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What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

• speeder 6y ago
  I do have an interest in vertical farming. But solely because I want a farm, and land in Brazil is crazy expensive. But if I had a 1000 hectare farm I would gladly use it in a sustainable non-SV tech but still tech way.
• coderintherye 6y ago
  The author here has a good premise, although glosses over many things. Yes, "vertical farming" is over-hyped. That said, the author didn't mention weather or pesticides/fertilizers at all. Statements such as "Current agriculture doesn’t need an artificial energy source" are plain wrong. Producing fertilizers takes quite a bit of artificial energy and the bulk of the corn and soybean farmers the author is pointing to are the ones heavily using them. And to completely ignore weather and climate is to ignore the single most important variable factor in farming. It's also a very US-centric view. There is a ton of innovation happening in other world markets, especially with smallholder farmers. Especially around financing. The author completely ignores financing (even saying there is no VC money in agriculture which is false), which with larger farmers is actually one of the biggest issues for farmers today. Given that farm equipment is getting bigger and more costlier, a lot of thought goes into financing that equipment. Insurance is also a huge deal, and there's certainly a lot of room for streamlining the process of insuring crops and obtaining payouts.
  • snarf21 6y ago
    Also, no mention of drought and other extreme weather events. Additionally, no talk about how the Ogallala Aquifer (and others) is being decimated and continued trajectories would be catastrophic in just a few decades. The higher yield and minimal water and and getting rid of pesticides/fertilizers and removing transportation pollution are interesting things to research and see if we can do better. It is already a high bar of productivity but so where horses compared to walking but they were replaced with something better.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • kickout 6y ago
      I'm very familiar with the Ogallalla aquifer. When the drought of 2012 hit, people were very worried about it never recovering. After several 'wet' years it appears to be fine. Mother Nature is stronger than we give her credit for
      • snarf21 6y ago
        I'm not suggesting it won't ebb and flow. The issue with aquifers is that as parts go empty and stay empty for long periods of time the sand that stores the water compresses and then can never be re-expanded to be refilled. There is also the worry about what will happen if we have several "dry" years. All this to say, we don't have unlimited fresh water.
  • Justsignedup 6y ago
    I would like to build on top of your point: - Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power. - Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously. - Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary. - The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages. - The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient. - The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.
    • dx034 6y ago
      Also, indoor and especially vertical farming can save precious land. Maybe the US has enough land for farming, other countries certainly do not. Rain forests burned to make space for soy or palm oil are proof of that.
      • vkou 6y ago
        What is the calory output of vertical farming? The only things I ever see grown in those vertical farms are low calory, short-shelf-life leafy greens, and the occasional bland tomato. Greens are nice and all, but calories are what keep us alive. Until they can produce calories, I will continue seeing them as a pointless distraction.
        • dzdt 6y ago
          I had the impression indoor farming is heavily hoping to pivot to marijuana.
          • vsareto 6y ago
            That's easier to secure vs. a field of marijuana so there might be other reasons besides growing.
  • evan_ 6y ago
    The article also doesn't mention all the diesel fuel used by tractors and harvesters during cultivation as well as trucks to move the harvested crop to the elevator and then to wherever it needs to go to be consumed. Then again most of the crops people are talking about doing vertically are things that are planted and harvested mostly by hand, so maybe that's not such an oversight.
  • kickout 6y ago
    Fair points...I'll follow up in another post.
  • newyankee 6y ago
    Efficiency and land use is indeed an issue in India as with the struggles to feed an increasing population with a higher protein intake requirement as well. Instead of natural gas -> Fertilizers route, a solar or renewable energy -> LED route can help for certain crops provided they do grow efficiently.
• roenxi 6y ago
  Not strictly relevant to the article, but I'm not excited by the efficiencies as much by the idea that it might offer a space-efficient option for me to have my food grown locally. Food production at the moment is very much out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I don't have a feel for what monoculture are developing in the food industry, I don't have a feel for what the supply chain risks are. If food ever stopped flowing in from wherever it comes from to my city, I'd be in trouble. It isn't totally rational, but I dream of being able to invest in food grown a few blocks away from me. If it only cost double existing prices that'd be a solid win.
  • j-c-hewitt 6y ago
    Uh, for you. Some of us live near farms -- it's neither out of sight nor out of smell (heh). The US is the most agriculturally productive nation in the world by a fair margin. Food and fuel are two of the things that the US is unlikely to run out of even under conditions of global nuclear war.
  • Valgrim 6y ago
    I'm not sure how prevalent this is around the world, but in my city we can register for produce baskets. In spring, I register on a website and I choose and pay in advance of the whole season a local farmer (less than 50 km away), who comes once every week to distribute his baskets a few streets away. The produced is freshly picked the same morning, it varies from week to week, it's a small family farm and I know it doesn't contain any pesticide or artificial fertilizer.
    • jpindar 6y ago
      That's common in small town or exurban areas in the US.
• wbazant 6y ago
  There's only so much that can be grown and mechanically harvested, and the US surely excels at producing maize, wheat, or soybean, but vertical farms don't try to compete with those. The production of other crops does not happen in the US that much, but it also operates at a rather spectacular scale - instead relying on poorly paid laborers abroad.
  • kickout 6y ago
    This is correct. But the crops they target (veggies mostly) are also grown outdoors. But the higher margins on these veggies give the indoor people and hydroponic people an opportunity to compete (also year round veggies command a premium as well)
  • Animats 6y ago
    There's a need for automated harvesting machines for a few remaining crops - apples, lettuce, etc. The big field crops - wheat, corn, etc. have been fully mechanized for decades if not centuries. There are vision guided fruit picking machines. They're too slow, too fragile, and need too much supervision. But they mostly work. What they need now is good practical mechanical engineering. The 2016 version:[1] The 2019 version.[2] When they get about 2x faster, have half the parts count, and can be routinely pressure-washed, they'll be ready. The "AI" part is done. One of the simpler automated systems is automatic weeding. Machines come in several forms, but the most successful seem to be wide implements towed behind a tractor. Deere has some of these. They recognize weeds with cameras and do something about them. Some stomp or pull, some zap with electricity or a flame, some squirt on an overdose of fertilizer. It's "organic", too; no pesticides. You can get this as a service in a few areas.[3] [1] https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU [2] https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ [3] https://www.robovator.com/ https://www.robovator.com/
• akajakaj 6y ago
  Of course they don't understand it, their field is technology. Agriculture requires years of specialisation and most people here if they do have a degree are computer scientists, doctors, biologists, etc. But it's rare to find someone who has genuine passion and knowledge of agriculture. It is far removed from the city lifestyle and it is incredibly hard to break into, both for land reasons and because it's a hard job. Moreover, agricultural sciences is probably just not a very commonly pursued degree for people in the city (citation needed). So that brings me to my main point: disrupting an industry is usually done by people who want money when all the other good ideas have been taken. There is nothing wrong with this, but the cost with this fast paced approach is that the oldest and most complex industries like agriculture are going to put you in your place if you haven't done the work to understand them.
  • thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
    Agreed. I grew up in rural Australia, when I moved to the city it was funny to see people talk about farmers in a willy nilly fashion. Farms are extremely hard to build, and the knowledge to run them has to be built into tradition. I'd wager if a governments policies bankrupted a large amount of them, you could almost starve the nation with no remedy. It would take lifetimes before anyone learnt how to till the land again.
    • quacked 6y ago
      I agree that farmers are misunderstood and under-valued by people who are only able to live in stability because of the ability of farms to deliver food to them, but isn't farm complexity able to be documented and analyzed in a similar fashion as other "very complex" fields like law and finance? It seems like farmers are still beholden to long "if-then" chains and risk analysis (what to plant, where to plant, how to plant, etc. based on predictive yield), just that the underlying mathematics hasn't been as accessibly documented because it's not as profitable. So "generational knowledge and tradition" are important, but I don't see how that changes the fact that this sort of thing can be written down and analyzed. (Edit: I should clarify that I am not in favor of "disrupting agriculture" and I also do not think that mathematicians can somehow usurp farmers and plan better farms than the ones that already exist. I'm just wondering what's stopping the logic and practices of the ones that already exist from being documented and reproduced without "lifetimes" passing, as you say.)
• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  I would hope that the savviest of SV or startup folks recognize that the actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't the thing that they are trying to innovate on. Rather it's the disastrous logistics chain and resultant waste, leading to overproduction and augmentation of our food system, is the problem trying to be solved.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    > actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't the thing that they are trying to innovate on. There are enormous problems there, such as a heavy reliance on human labour for picking and processing. The problem with going after waste reduction is that the tab for that is picked up through subsidies. The inefficiency is in policy.
    • adrianN 6y ago
      The problem with human labor in agriculture is that we've already spent a lot of effort to remove humans, the jobs that are left are really hard to automate.
  • protomyth 6y ago
    Can you explain this "disastrous logistics chain"? I am a bit confused given all the effort that goes into logistics by farm companies.
    • AndrewKemendo 6y ago
      It's the logistics chain from the farm to your plate that's the disaster. That's not for lack of trying. But having exposure to farming growing up, there's no good way to get a ripe berry from Washington State to Florida before it spoils without freezing it, genetically engineering it (which is fine, I'm pro GMO, it's just costly) or treating it. Even if you do, handling it will see large losses. So the trick is, how do you reduce how far something needs to travel from the time it's ready to harvest until it's consumed.
• cagenut 6y ago
  This has the infuriatingly common fatal logical flaw of wrapping "farming" in one giant layer of abstraction and comparing indoor vs outdoor at the broadest scale. Indoor farming, or greenhouse farming, or high-tunnel farming, or a zillion others are all incremental adaptations of particular plants and particular markets. You cannot compare the global corn and wheat markets to the nyc lunch salad market. "Farming" has always meant thousands of different things, and for some of those things there will be markets for indoor grow ops. This is not an assertion, we all know there's a very robust one right now. Debating indoor vs outdoor farming at this broad a level is like debating cars vs bicycles as if we have to pick one. If anyone would like to see an extremely deep dive into the exact scientific measurements at which certain plant markets become viable at certain energy prices you will find this half hour very well spent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk
• Valgrim 6y ago
  I believe I've never actually eaten soy, and I rarely eat corn. I'm also pretty sure the amount of wheat humans eat is less than what we feed to poultry and livestock. The author seems to conflate the purpose of the "modern row-crop farmer" (which is mainly to repay their huge debts and to feed cows and chickens), and the solution touted by vertical-urban-aqua-dome-whatever-ponics: to provide year-round, local, fresh and varied types of plants to feed humans.
  • cyberbanjo 6y ago
    You've probably eaten more corn than you know. 1:Corn has made its way into everything: a Washington Post article https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how-corn-made-its-way-into-just-about-everything-we-eat/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how-c...
    • Valgrim 6y ago
      This articles points out that this is a very american-centric reality. If you cook your own food from basic ingredients there's almost no corn reaching you directly.
  • leadingthenet 6y ago
    It’s very unlikely you’ve never eaten soy, unfortunately. It’s essentially added to every processed meat product, nowadays.
  • jcampbell1 6y ago
    Soy is crushed into what Americans call vegetable oil, and meal. The meal is the protein source for pork and chicken production. If you get a piece of fried chicken from KFC, the chicken was raised on soy meal and corn, battered in milled wheat, and fried in soybean oil.
• Brajeshwar 6y ago
  About two years ago, I started with a much fancier AgTech with Hydroponics. Went all the way to the YCombinator interview in Mountain View (the last one for Indians), and rejected with something in the lines of "not advanced enough". Spent time researching, talking, and more researching about the core problems of Agriculture in India. It is one sector where everyone loves to toss and play around, the most politically involved and abused, with huge numbers but contributing less than 20% of the total Indian GDP. Everyone seem to have a vested interest -- both good and bad. At times, I'm shit-scared that I'm trying to help solve something so massive and gigantic that if I can make an iota of difference, it would be huge. Of course, my hammer is Technology and I'm trying to find just the precise nail-heads to hit, one at a time.
  • julianeon 6y ago
    You seem like the right person to ask about this. My sense was that hydroponics were so expensive that they really only made sense for one crop: marijuana. If your plant is selling for $1000, then spending $50 per plant to increase its yield and 'baby' it so that it sells for $1200 makes sense. But for most plants, it doesn't make economic sense. (Tomatoes, maybe. But they're going to have to sell for a higher price point, in more expensive markets). Is that accurate? I'm an amateur so if this is uninformed, feel free to correct me.
