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What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture, part 2
- WJW 6y agoThat plant tape tech he links to at the end is incredible.
- mvidal01 6y agoThat idea has been around for a while. I'm aware of similar tools for small farms. (0) https://www.johnnyseeds.com/tools-supplies/transplanters/paperpot-transplanter-7601.html https://www.johnnyseeds.com/tools-supplies/transplanters/pap... (1) https://paperpot.co/ https://paperpot.co/
- mabbo 6y agoAnyone have an alternative link? My company relies on Cisco's reputation system[0] to decide if a domain should be blocked. Oddly, thinkingagriculture.io is "untrusted | poor". [0] https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?search=http%3A%2F%2Fthinkingagriculture.io https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?searc...
- kickout 6y agoSorry, brand new blog. Probably some security issue I lack knowledge of
- willcipriano 6y agoThis will happen anytime you put something new online. It's basically a whitelist and they wait until they see a few hits before you get added.
- yunusabd 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20200625130604/http://thinkingagriculture.io/what-sv-doesnt-understand-about-agriculture-part-ii/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200625130604/http://thinkingag...
- ashergill 6y agohttps://outline.com/SCvAC5 https://outline.com/SCvAC5 hopefully this works for you
- Mengkudulangsat 6y agoThe amount of economy of scale in agriculture is disconcerting to me. Surely finely-tuned, monoculture mega-farms in rigid supply chains have disadvantages? I was hoping with improving technology, the minimum viable size of a farm can be brought down to something more culturally sensible. Even if existing technology in agriculture is as good as the author claims, access remains an issue. Perhaps the real innovation we need right now is to make technology more affordable.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoCan you think of products where mass-production makes things less efficient?
- KineticLensman 6y agoThe apparent efficiency may depend on whether the manufacturers and the immediate customers pick up all of the costs, or whether negative externalities or other costs are picked up by third parties. E.g mass agriculture may make food cheaper at the cost of environmental damage due to use of pesticides, soil erosion, etc. These costs may be picked up by wider society or just ignored.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoYeah, in the big picture that's true - lots of industries suffer from this - but I meant from a "disrupt the market, make lots of money" frame of reference, which is where all these things seem to start from.
- greggyb 6y agoMonocultures are vulnerable to catastrophic phenomena that affect the monoculture. See Irish Potato Famine for one example. Additionally, monocultures tend to deplete soil nutrients, so need land management in the form of fertilizer, crop rotation, or lying fallow. The latter two are often combined. These are (obviously, I hope) not insurmountable.
- 6y ago
- mdorazio 6y agoI'm going to go out on a limb and say that SV tends not to understand most of the non-tech markets it aims to disrupt, and instead gets occasional success by either completely ignoring/sidestepping regulations and protections (ex. Airbnb for short-term rentals) or by throwing so much investor money at undercutting incumbents that the natural market dynamics are temporarily skewed (ex. WeWork for office leasing). Innovation in most industries tends to come from people with deep expertise and team skillsets that extend far beyond software.
- api 6y agoI'd add that these successes only happen in markets that are so stagnant and moribund that they're easy to disrupt. Hotel and especially taxis strike me as those. Every trip in a regular taxi I've had in the past decade has been followed by a thought of "never again." Agriculture is a hyper-competitive low-margin market, and I have never gotten the impression that this industry is stagnant or incompetent. Those are the areas where disruption by outsiders isn't going to work.
- huffmsa 6y agoCorrect. Taxi logistics had been stagnant for a long time. Human dispatchers and operators. Farming is constantly improving yields and optimizing. It might look stagnant to outsiders but it's a meat grinder. In one of my college classes, all of the "business" majors looked down on the farm kid who'd show up to class with blood on his boots during hunting season. Then he'd give presentation after presentation / example of how his farm is using GPS coordinated UAVs to survey the crops and drive the tractors, and all sorts of other technology deployments that the kids in boat shoes had zero comprehension of.
- reaperducer 6y agoTaxi logistics had been stagnant for a long time. Human dispatchers and operators. Taxis in Chicago had an app even before Uber and Lyft. I think it was called Halo, or something like that.
- 6y ago
- dsalzman 6y agohttps://www.planttape.com/ https://www.planttape.com/ mentioned in the article is so cool. I wonder if they were inspired by pick and place machines with electronic parts on reels.
- kickout 6y agoMight be coolest engineering solution I've seen in my short time on this planet.
- mikro2nd 6y agoThere have been similar systems for seed-sowing for decades. This is the first system I've seen anything like it for seedling transplanting, but the concept is not so far different from the seed-tapes that horticulture has used for quite a long time, so I'd be more inclined to think the inspiration came from closer by than electronics.
