10 ms·

Things Silicon Valley gets wrong about agriculture

118 points by rmason 4y ago

quantified 4y ago
"Imagine getting paid 50 times in your career instead of 50 times a year".
coin 4y ago
> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) This is done all the time. When evaluating a new seed variety, a different seed spacing, a new nitrogen application, farmers will do a test plot next to the control. If things looks good then they'll expand the new change to more acreage.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  This is really funny to me after living near a place that has done exactly that for ~100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Experimental_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Experimental_Farm
  - monsieurbanana 4y ago
    Or the Incas, experimenting with micro climates 500 years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin)
  - fastaguy88 4y ago
    Or almost 150. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrow_Plots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrow_Plots The US Dept of Agriculture funds comparative research and agricultural extension agents help put it into practice. They actually know quite a bit about technology adoption in agriculture.
- kcb 4y ago
  That is a pretty wild statement. I would assume A/B testing in farming has happened for centuries. Farms are made up of a multitude of fields. And so are a perfect environment for A/B testing. I did A in one field but stuck with method B in the other and saw that the former crops had higher yield, etc. etc.
- jvm___ 4y ago
  There's farms near me that have a field of corn, every 5 rows has a different sign up with some sort of code and a logo for a seed company. I'd always assumed thats what they were testing.
  - robbiep 4y ago
    Those are field trials of different varieties. It’s not at scale
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      Could also be producing hybrid seed.
      - drewcoo 4y ago
        This. The big clue is signs for a seed company. As a teen I detasseled corn for a couple of summers - pulling the male tassels off the female rows of corn to create hybrids.
      - jcampbell1 4y ago
        I have worked on a corn seed farm detassling odd rows of corn. It is every other row for seed hybridization. The rows were marked, but it was pretty obvious because the two heirloom varieties were distinct. If there were more that two varieties, it is not seed production.
        hinkley 4y ago
        I used to live in a town in farm country and saw a lot of it from the back of a bicycle. There’s not much to look at when the corn is high except the corn. I don’t know if things have changed in the last couple of decades but it was pretty common for detassling to remove the pollen from four or five rows at a go, rather than odd/even pairings.
- bagels 4y ago
  I came in to make the same point. You can reserve a small part of your crop for the experiment. This is exactly akin to how social media companies do growth hacking. Try something new out on x% of the users/crops, measure the results. You don't have to risk your whole farm on it, unless there is a huge capital expense on equipment.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Some of the newer farm equipment can actually apply different amounts of fertilizer (or whatever) to different parts of the same field, based on GPS and a grid of soil samples.
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    This is precision ag and it’s been around for quite some time.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Someone wa pitching a project for this when I was at NCSA (which was less than two miles from corn fields) in the 90’s, as Netscape was taking over browser development and they needed something else to do (NSF is not fond of competing with commercial interests.) That would have been an excellent match but I was barely interested and others were less enthusiastic. They started a collaborative software project instead. Which was cool but CRDT wouldn’t be invented for another five to ten years so I wonder what happened with that project.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  It's hard to have a truly controlled experiment though. The result will be valid for that farm, on that year - but next year the conditions will be different, etc.
  - Kamq 4y ago
    That's true of all A/B testing for real world things isn't it? You could have measured increased traffic because something was trending on twitter/HN instead of the UI changes you just deployed. Might be completely different tomorrow.
  - jeltz 4y ago
    That is true for A/B tests too in tech.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I’m in the permaculture community and most of these guys have stories about their neighbors looking at them like they’re crazy for years until there’s a catastrophic event and they see the land across their fence is doing better than theirs and only then do they start asking for advice, which they then take very slowly. For the people who think this is where we need to go to fight soil loss and global warming, this sort of learning by osmosis is very, very frustrating. People blame these guys for making their money off of speaking engagements and consulting, but it’s going to take a lot to get to the point where your neighbors are on board. If you want to teach someone you have to seek them out, not just work locally.