    • pvaldes 6y ago
      There are lots of really expensive products that can be cultured indoors, are perfectly legal, and aren't drugs
      • julianeon 6y ago
        I'm not being dense here - I really thought there weren't? Like the core problem with ag as a business is that it's very low margin and it's extremely hard to make money. I can only think of a handful: marijuana, fancy tomatoes at Whole Foods, maybe coffee or vanilla (?) beans... but even there, notice how there's either fierce competitive pressure, or it's possible to easily overwhelm the market (vanilla beans have to compete against synthetics). I mean there are surely some I'm forgetting, but it's a small number, and I thought that deterred VC investment. For your staples - corn, soy - that's still much cheaper to grow outdoors, so hydroponics can't win that market.
• degraafc 6y ago
  I spent a few months at a consulting company working with a precision agriculture startup, and my mind was totally blown when I first learned how much technology goes into agriculture these days. I feel like a lot of tech people have a mental image of outdoor farming still being somewhat primitive (I certainly did!) which could cause the misconceptions mentioned in the article.
  • gpanders 6y ago
    My graduate school advisor is a big name in satellite-based navigation (e.g. GPS), and I spent a lot of time learning about state-of-the-art advances in GPS techniques such as precise positioning. I was surprised to learn that many of the former students in our lab went to work for John Deere of all places. At the time, I also had an image of outdoor farming being fairly primitive, but this was an eye-opening revelation to me.
    • Loughla 6y ago
      We have auto-steer on all large equipment, full stop. Planting is a science down to the square foot to optimize yields. Spraying is optimized to 2 square inch across every field. Soil checks for nutrients, compaction, and other factors are weekly in the fall and spring, and monthly in the summer. Moisture checks are twice weekly in the summer. For livestock - they have routine blood screenings for disease and nutrient deficiencies. Rotation through pasture is decided via nutrient content and growth rate of pasture plants. Breeding and genetic lines are strictly controlled via artificial insemination. Animal growth rates, health, and any number of other factors are tracked long-term to decide lineages to keep, modify, or eliminate. All feed supplements are planned to absolutely optimize feed/meat conversion ratios. The problem with farming isn't that the data doesn't exist, or that the technology isn't being used. It's that the data lives in 18 different places, some in my head, and that the technology is ungodly expensive. The only way I can see to make SV and ag work well would be to focus on what would otherwise be mid-sized businesses. Large scale operations already have the tech and data. The farmers who run operations of <2000 acres can't afford the large scale purchases, and do much of what I talked about via 'inherent' and 'inherited' knowledge (i.e. they know the north pasture needs to be emptied for two months early spring, but don't know how to improve the plant growth there without messing everything up).
• antoniuschan99 6y ago
  I really like this video series from Exa Cognition on Vertical Farming that goes over many of the issues the article posts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw And here's a video from Techno Farm he mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfyPlyJfKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfyPlyJfKA
  • newyankee 6y ago
    really good videos, although an honest breakdown of costs is what will help with the naysayers
• microdrum 6y ago
  One of the exceptions: https://www.waterbit.com/ https://www.waterbit.com/ Takes advantage of current massive farm scale and extant automation, simply increasing yield by adding precision to watering.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  How does vertical farming compete with traditional row crops? I have never seen a proposal to grow wheat in a skyscraper. It has always been higher value fresh foods like lettuce and spinach.
  • krzat 6y ago
    Most likely terrible. You need to gather electricity in one place, send it to the farm, emit some light, plant will absorb 5% of that light, and then 5% of that 5% will end up in the final product.
• legitster 6y ago
  “Premature optimization is the root of all evil” It should come as no surprise that programmers who spend all day thinking about the theoretical problems they might run into may be bad at understanding current limitations and bottlenecks in the real world. This doesn't just apply to agriculture. Think of how many startups you know aimed at addressing problems that seem imaginary outside of the bay area. At the same time, I think we underrate the benefit of naive amateurs throwing themselves into industry. If Stripe actually fully understood the amount of work they had to do to get to the other side of a complex, messy, and competitive market, I'm going to guess they never would have done it in the first place.
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  Think about it. The biggest legacy of the hippies is that their critique of food and agriculture evolved into the mainstream's. (Well, that and same process with nuclear engergy.) The problem is it's incoherent mix, then and now. We have jumbled together: - Nostalgia. First this was yeoman farmer nostalgia. Now there is also pre-agricultural nostalgia. Primitivism is coherent, but only once you embrace what it really entails, which paleo dieting absolutely does not. - Anti-monpolization. Great idea. - Corperations-are-bad-so-their-means are bad. Cargill might be bad, but that doesn't mean combine harvesters are. - Concern about environmental externalities. Good idea. - Concern about nutritional externalities. Good idea. It's crazy we gave 0 fucks about supply chain risk and other security concerns, but focus on cranking out carbs in a way that only global armageddon justifies. GMO hysteria among heirloom lovers is a funny small example: please just say biodiversity is good, and tons of GMOs or tons of hierlooms will be good, and purely golden rice or purely sweet delishious apples not so much. Even "locavorism": Guess what? it takes like <5 days to transport anything within continental US, easy. If your non-California produce sucks, it's not because distance, per-se, it's because warehousing. ------ Now, back to the question at hand, I absolutely don't believe your average Ag wantrepreneur is immune to the current in the larger culture. I mean think about it, modern gourmet-mediocre-----fancy food culture is per-dollar, easily the Bay Area's biggest cultural export, ahead of anything SV ever did. So what might an Ag startup look like instead? Well, conquering externalities - without changing government policy - still making a profit - at a scale to actually matter is just some liberatarian wet dream so let's not worry too much about that. I would rather worry about the bullshit job problem. Average person is spending all their time doing useless shit, or not being paid enough doing useful shit. Ag is super efficient putting everything else into stark relief (well, super efficient when they aren't over-leveraged looking like fools and Daddy USDA bails them out). How about we give people lifetime food for a portion of their earnings?! Just like Worry-Free but fiancialized. Could actually work, certainly given today's "10 years no profit is fine" model.