- kickout 6y agoCorrect, its a horticulture driven innovation (makes it more cool IMO).
- dakna 6y agohttps://paperpot.co/ https://paperpot.co/ is the same idea as a manual labor version. I never used it since you need more machinery to prepare the beds for it, but from what I read they are very popular with small scale market gardeners.
- dejv 6y agoMachines like these exists in all scales you can imagine. I had new vineyard planted two years ago. Big tractor with automatic planting station arrived and with GPS base station they were able to plan in around 2cm accuracy. There was no automatical steering, but whole machine and tractor shutted down when driver move out of mission plan. You can decide what is row spacing going to be, what space between plants are going to be and you are done. What would take me week of manual labor took machine just 40 minutes (well kinda: one servo broke down and they had to call mechanic from Germany which took off two days of very expensive machine time in prime season). Here you can see simmilar machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC32JgiDxo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC32JgiDxo4
- enriquto 6y agoReally nothing to say about this article... but the "ag" abbreviation is strangely disturbing. Do people pronounce that in speech? If so, how?
- dsalzman 6y agoPronounced "Aaahggg"
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoI believe there's python documentation about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlIz0q8aWpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlIz0q8aWpA
- kickout 6y agoIt is a weird abbreviation. Laziness precludes me from typing agriculture too much.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Do people pronounce that in speech? I've heard it frequently in politics. (It's also an acceptable Scrabble word.) Pronounced the same way it is in the word agriculture.
- JJMcJ 6y agoChapter in a James Bond book "The Man From Ag And Fish", that is the Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry.
- derwiki 6y agoWhat makes you say it’s disturbing? Having grown up near several Ag colleges, I never questioned it.
- enriquto 6y agoI cannot avoid reading it as silver (the chemical element), especially when the first letter is uppercase. I had a hard time understanding some sentences of the article due to that. My mind just refuses to parse "ag" as "agriculture". It's just that I'm not used to it. EDIT: In your case, I cannot help to think about your colleges as very shiny, kitsch buildings.
- abetusk 6y agoPresumably the submitter of this link is also the author? Do you have any suggestions on what areas are good for innovation? I also find myself at a complete loss for what technologies are actually out there, how they're used and what a typical farm looks like and how it operates. Even the data of "90M acres of corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat" is complete news to me. What are some sources to get at this data, to get a feel for what this system looks like? I know that the "global village construction set" [1] was marketed as trying trying to solve some of these issues but I'm not sure it really developed into anything actionable. Keep up the good work, I'd like to see more writing. Do you have any suggestions on other blogs that talk about similar subject matter? [1] https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
- kickout 6y agoUmm...start with USDA NASS for agriculture statistics in the US. agfundernews.com for the startup scene. Just reseach in general. Deep Learning, Nanotechnology, Drones (UAVs), genetic engineering all have a home in agriculture. I'd be happy to PM you more resources.
- brootstrap 6y agoYeah USDA NASS is the spot for your ag statistics. even then NASS is not 100% accurate but pretty solid. Drones, meh. nobody wants pictures of their farm bud. What do you do with pictures of your farm? Nothing. I've been working with farmers for 6+ years and only a handful of them like the drones mostly because it's a fun toy. Sure tell me that you can get AI imagery and machine learning non-sense from your farm pictures. The only thing i agree with you on is genetic engineering. And that is not startup space really. That is like giant bio-tech companies breeding corn seeds in a lab. You need a phD for that shit you dont just build a startup that 'disrupts' seed genetics.
- botwriter 6y agouse them to spot pest and diseases image recognition and you're able to stamp on a problem before it destroys half your crop.
- loourr 6y agohttps://farmersfriendllc.com/ https://farmersfriendllc.com/ good example of a thriving company in the space, though smaller scale and no VC funding
- OldHand2018 6y ago> Auto-steer systems that leverage machinery that already exists. That links to a company selling a retrofit system for 7500 Euro and no annual fees. That's super cheap compared to buying a new tractor and I hope they are successful. But... My brother-in-law hobby farms a few hundred acres of corn and soybeans and built an autosteering system for his 1950s tractor. The only thing he bought new was an Arduino board to tie it all together. Everything else was used farming equipment and his total cost was less than $1000 (USD). He's not even a programmer, just an engineering degree from Flyover State U. He cobbled together open source software to make it work. The traditional farmer is very resourceful. They aren't going to allow your company much margin if they can do even part of it themselves. Good luck to VC-backed firms.
