label" is on their vegetables and won't pay a premium for a given label when they can get reasonable analogs for the same or a lesser price. Consumers just want quality produce at a reasonable price. When technology driven high intensity automated farms are able to output yields orders of magnitude greater than these people digging in the dirt with hand-tools are able to output, at a commensurate if not substantially higher quality, they'll be able to undercut the prices of these "micro farmers" by significant amounts and all consumers will care about is that their organic heirloom greens taste just as good but cost half the price. Not the mention they'll do so with a substantially reduced environmental impact, requiring less water per unit of output and requiring substantially less space allowing formerly agricultural lands to be returned back to their natural state. Small scale agriculture is a fantastic solution to the problem of disaffected young people who want to be farmers, but doesn't really offer any practical solutions for the rest of the world.

gloverkcn 10y ago
Are you really familiar with the industry? I ask because in the steel industry the opposite happened. Minimills started by making limited easier to produce steel goods. They improved their process and mills to be able to offer more difficult types of products and could compete against the larger mills. My assumption is that as the technology improves and gets cheaper, the ability for someone to enter the market will go down. Getting higher yields with less expense will lower the cost, and will allow smaller plots of land in/near the city to provide for a more local customer base. People around the world have phones because the tech has become so cheap. If micro-farming tech continues in that same path, then around the world, micro-farms can be installed by local entrepreneurs at a much cheaper star-up cost with an higher yield. Though I suspect government regulations will play a more limiting role in a lot of countries. As a side note one of the things I've always wondered is how cheap does crop production need to get before the food can just be given away. If it gets to where it costs $0.05 to produce a head of spinach on the city lot down the street, is there a point it's free.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >As a side note one of the things I've always wondered is how cheap does crop production need to get before the food can just be given away. When marketing and selling the thing is more expensive than just giving it away while making money on something else.
- akiselev 10y ago
  You can't compare value-add manufacturing to agriculture because former is demand-driven while the latter is supply-driven. If a mill has a customer, its ability to make money depends on expertise and equipment but a farmer can only sell what nature allows them to grow. Modern agriculture is a balancing act between the forces of nature and financing so if a farm's output one year is bad enough they are almost certainly doomed to bankruptcy within a few years unless they have a miraculous turnaround. The vast majority of farms take on debt every year for fertilizer, seasonal labor, maintenance, etc and if they have a bad year, the extra debt makes it much harder to make a profit the next year when they again take on even more debt for the growing season. The rise of industrial farming can be attributed more to transportation than automation because it allowed corporations to form that could finance hundreds or thousands of farms across a region or continent. A disease or drought impacting the yield in one area no longer meant that those farms were doomed to bankruptcy because the profits from successful farms paid for natural volatility. In this sense, agricultural conglomerates are essentially insurance companies. Automation and other technology would have to help farmers deal with the financially ruinous harvests to really help local farming become competitive.

willholloway 10y ago

I've become entranced by the Youtube videos of Urban Farmer Curtis Stone. I played around with the idea of starting a farm like this and the labor involved turned me against it, but I can listen to his vlogs for hours while doing yard work or painting through my wireless headphones. There is something very human about one person teaching another person to produce food in the kind of detail he goes in to, and I think time farming lends itself to quality thinking and reasoning for a philosophically inclined intelligent person. They are essentially rediscovering the way humanity grew greens before tractors and herbicides, but there are some new innovations that are making these farms work: 1) Growing things like romaine lettuce in holes cut in landscape tarping is eliminating weeding. 2) They are cutting time from harvest to plate by a few days, and the resulting quality is much better, and they are not using toxic chemicals to control pests and weeds. 3) They are using no-till methods, the only input is compost and earth worms do the tilling work. I wish that there were more farms like this in my area, because I really hate the selection and price of organic produce in my supermarkets. It is very much lacking, or insanely expensive.

Spooky23 10y ago
Setup a square foot garden, and get a couple of earth boxes for Tomatoes. It doesn't take a ton of time, and is very rewarding.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  Tomatoes are truly one of the easiest things to grow, but they seem to be too cheap to bother with the large-scale production. They also get infected sometimes, we lost all of our plants at the end of the season a year ago. But then 2016 had been fine.
  - internaut 10y ago
    I have become convinced I must start a small tomato patch. I encountered a dreadful tomato last week. It contaminated my BLT sandwich to a luricious point where even the bacon was no longer enjoyable. I don't think I'll ever buy a tomato under plastic wrap ever again.

GuiA 10y ago

I'm assuming this was posted in reaction to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610. Interesting to see the contrast - on one side, the funded Silicon Valley "everything you need in a (very expensive) box"; on the other, just a few people sharing knowledge they've acquired through decades of practice without using any significantly new technology. My money's on the latter when it comes to long term impact.

nadezhda18 10y ago
>> a few people sharing knowledge they've acquired I also failed to see much of new knowledge in this article. it is not very clear from the article how these people managed to achieve such high profits. Because of a big demand for organic food? And due to their proximity to a large metro area? As of the technology they are using, it is not that special... my parents used to have an extensive vegetable garden (as a consequence of living through a very hungry period of the USSR collapse). When I was still living with them, about 20 years ago, they already had these technologies: walk-behind tractors, vegetable pairings, composting, hand tools. They could feed 4-5 ppl family but that was it. I remember it required A LOT of manual work non-stop all year around. We, their grown-up kids, were highly suggesting them to stop brother and simply go to the local market and buy the food there. Pretty much the same price, much less labor. I want to say people left farming for a reason and it looks like now the new generation either does not know or forgot how hard it is to grow food.
- crewshon 10y ago
  My mum still messing up in garden and bringing to my home some vegs. Because she just has no job and nothing to do.

morley 10y ago

The article is a little light on detail of how those high profits come to be. Is it maximizing the amount of produce you can grow, or is it choosing the highest-margin produce, or is it something you do on the sales or marketing side? Is it some combination of these things? Where does most of the margin come from?

leepowers 10y ago
High-margin crops, minimal overhead, and intensive cultivation (i.e., greenhouses) to get the most out the available space. Pretty much be the only way to go on a small acreage: > Though his book The Urban Farmer still similarly emphasizes minimal machinery and biointensive growing, Stone sticks to the highest profit crops—baby greens, microgreens, and tomatoes, for example. The other part of this is having a strong local customer base willing to pay a premium for fresh ingredients. A fresh tomato, ripened on the vine, and picked and eaten the same day is much tastier than a store-bought one shipped a thousand miles. Taste-wise it's almost a completely different foodstuff. But location is key for this type of business. If there's 200 restaurants within 20 miles of the microfarm the customer base is good. If there's only two it's going to be much more difficult.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tjic 10y ago

There seem to be more and more "high tech farm" threads on news.yc over the last few months, and I've got several friends who are doing the same thing I'm doing: making a living as a coder, but running a farm as a hobby. I set up a slack a few months back for a few friends to chat on this topic, but we didn't have critical mass. If anyone wants to chat about coders who farm at https://codefarmers.slack.com/ https://codefarmers.slack.com/ send me an email at tjic@tjic.com and I'll invite you in.

aaron695 10y ago

Technically not a farm since a most of their profits are from the religion of organics I'm guessing. More a church. Says me who earns less money than they do, religion pays big I guess.

mmjaa 10y ago

I love our house garden, which regularly provides us with daily sustenance/delight for the most of 8 - 10 months of the year (depending on yields and canning..) .. to me, it seems really strange that folks don't grow things in the city. A human being that doesn't grow something is truly missing out on a valuable experience - even if you live in an apartment, you can grow food. Its truly a quality of life booster.