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    Basically anyone thinking agriculture disruption should read about the Hutterites[1] rather than get caught up with some vert ag thing. Hutterites have major capital expenses (unlike Amish), and yet they are farmers. Income-portion subscription model maybe doesn't so crazy if you consider employees can live off the surplus food on one hand, and so the subscription can largely go into capital and operational expenditures. It sounds dual to "lifetime cut of earnings to pay for college", since education is considered the ultimate personal capex, and food the ultimate personal opex. But considering the rat-race nature of bullshit jobs, and the basic income studies, a lifetime free from fear starvation could well kick one up the hierarchy of needs enough to learn far more efficiently. So food indefinitely is actually pretty good personal capex from that perspective. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites
• indigo62018 6y ago
  In these days, whenever I hear a news that Google launches some services, I always ask myself this question - when this service will be abandoned? I can't imagine what would happened on their stock price if they didn't acquire YOUTUBE.
• rudolph9 6y ago
  A really great non-profit focused on more sustainable agriculture is The Land Institute. Generally people also don’t also understand that some advancements in agriculture take decades or even centuries. One example of an advancement from The Land Institute is their focus on domesticating a perennial cousin of Modern wheat. This is no small task given humans have been domesticating modern wheat for thousands or years. Although the cousin still yields relatively less grain, it has significantly deeper roots, is much more resistant to weeds and big in turn requiring less pesticide and can harvested with existing equipment. With time it’s not unreasonable to think it would have comparable yields to modern wheat. They have a number of projects and been focusing on sustainability since 1976. https://landinstitute.org/ https://landinstitute.org/
  • rudolph9 6y ago
    They actually had a run with the grain in General Mills cereal! The commercial name of the Modern wheat cousin Is “Kernza” https://kernza.org/ https://kernza.org/ https://www.dallasnews.com/food/cooking/2019/05/23/can-cereal-save-the-planet-this-sustainable-new-grain-may-bowl-over-the-industry/ https://www.dallasnews.com/food/cooking/2019/05/23/can-cerea...
  • gdubs 6y ago
    +1 to The Land Institute. To give others context, perennials require much less input than their annual cousins, both in terms of labor and also petrochemicals. The other big benefit is carbon sequestration. Perennials typically root far deeper into the soil, giving prairies enormous amounts of (carbon sequestering) root mass. This also has benefits in terms of erosion control — soil loss is one of the biggest, not talked about threats to society. Finally, perennials can help — again through extensive root systems — improve water capture, recharging aquifers.
  • kickout 6y ago
    Yes, Land Institute is excellent. I follow their work closely. They are on the right path.
• ntbloom 6y ago
  Traditional agriculture has "solved all of the scale problems" through the use of pesticides, destructive monocultures, and disruption of the natural water cycle. It's also built on the idea that diesel is cheap both for the tractors to farm in the midwest and the trucks to deliver goods to markets around the country. Should any of those fragile pillars collapse due to regulation (not likely), major environmental catastrophe (pretty likely), or disruptions in the global fossil fuel economy (possible), solutions like vertical farming start making a lot more sense.
• alisson 6y ago
  Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning. This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes instead of inputs. There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because right now most machines are very focused on monocultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
  • stelonix 6y ago
    Hello, also a developer who's interested in agroecology. I actually also left development (as a job, not as something I do) in order to pursue a more human-centric approach to agriculture. With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now, which is already alarming; small farms with synergistic crops & forestation seems like a no-brainer to achieve food sustainability. Plus, chemical pesticides are usually not used in syntropic systems, which makes it good for your health too. I dropped out of Agroecology course in 2018 but I actively work with it or did before the pandemic at least.
    • neltnerb 6y ago
      I am skeptical that "more farm workers" is a trend that anyone really wants. Maybe at small scale you can sell produce at vastly higher prices to make up for the higher costs, but I don't think that what you're suggesting would be good for agriculture if adopted broadly.
      • feteru 6y ago
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Farming is not a sustainable use of land. The article of the author assumes the massive scales of land use for farming is an invariant, but it is a massive contributor to species extinction and global warming. Vertical farming is as important as solar is to the future sustainability of the human race.
  • chrisco255 6y ago
    Other than soil depletion, it's perfectly sustainable. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. Of course, we also figured out how to revitalize soil a long time ago, vis-a-vis ruminant fertilization and crop rotation. But the soil nutrients are supplemented with artificial fertilizer these days for efficiency.
    • solomonb 6y ago
      We haven't been farming as we do today for 10,000 years. The green revolution was exactly that, a fundamental revolution in the way to grow crops. You can't be farming sustainably if you are depleting the soil. Preserving soil health is a fundamental aspect of sustainable agriculture..
• gdubs 6y ago
  What I want: an autonomous, EV brush mower to take care of the scarily steep slopes of our native upland prairie restoration project.
  • Loughla 6y ago
    Autonomous, EV mower/tedder/rake for hay fields with an integrated weather center. Would like that for my life. Bonus points for super low center of gravity, so we could get value out of the hills more than CRP checks.
  • Kye 6y ago
    Are there any plants you can replace the brush with that do well in the environment, fit what you want better, and stop at an acceptable height?
    • gdubs 6y ago
      Most of it is really just mowing the prairie grass. The brush has largely been mechanically removed, but the mowing is meant to suppress weeds as well as annuals which try relentlessly to suppress the native vegetation. Reduces need for spraying / extensive manual weed control.
  • adammunich 6y ago
    You mean... Goats?
    • gdubs 6y ago
      Lol, that’s great. Would love to have grazing animals in the future but we’re not quite ready to take care of them yet. Also involves decisions on fencing etc. I have been warned a LOT about goats and their ability to destroy everything, and evade even the tallest fences.
      • m3047 6y ago
        What about goats with earphones, trained to stimuli? I'm not actually "rural", but I have chickens. (One of which is 10 years old!) There is such a thing as a "judas goat"; or "judas chicken". I've been through three generations of chickens now. The first generation ended up a quarter mile away on Pete's garden (he wasn't that upset). It doesn't happen any more.
• skybrian 6y ago
  This article is at too high a level of abstraction. It doesn't make sense to talk about the huge, almost almost entirely automated farms that grow crops like corn and soybeans in the same way as the farms that grow fruits and vegetables that are still mostly picked by hand.
• masona 6y ago
  The biggest opportunity for disruption is the checkoffs. >These types of programs represent an already existing framework of farmers ‘paying’ for this type of knowledge. This model has proven scalable, even more so with the internet and social media making information readily available. Note this doesn’t prevent bad information from being shared, but since savvy farmers will try and eventually ignore unprofitable methods, one can assume this is an efficient system. No. It is one of the most wasteful systems I've ever seen. Take one look at the reports they put out to justify their existence and you'll see that it is filled with ridiculous math, where ROI is based on outputs instead of outcomes. The data being collected is junk, all the vendors are super-insidery and collaboration is a political minefield at best. There's so much room for improvement you could throw a dart at any of the checkoff 5-year ROI reports and blindly hit an area to innovate on.