- _curious_ 6y ago"They aren't going to allow your company much margin if they can do even part of it themselves." Interesting observation. It reminds me of the myriad of products and services targeting bootstrapped/self-funded entrepreneurs, who also tend to be resourceful by nature.
- rstupek 6y agoOr programming tool companies selling to programmers who notoriously will question why your tools aren't open sourced?
- _dps 6y agoThis is true for a large fraction of the programming world, but not all of it. As just two examples I happen to know: 1) graphics / games / vfx 2) energy / mining It is the norm in these markets to pay for industry leading software tools, and I know multiple companies making profit-per-employee in ballpark FAANG range.
- ponker 6y agoCool to see that the same open source dynamics that make it possible for three engineers to ship a great web app in 3 months (Linux, Node, React, etc) also have made it much easier for people like your brother to use off the shelf tooling like Arduino to solve their own problems.
- rhacker 6y agoI want to see the end of skim the top businesses that come out of SV. They pretty much set up a database, a front end and expect everyone to pay them a percentage of a business that already works. But because they capture a young crowd, it eventually takes over. I hope Ag is resistant to that. I'd rather see SV help the industry keep its jobs and just create new machines. Like the drone that picks weeds (or just makes a map of all weeds in the field for someone to go pick). Perhaps a drone that scoops up bugs via vacuum attachment. Whatever it is, I'm kinda just sick of SV starts that want to skim the top of some existing process.
- heymijo 6y agoAfter reading Part I yesterday I got to thinking about SpaceX. In his biography, Ashlee Vance describes how Musk built a knowledge base about rocket construction after his exit from Paypal. Both the "how to" and a first principles approach to the economics of it. Musk knew the calculus that he could attempt to build rockets for far less than his competitors before he ever put a dime into SpaceX. In contrast, vertical farming sounds more like the computer engineer equivalent of "I built a thing, isn't it shiny and cool" without understanding the industry, economics, or competitive landscape. Vertical farming seems to be taking an ahistorical approach. With both both vertical farmers and VCs ignoring industry knowledge [0,1] Sticking with Musk, he took an ahistorical appraoch to Tesla's Fremont factory with automation. He learned a very expensive and wasteful lesson that other auto manufacturers had known for decades. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23633298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23633298 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634030
- newyankee 6y agoThere is a lot of economies of scale to be achieved by more growing cycles, better customization of growing conditions, improvements in LED in the future. The bottleneck will always be cheap energy. However the industry will progress from non calorific high value foods like lettuce and leafy greens (they may be low calorific but have a lot of value in terms of nutrients etc. and are expensive) to stuff like cherry tomatoes, cucumber as renewable energy starts getting cheaper.
- c3534l 6y ago> Sticking with Musk, he took an ahistorical appraoch to Tesla's Fremont factory with automation. He learned a very expensive and wasteful lesson that other auto manufacturers had known for decades. Sometimes things change and the lesson everyone learned is no longer valid. Fools sometimes get lucky.
- hef19898 6y agoAnd sometimes they don't. In case of automation, Tesla really ignored decades of experience just because. And it wasn't even slightly related with anything tesla really inovated on. Not sure these "maybe we are lucky" initiatives are a wise thing to do.
- reality_inspctr 6y agoPoster makes a great point about what SV doesn't get about farmers, but there is a huge range of things farmers do get about SV that are not obvious to many people who don't know farms or farmers very well. I used to be CEO of a venture backed agriculture startup, and we learned pretty quickly that the hacker mentality applies very well to supporting farmers. Internally, we talked about providing farmers something like an SDK for the automation tools we were selling, where they could mod it to their own situation. In most cases, skills from soldering to metal work to carpentry were not only realistic to expect, but complete shops with air tools, etc. were usually present and often complete machine shops with CNC and 3d printers.
- reality_inspctr 6y agoOP would be glad to connect if you see this note. twitter.com/sean_mcdonald https://agfundernews.com/inside-insect-farming.html https://agfundernews.com/inside-insect-farming.html
- kickout 6y agoThanks, perhaps I will reach out later today (going to fields ironically enough!)