- vharuck 4y ago
  If I picked up a random statistics textbook printed before 1990, I'd be very surprised to not see numerous word problems about crop treatments.
rgarrett88 4y ago
> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) Pretty sure you can subdivide a farm however you want and use different methods across them. Iteration cycles are in the year time frame but otherwise seems pretty easy to test whatever you want.
- elcritch 4y ago
  A buddy of mine works at Simplot and does exactly that. He works on a team that designs experiments and run them on crops. Now smaller farms probably don’t, but then again smaller startups often don’t have A/B infrastructure setup either. Edit: Come to think of it, despite this being an article on what SV doesn’t get about AG they talk of A/B testing as some special SV only thing. In every other field they’d just call it “scientific experiments”.
Animats 4y ago
The key insight Silicon Valley lacks about agriculture is that there is little potential for a big win. Major improvements mean 10% of something, not 10x. US agriculture is already highly efficient. On the down side, there's potential for a big loss if you screw up.
- ijoijiuiuni 4y ago
  Vertical farming can do 10X, GMOs can do 10x, urban farming can cut out 90% of transportation costs, (not exactly what you mean but getting people to eat less meat would 100x our efficiencies) there is still room for improvement.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Even in a place like Canada where so much food is imported, transportation only adds up to about 12pc of the total energy cost. I'm not aware of any vertical farm that is 10x as efficient as a regular farm.
    - boomanaiden154 4y ago
      It depends upon what you're defining efficiency as. In terms of yield per acre, there are estimates that yield per acre can increase by a lot more [1]. I haven't seen anything more efficient energy or cost wise (outside of a couple types of plants, really just microgreens). [1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002655117
      - itsyaboi 4y ago
        Land is cheap. Efficiency in this context is units of product per dollar spent.
        musasabi 4y ago
        Or, perhaps, carbon emitted. Either way vertical farms are a huge loser for anything outside of niche products.
Sytten 4y ago
Farmers also hate to be dependant on closed technology they can't fix themselves. When you are out in the field and something breaks, you can't wait 3 days for the dealer to come around and plug a computer in to fix things... There is a reason farmers hack their John Deer or use older equipment like my dad does.
seydor 4y ago
thats a bit of hyperbole, farmers do like to experiment as well, and bad yields do happen, they are not risk averse. at this point there are many places in the world that crave for more agtech
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  [dead]
radicalbyte 4y ago
Silicon Valley is great at tech because it has a high concentration of tech companies and top universities. It doesn't have that for agriculture. The "Silicon Valley" of agriculture is in Wageningen, a small university town in The Netherlands. In the surrounding area you have a huge number of food/agri-tech firms.
- nradov 4y ago
  There is a huge amount of agriculture within driving distance of Silicon Valley. The main obstacle is culture, not distance. Most people I meet in Silicon Valley have zero clue how food is actually produced, and lack the proper respect for farmers and ranchers.
  - golemiprague 4y ago
    [dead]
- marvindanig 4y ago
  i’m not sure if silicon valley is great at technical prowess anymore. the hype machine has run its course and the tech is more proliferated and distributed than ever before.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    It depends what counts as "technical prowess". You've got to go elsewhere if you want microchips with the finest available features.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  It's not exactly Silicon Valley, but UC Davis, which has a lot of Ag programs, is within fairly short driving distance of the bay area (to the point where some consider it potentially part of the 'greater bay area')
- Biologist123 4y ago
  I had a visit to Wageningen and really enjoyed it. As a gift for delivering a lecture I received a cookbook for insects. I never used it, but the cookbook has pride of place on my shelf.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lostlogin 4y ago
World food production needs to double by 2050? Why? Population modelling doesn’t have a doubling in that time. I’ve read the link but suspect I need a EILI5. https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
- ido 4y ago
  Perhaps improvement in the quality of life (=wealth) of the population as well as population increase? The world is incredibly richer today than in 1992 (particularly Asia, which accounts for about 60% of the world's population).