• austincheney 6y ago
  What numerous Netflix documentaries and now Covid has revealed is that ag industry is perhaps too efficient from a people perspective. Those people closest to production carry a disproportionate risk of the supply chain with very little compensation. This is problematic in that it creates funnels too close to the raw materials that can break without adequate redundancy. Where ag industry is less efficient is in material usage like fertilizer, water, and waste products. For example it takes about 18 gallons of water to produce one avocado fruit and there are concerns about a future shortage of phosphorus. Then there are also the environmental footprints as well. For what it’s worth the loss of resource efficiency inversely drives land use efficiency. When resource inputs/outputs are a concern land use is compressed to consolidate management concerns while land use concerns relax when resources are more abundant. One segment that really seems to nail resource efficiency, at least in North America, is commercial lumber but then they operate on long time horizon unlike edibles.
• mmargerum 6y ago
  Robotics on traditional farms is where it's at. Weed/Pest killing, fertilizing/watering, and tilling robots will cut down on fertilizer/water usage and will alleviate the need for GMO and pesticides. I hope to run a droid farm in 10 years like uncle Owen Lars. I just don't want to be charred at the end :D
• jonnypotty 6y ago
  I was just expecting a page with the word 'anything'
  • kickout 6y ago
    They know there is money to be made :)
• rmason 6y ago
  With twenty years previous experience as an agronomist I can tell you that this article is right on. You want to know cropping ag's biggest problem? Too much data. Farmers are collecting all sorts of data - soil samples, weather station data, aerial infrared photos and yield monitor data to name a few. But there are few tools that give actionable information from all that data. Actionable in prescribing something that results in a positive ROI. Now as an agronomist who soil sampled, walked the field multiple times every year and sometimes even rode the combine with the farmer I was able to do that - sometimes. Someday it will happen but it's my opinion that AI is a long, long way from performing that job. But I do hope I live to see it.
  • kickout 6y ago
    Thanks. Agree---lots of data, little 'actionable' solutions out there
  • michaelscott 6y ago
    Out of interest, what kind of prescriptions would you hope data could make? Are you talking about coming up with new ideas for production or further optimisation for what already exists?
    • rmason 6y ago
      Farmers were told to collect all this data back in the early nineties at the beginning of what was called the precision farming movement. They bought the sensors, collected the data and they're still waiting. They're looking for the data to point at problems that could be solved to make them more money.
• greenie_beans 6y ago
  I’m not “silicon valley,” but only a single programmer who has an interest in agriculture. The author is talking about large scale farms. What about small scale farmers? In my experience with those farmers, they don’t typically have the access or money to afford tech. Do you not think there’s an opportunity to create cheap tech tools—automation and robotics—for small scale farmers?
  • kickout 6y ago
    There is. But its hard to recoup any profit for the same reason you don't hear about iPhone's/premium tech in poor countries/region. Money just isn't there. Also, as pointed out, most farms are larger and getting larger. Small farms and small farmers will (in general) be aggregated (according to history at least).
    • carapace 6y ago
      I think (hope) there are opportunities around connecting small farmers directly with customers for both produce and value-added prepared food. There are a few "virtual farmer's market" services already. But this is much more an issue of marketing and communication than technology, eh?
    • greenie_beans 6y ago
      I don't have any data to support this, but hasn't farm consolidation already happened? In my area, the small scale movement is only growing. That's based on observation and no data. Edit: I realize that a small scale farm doesn't "scale" like VC business wants so it's not even in the conversation about venture capital. But small business will always (hopefully) be a viable endeavor for somebody.
• aj7 6y ago
  Go to YouTube and search “operate a combine” if this is new to you. Our farmers are computer literate.
• vincehark 6y ago
  The problem with industrial outdoor farming isn't the efficiency, it's the toxic pesticide applications, the environmental pollution in air and soil getting in the crops, and lack of nutritious crop diversity leading to inefficient food supply chains. Growing plants with coal indoors isn't a solution either but hyper-efficient indoor and vertical farming is getting closer by the day and more funding needs to go into new evidence based controlled environment farming techniques. Check out https://youtu.be/VIrXQo00OWc https://youtu.be/VIrXQo00OWc for an example of what hyper efficient indoor farming looks like.
• jillesvangurp 6y ago
  What's referred to as "modern farming" is in fact kind of grossly inefficient, destructive, and hopelessly dependent on subsidies as well as a handful of companies supply pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals needed to squeeze some life out of a dying and eroding soil. We "perfected" that over the last century or so and it's used to mass produce only a comparatively small number of staples. I grew up in an era that was probably peak industrial scale farming (i.e. the seventies and eighties last century). A lot of stuff you find in a supermarket today was simply unknown or considered exotic at best. Bread came in two varieties: brown and white. The flour came from a factory. A lot of the stuff you put on top came out of a tube or a jar. James May (from Top Gear fame) has a hilarious Youtube channel called food tribe where he satirically highlights some seventies era sandwich recipes. This type of farming scales only at the cost of variety, quality, the environment, and our health. Contrary to self serving studies, having less pesticides in your food intake is probably good for you. Also, less corn syrup in your life is definitely a good thing. And more variety in your diet is probably not a bad idea either. In a nut shell "modern farming" is a great way of feeding the poor and a core reason why obesity and poverty is a common combination in modern economies. All the cheap food is great at keeping you alive but not necessarily optimal for a long lifetime. The promise of actual modern farming is vastly more efficient use of resources (water, energy, chemicals, the environment), more variety, better freshness, nutritional value, cost, being able to grow it closer to the place of consumption, etc. It has nice side effects like being less taxing on the landscape and environment and generally being associated with things that give people warm fuzzy feelings, which they tend to attribute some $ value to. I other words, modern farming is what modern farmers want to do because that's where the money is. If you look at the value chain in farming, it's clearly a very tiered market. At the very bottom you have the basically inedible stuff that is destined for animal fodder and industrial processing. It's by definition low margin and high volume. Farming practices in this space tend to be very destructive. It's cheap only because the epic cost of cleaning up the mess is not factored in (that's for the next generation to worry about). One level up you have the stuff we actually can eat that is mass produced at razor thin margins for the industrial production of food. It's the bottom of a value chain where most of the money is made by industries using the produce as the input for their food products. Then we get more into niche farming where quality of production, production process, and the produce is the key goal. This is the stuff consumers pay extra for to get because it tastes good or makes them feel good. Whether it's organically produced spelt flour hand ground by some bearded hipster or some japanese beer fed and massaged Kobe beef; this is high value, high margin, produce. Any farmer with a clue wants to be here because that's where the money is. High margins and everybody thinks your cool. The only problem is that it doesn't quite scale to feeding the planet. But nevertheless this sector has exploded in the last few decades. And then you have actual high tech modern farming which does the former but in a smarter way such as to maximize quality and yield while minimizing cost. Vertical farming fits in here because it gets you fresh stuff pretty much straight from the farm into your shopping basket. The reason it's currently applied mainly at the top end of the market is simply because that's where the money is right now. But there's no reason for this stuff not to eventually gobble up the rest of the market. There's probably a lot of stuff that will fail to scale or to deliver but inevitably some it will work pretty much as advertised. In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving themselves with shaving of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny margin on producing glorified pig food. There are no 10x returns doing that. It's a race to the bottom. Selling fresh basil to city dwelling hipsters on the other hand is a thing short term but hardly the end goal.