- throwawaygh 6y agoI've never been able to understand the excitement around vertical farming from VC. I assume the primary reason for VC interest in this boondoggle is just that sleeping at the Comfort Inn in Sedalia, MO is not nearly as fun as a champagne black tie at the media lab. But, during COVID, I now think there actually is a strong case for large-scale vertical farming: robustness. It's a backstop against famine in case of long-tail events: "locusts", plagues that wipe out key crops, once-in-a-millenia systemic flooding, a super-volcano eruption, etc. But it's not going to be profitable. It's going to be horrendously unprofitable. And it's not something we should be doing now; it's just something that we should be able to quickly start doing immediately in case of a catastrophic event, and at a scale large enough to get 1200-1500 calories to everyone each day. In other words, the primary customer for vertical farming is government, not the private sector. Unless you can mass produce morels, as the author notes :)
- amerine 6y agoIt’s interesting to think about it this way. Thanks for the new lens.
- mrtksn 6y agoNo one wants to start a career in Agriculture, it only makes sense when you are payed extremely well and currently that's the case when you can make the bare minimum but that minimum is a lot somewhere else. In West Europe, Agriculture is done by Eastern Europeans who can work for few months and make some money that is uninspiring the West but life-changing in the East. Western youth would't touch it. In Turkey it is done by people who escaped a war or tyranny : Syrians and Afghans. It makes sense for them because the alternative is worse but the Turkish youth would not touch it unless it's some kind of organic avocados hipster thing. The Agriculture production is now cheap but unless everything gets robotised at the same pace(or faster) with the people leaving the business or the inequality in the world vanishes it can get real expensive real quick. The vertical farming looks like an option before automatic drones produces us all the produce in a sense that no one ever seen a tomato field in life. But as the author states, farming is massively automated and the efforts are still going on. So, maybe it's about lifestyle? Having a vertical farm in each garden could be desirable even if not efficient.
- jmheflin 6y agoYour statement that 'Vertical farming for non-vegetables (or fruits) is likely dead-on-pitch.' is true with current technology. But there have been significant developments in this space in the last few years. See this work done by Zach Lippman at CSHL. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31873217/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31873217/ Early flowering, dwarf varieties such as those described along with renewable energy (thinking of electricity rates going negative in Germany recently) may significantly shift the economic viability of growing fruits indoors.
- carapace 6y agoModern mechanized agriculture is incredibly efficient and productive, but it degrades soil health over time and loses topsoil. There are methods that increase soil and fertility over time (Permaculture, Syntropic farming, regenerative agriculture) but they are typically relatively labor intensive. China and India have made great strides in recent times. India's Water Revolution #2: The Biggest Permaculture Project on Earth! with the Paani Foundation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMnbeW3F8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMnbeW3F8A India's Water Revolution #3: From Poverty to Permaculture with DRCSC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtHuIlfyJao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtHuIlfyJao Regreening the desert with John D. Liu https://youtu.be/IDgDWbQtlKI?t=82 https://youtu.be/IDgDWbQtlKI?t=82 > It all started in 1995 when Liu filmed the Loess-plateau in China. He witnessed a local population who turned an area of almost the same size as The Netherlands from a dry, exhausted wasteland into one green oasis. This experience changed his life. To me it seems that the two main areas to focus on to make a real contribution are: 1) Make modern agriculture ecologically harmonious. 2) Make ecologically harmonious agriculture more automated. Obviously these converge. (My feeling is that we would be happier with lots of little farms rather than a few large ones, but I'm not interested in debating that particular point. I care about ecological harmony. Future generations can work out the economic forms provided we don't crash the system before then.)
- raptorraver 6y agoI think that the biggest problem with agriculture today is that it's utterly unsustainable. It is ran on fossil fuels and we need to mine minerals for the fertilizers. But still the most worrying issue is that the modern farming is consuming topsoil and we will run out of it in 60 years if we don't change our methods [1]. There are interesting things going on in regenerative agriculture scene where the main idea is to produce new topsoil and through that make farming sustainable. Here is a nice lecture by Richard Perkins - who is one of the most famous regenartive agriculture advocate - explaining the principles of it in a lecture he kept in a food hackaton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knn7ZH4Tiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knn7ZH4Tiw (1) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farming-agriculture-food-toxic-america https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farm...
- spthorn60 6y agoThe kicker for me was reading the very consumable Dirt to Soil [1], written by a farmer who's applying regenerative ag techniques on a large scale, and very profitably. Transitioning from input-dependent, technology-sucking financially-overextended traditional monocropping IS POSSIBLE. This isn't just your backyard garden anymore. Something needs to change in mainstream ag. I'm moving onto a small farm to do something about it, in my small corner of the world.
- yencabulator 6y agoYou've managed to describe exactly what annoyed me about these two posts. OP's argument is that whatever is cheapest this year is the only thing that should ever be done. We definitely need something better than current farming practices.
- dang 6y agoThe earlier thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630201.