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  I find this story odd because it seems like it's over-emphasizing the large scale/ low manual labor crops. In other words, the article is talking about inexpensive, long shelf life crops: > The Midwest in the United States has close to 90M acres of corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat. Maybe I've got this entirely wrong, but my understanding is most vertical farming focuses on producing highly perishable fruits and vegetables which often still require a fair amount of manual labor and where being close to market is a benefit. I haven't yet seen large scale vertical gardens being commercially successful yet, but if they do, I'm certain they won't be producing corn, wheat, or soybeans.
• jfb 6y ago
  Why did the title get changed from the article's title ("What Silicon Valley Doesn’t Understand About Agriculture")?
  • kps 6y ago
    Because Silicon Valley thinks nowhere else matters, and likes to pretend its parochial local monoculture is never a problem.
• pnathan 6y ago
  I used to work at Climate. Always fun seeing ag tech come up in articles. The wealth of knowledge available to farmers in the US, as the article points out, is staggering. We're very efficient here on the production end of things.
• Ms34me 6y ago
  According to the author, "hyper efficient" is throwing 40+% of the food in the trash, while slowly increasing prices YoY. Yeah right
• carapace 6y ago
  I've been thinking about this in the context of applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) It's undeniable that modern mechanized mass agriculture is incredibly efficient and already highly automated. It's kind of fantastic. (And very challenging to compete against.) The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and ecological ignorance. The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that will become endangered if we do not mitigate the severe erosion problems that stem from single species field that are barren (re: nothing actively growing) for 30-40% of the calendar year (in North America)." (Imagine installing millions of acres of solar panels and just switching them off for 1/3 of the year.) Broadly speaking, if our agriculture destroys topsoil rather than creating it we're gonna have a bad time. An interesting challenge would be to automate food forests. For concreteness, check out what these folks are doing: https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance This is one family working on their home plot in a suburb who have converted it into a really cool food forest with chickens and lots and lots of different crops. Imagine replicating this across millions of acres, without involving hundreds of thousands of people (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but it couldn't compete with mechanized agriculture.) What kind of automation could help with that?
  • mespe 6y ago
    Fallow fields are essential to maintaining soil health, a successful practice going back 10k years. Additionally, some of the "barren" fields are actually being used to alternate crop - it is a technique to grow crops with limited natural water. Modern best-practices avoid a lot of erosion by using no-till or low-till systems.
    • carapace 6y ago
      I read up and watched some videos in re: "syntropic agriculture" last night. Ernst Götsch's farm produces crops all year w/o any inputs and with continuous improvement of the soil quality.
• hootbootscoot 6y ago
  I thought that this was a great & succinct article.
• _ah 6y ago
  Weirdly, the thing I find missing most from this discussion is finance. If we take the premise that information is valuable (decrease inputs, improve yields) and that equipment is valuable (automation), then there's a very real return to be gained by using these valuable products. What's nuts to me is that we would ever ask the farmers to bear the risk of these products. I mean, sure they could I suppose (better returns overall!), but it concentrates all the risk in the worst places. I feel like there's a much better opportunity here for a targeted financial product. "Implement our methods with our data, and we'll skim a percentage of your profits." Imagine if the risk of buying a new tractor was gone, because it was provided by the company. The risk of data integration was also gone, because it's guaranteed to work with the provided tractor. And the risk that the data is crap is also gone, because the financing and return risk is borne by a diverse number of institutional investors. Almost like weather / crop insurance, but much much bigger. For the farmer, the sale is simple: Do our thing, and you don't have to worry about paying for stuff that may not be valuable. You might make slightly less total profit in the good years as the price of offloading that risk. For the investors, it's also a great story: look at these great startups! Wouldn't you like a piece of that productivity and return? ...and maybe the startups are wrong, and the equipment doesn't work, and everyone learns a lot while they go bankrupt. Everyone except the farmer, who offloaded the risk. Surely this is a thing that someone is working on?!? I'm sure it's available in bits and pieces, but a unified financing and operational solution seems like it would be a slam dunk.
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  Hello my hot photos are here .. http://69chat.club http://69chat.club username annaxx))
• Vysero 6y ago
  I currently work as a developer for a company that develops a "black box" (as we call them in the business) for the AG industry. We develop the systems the author was referring to that provide: auto-steer/guidance, and application control for tractors. I am not sure if that makes my perspective unique or not, but as a general rule of thumb I would tell anyone looking to get into the "dirt work" (growing) of the AG business to change their minds. In fact, I would tell them to run for the hills. Most farmers in America (aside from the huge co-ops) operate at a loss each year, and only survive due to subsidies, at least here in America. That being said, if you are interested I can say for sure there is a LOT of money to be made developing the systems I currently work on and/or contracting yourself out to companies like mine for existing work we can not handle in house.
• bb2018 6y ago
  This article compares growing food like wheat locally and rightfully points out how insane that would be in terms of land required. Growing some specialized foods locally is what others have suggested but I still find this extremely misguided. First, as a citizen of a large city, if we are going to give valuable land to a large building is it really beneficial to make it a farm? Making space for housing (whether affordable or regular apartments) seems more appropriate for most cities. Second, as a consumer, would I really prefer the building crop to a the crop of a farm about an hour or two away from the city? Probably not (and especially not if tower fruit is more expensive).
  • mrep 6y ago
    Most of the US is does not have high land prices because they are not space constrained; it's basically just the west coast [0]. [0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/ https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
• d_burfoot 6y ago
  As a consumer, I don't care a tiny bit about making my food less expensive (by making production more efficient). Food is already very cheap. I care very very much about reducing the suffering of farm animals. I do not want to become vegan (for health reasons), but the guilt I feel because of my contribution to animal suffering is one of the worst parts of my life. Please, please, smart young technologists out there: figure out some cool technology to make it possible to raise farm animals efficiently while also ensuring that they live comfortable, decent lives.
  • firethief 6y ago
    Not everything is a technical problem. No technical solution is going to make the cheapest way to get animal parts in our fridges involve the animals living fulfilling lives.
• seph-reed 6y ago
  I always thought vertical farming was about developing strategies that will be essential in space under the guise of figuring out how to make cities less dependent on external resources.
• kumarski 6y ago
  My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years. I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now) Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd. - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinate. More if it gets periodically polluted at an increasing rate. - Large majority Agrarian populations exist because the countries are stuck in a purgatory of <1 MWh/capita annum whereby the country doesn't have scaleable nitrogen and steel manufacturing. - Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes are some of the highest satiety lowest input to output ratio produce. High efficiency. - In civilizations where you are at < 1MWh/capita annum - there is not enough electricity to produce tools for farming, steel for roads, and concrete for building things. The end result is that the optimal decision is to have more children to harvest more calories per an acre. - Property, bankruptcy, and inheritance law have an immense influence on the farmer population of a country. I remember telling some "ag tech" VCs my insights and offering to introduce my father who has an immense amount of insight on the topic from having grown things for as long as he has....My thoughts were tossed aside.
  • messe 6y ago
    > Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes Is this a typo? Did you mean to write a second vegetable?
    • HeXetic 6y ago
      Probably regular potatoes; they are incredibly calorie-dense and resilient.
  • chx 6y ago
    > 1MWh/capita annum Oh this is fascinating! I never thought of this but of course energy consumption per capita is going to be an indicator of how industrialized a country is. I briefly checked the two countries I am a citizen of (Canada, Hungary) and counterchecked with one of the poorest countries I know of (Chad) and the numbers are as expected: 14.6, 4.1, 0.013 (oof).
• hogFeast 6y ago
  Look at the Netherlands. Tiny country (slightly bigger than MA), basically underwater, and the second largest exporter of agriculture in the world. Denmark is similar although at a far smaller scaled. The reason the US is inefficient is because it has massive scale. Huge country, basically no-one lives there in population density terms (tbf, Australia is the same size and even less dense though...so not an outlier). The future will be about doing more with less, and the US is an example of doing less with more. Simple. The room for innovation is still huge. Saying vertical farming is overhyped is probably correct too. But that ignores the fact that this is essentially what Netherlands has been doing for two decades. Their ag research programmes have focused on minimising resource use for a long, long time. And it does work...it is working already, and has been for a long time. Call it overhyped or whatever but it is happening already (the level of hype is correlated to funding or whatever...this just works).
  • newyankee 6y ago
    US agriculture is one of the most advanced in the world, its agricultural incentives and economics however ... are not. Subsidy to certain crops over others and do not even want to get into the health impact aspects.
    • hogFeast 6y ago
      Yep, I left that out and it is definitely a huge factor. Europe definitely has the same issue with subsidies but the CAP program actually works on the volume planted, so Netherlands gets royally screwed (and the big inefficient producers in France/Spain and, more recently, Eastern Europe...where there is huge corruption in CAP...get the lion's share) because they minimise resources (and don't have many to begin with). I understand a certain level of subsidy to boost security...but the unintended consequences are huge.
      • blobbers 6y ago
        I think you should note this is export, not production. The Netherlands has a very small population so they export what they grow. Clearly they're not capable of producing anything on the scale of the USA, China etc.
• danans 6y ago
  > Current agriculture doesn’t need an artificial energy source I agree that vertical farms have their limits for producing certain important products like grains, but current agriculture does require a massive artificial input in the form of petroleum based fertilizers (via the Haber-Bosch process) - to say nothing of large amount of diesel used to transport agricultural products from rural growing areas to market in urban areas. The transport could in theory be electrified, but the fertilizer can't at this point be produced in another way. Vertical farming can use far less fertilizer due to its precision. Again, not that it doesn't have downsides. For example, if vertical farms are powered by fossil fuels, they could be even less efficient and more carbon intensive than traditional agriculture.
  • philipkglass 6y ago
    The energetically expensive input to the Haber-Bosch process is hydrogen. At present hydrogen is predominantly manufactured by steam reforming of fossil fuels, which produces CO2 as a byproduct. Hydrogen can also be produced cleanly by water electrolysis powered with clean electricity. I actually think that Haber-Bosch plants will predominantly use clean electrolytic hydrogen before farm machinery becomes predominantly electric. Farm machinery has a very slow replacement cycle. Some of my farming relatives are still running diesel powered machines built in the 1930s.
• nostrademons 6y ago
  If you haven't read about the Green Revolution [1], you probably should. Basically, this is was a series of technological developments in the early 50s and 60s that completely revolutionized agriculture. High-yielding seed varieties, fossil-fuel fertilizers, chemical pesticides, etc. During the Green Revolution, the proportion of common feedstocks that are edible grew from 4-5% to 40-50%, and the number of humans that can be supported on earth by a typical 2000-2500 calorie diet grew from ~1-2B to 10+B. Most of the things we hate about modern agriculture - pesticides, GMOs, monocultures, Monsanto's dominance, the loss of small family farms, coupling between agriculture and fossil fuel extraction - came about because of the Green Revolution. But without it, 80% of the world population would be dead or never born. Agriculture isn't really in need of Silicon Valley style disruption, because it happened in the 50s. We currently produce enough food on earth for everyone to have a 3000+ calorie daily diet, and we could increase the world population by 50% with current food output and still have enough to eat. The problems with agriculture today mostly concern distribution and tail risks - we produce plenty, but it's allocated inefficiently (wealthy people eat veal and foie gras, poor people struggle to get enough basic grains) and it could be wiped out by a blight or supply chain disruption. Silicon Valley doesn't really help with these problems, and if anything exacerbates them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
  • rmason 6y ago
    Norman Borlaug was my hero. A man most Americans never heard of did more to help people in the twentieth century than any other person. He was more impactful than Elon Musk without all the publicity.
• thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
  What this article doesn't understand is that some people like myself would like to have fresh vegetables that are bred for nutrition and taste, not something that's been bred for maximum shelf life. From big Agg, When those big optimized over fertilized tasteless tomatoes arrive, I'm not excited. But, those local farmers markets sometimes come up with superior tasting products. I once tasted an early girl tomato from a local farmers market and it tasted like nothing else. some people want quality of quantity. Besides when it comes to freesh produce there's not much choice right now. I mean, we have gazillion different varieties of frozen stuff in the freezers, but only 1 kind of cucumber to choose from,etc.
• hamzahc 6y ago
  A lot of the points around efficiency of traditional farming vs vertical farming are valid points. Over time however, you would expect vertical farms to catch up to the level of sophistication of traditional ag. The two practices are not like for like and shouldn't be compared as such - vertical farming is still in the 80:20 phase of development where as traditional agriculture is now in the hyper optimisation phase after 000s of years squeezing for incremental improvements. The primary benefits of urban vertical farming come from things like: - Reduced transportation costs and emissions to people buying them due to being located close to urban centres - No dependency on natural climate/weather, you can never have a bad yield! - No need for pesticides that can get into the water table and damage local environments - Allows for high accuracy estimations of yields that can build better forecasting models for supermarkets etc.
• m3047 6y ago
  I bookmarked that site, I hope they keep posting.
• valboa 6y ago
  My response was too long, so I put it in my blog. https://www.yorch.co/what-i-think-about-food-production-and-distribution-chains-inefficiency-a-response/ https://www.yorch.co/what-i-think-about-food-production-and-... I think the author has great points, but is not the full picture.
• mespe 6y ago
  My PhD is in sustainable agriculture, and I have 18+ years experience in both field and greenhouse ag. Ironically, unlike many here, I went from agriculture to data science/programming. One thing missed by a lot of the comments: Indoor systems tend to be incredibly fragile affairs. If you've ever been in a well managed commercial greenhouse, you will notice a ton of sanitation procedures. There are greenhouse pests and diseases which are never an issue in the field, in large part because there is an entire ecological system of checks and balances working out in a field. Even in modern intensive ag fields. The truth is an agricultural field is an amazingly complex system which we don't fully understand (we are only starting to explore soil ecosystems and plant roots). Vertical farms are disconnected from this, though the costs might not be obvious. As a consultant, I watched a "trendy" aquaponics startup crash and burn because they underestimated this.
• hosh 6y ago
  Several weeks ago, I finally looked up what "permaculture" is all about, and it blew my mind away. It works even better than modern agricultural processes. The ideas are inherently distributed and decentralized, and when implemented along the ethical principles, bypasses many of the wealth inequality. It builds up resiliency through diversity (something the tech world is only starting to explore with Kubernetes and containers). It goes beyond mere "sustainability" and into regenerative processes. These are very practical ideas that have had 50 years of implementation proving out those design patterns. It requires a different way of thinking about how we grow and get our food. My techie friends all love it when they see these ideas, and yet, the development of permaculture design tracks the development of the personal computer, internet, and smartphone. But it is also big blind spot. Many of the design patterns are low-tech or no-tech (which, not depending upon a supply chain, is much more resilient). Dwarf Fortress is a lot of fun, but I have found that applying and implementing permaculture design is a lot more challenging and rewarding.
• worik 6y ago
  No, this is untrue. I cannot speak to "Vertical Farming" and silicon valley types, but I live in the heart of a modern agriculture zone. It is catastrophic. The environmental devastation is breath taking. Yes there is a lot of industrialisation, but of the wrong things and at a very high, and completely externalised, price. Instead of innovating farmers are using technology to do what they have always done, just more of it. The enormous cash flows generated (but not profits, land prices take care of that) have corrupted the political system and farmers use their power to fight off any innovation that would reverse this catastrophe.
• goldenshale 6y ago
  I was blocked as a suspected bot by the wordpress site, so I'll post here... I think this discussion requires a bit more nuance. Of course classic row crops like corn, wheat, soy, oats, etc., are unlikely to ever make sense for indoor crops. But that's not what any of these businesses are tackling. Instead they are focused on high value fruits and vegetables, herbs, and fresh greens. You only have to look at the agricultural success of the Netherlands to see that these crops can be grown for profit at scale, indoors. During the winter months they augment the greenhouses with light, but they are also taking advantage of the sun as much as possible. In greenhouses you can grow with far less water, and you can produce fresh, local food that doesn't have to be cooled and shipped nearly as far. I'd like to see an honest comparison that looked at a tomato and a handful of fresh cilantro being sold in NYC or SF from a local greenhouse with augmented light versus comparable produce shipped in from Mexico or somewhere else warm. I think there are also many good arguments for shifting our diets away from the commodity crops and towards more fruits and vegetables, so as the world gets wealthier and more people seek diverse, healthy foods, we might see new models that make increasing sense.
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    I immediately thought of the Netherlands as well. As I understand it, they began vertical farming more crops thinking that they would be the R&D department for world agriculture, because they could get results faster, and then it would go into "production" in conventional farms, but were surprised to discover that they could (in some cases) compete for the production as well. It makes total sense to me that this would not be the case for every crop (probably not corn, wheat, or soy for example). But I would also be surprised if vertical farming made sense for NO crops.
• aaron695 6y ago
  Vertical farming is performance art. Just like Organic and Permaculture and many of those growing ideas. That's ok, so are most cafes and many things in society. But if you call it agriculture you are not getting it.
• crb002 6y ago
  Robotic weeding and tile lines with irrigation control are startup worthy. The former Bosch is heavily invested, the latter a VC will gobble up AgriDrain.
• jacknews 6y ago
  "90M acres of corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat. Brazil has as much, and usually more, soybean acreage grown every year in their breadbasket " We need to drastically reduce agricultural land-use. That's what indoor farming will be good for, and especially synthetic foods, beyond meat, etc.