- bagels 4y ago
  Increasing worldwide living standards of living leading to increased consumption, and increased meat consumption?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  I suspect a large aspect of this is not merely caloric sufficiency (already an issue), but protein, for which much of the world remains deficient. Protein, whether animal or plant-based, is both an essential macronutrient and sees far lower productivity than staple (carbohydrate) crops. The Green Revolution and following developments have seen major enhancements in the productivity of rice, wheat, and maize. Far less so of soyabeans, whether for human or animal consumption. Beef cattle is amongst the least productive (and most desired) animal proteins. But pork, poultry, eggs, and dairy, as well as farmed fish also require feed, including protein-rich feeds, to develop. (I'm not making arguments over the morality or benefits of meat vs. vegetarian or vegan diets, though that's also a concern, especially concerning land-use, degradation, and greenhouse-gas emissions, of which animal metabolism alone is a very significant source.) Protein-deficient diets, especially amongst infants and children, are a major contributing factor to developmental and cognitive deficiencies. So improving global standards of living will be dependent on increasing overall protein availability.
boomanaiden154 4y ago
> To feed a growing population, we need to double global food production by 2050, but we can't double agricultural acres. We need more food (or more high-quality calories and nutrients) per acre. That's where technology comes in. While it's true that increasing global food production is one way to enable food security for a growing population, I think it's also pertinent to analyze the inefficiencies within our current supply chains. Food waste is a big issue[1] and efficiencies gained in this area could also have a big impact. [1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.123952 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.123952
- mlindner 4y ago
  Food is ridiculously cheap to create right now to the point much of it is turned into fuel. Once it becomes more constrained, food production will increase as demand causes additional supply. Those inefficiencies similarly become removed once demand is higher.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
I used to specialize in Agtech as a consultant. It's a weird space. [Disclaimer, this is my experience of the Australia and NZ scene, not much Silicon Valley involved] The gap between "people who know ag" and "people who know tech" is just vast. And I sensed no great urgency to bridge the gap. I tried myself - talked to every farmer I could, moved to a working farm, even had a go at weighing cattle and applying treatment [0] (yes I am wearing slacks here!) but I didn't see a lot of people around me really interested in understanding the "other side". There's also reluctance to address the connectivity issues. For most software developers internet connectivity is an ever present resource and it's a fault if it's gone. That doesn't really apply if you're deploying rurally, but multi-master distributed systems are hard and few people want to accept that's what they're dealing with. In the end I came to the conclusion that no one appreciated my industry knowledge in AgTech (I must be one of the most experienced livestock identification software professionals on planet earth...) and it wasn't really worth investing my time in. That's not to say I would never work in the field again, but it would be in the capacity of working in offline systems, not my fairly extensive knowledge of cattle identification tags. [0] https://lewiscampbell.tech/img/CattleTreatment.jpg https://lewiscampbell.tech/img/CattleTreatment.jpg
- devwastaken 4y ago
  I recall my father hating technology because the irrigation systems for crop circles would call him when they stop functioning at night. Likely could just wait until morning for a motor or solenoid to be replaced.
  - kirubakaran 4y ago
    RFS[0]: PageDuty for AgTech [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  I've often wanted to look into AgTech (grew up chasing sheep in Canterbury) but people I've talked to in that space say that it's incredibly hard to grow sales, farmers are inherently conservative on new expenses, what was your experience of that?
agtech_startup 4y ago
I launched a self-funded startup to focus on technologies I developed that have the potential to deliver significant benefits to indoor farming operations. We launched in 2019, yet, the pandemic put everything on hold for almost two years. This year we finally completed our first installation (paying customer) at a farm in Singapore. Yes, we are US-based. Due to circumstances and opportunity our first installation happens to be abroad. I applied to YC for multiple batches (I don't remember if it was three or four times). Rejected every time. I think it was an algo-rejection far more so than someone explicitly rejecting the company. We have shipping hardware and software products, a sizable first sale and at least one happy customer. This isn't an idea, it's a validated opportunity with solid execution. Our customer is looking to expand and wants more of our product. Lots more. We also have a product plan that will expand into other related domains. I don't know if I have a solid opinion about SV and agriculture. Starting 2023 I will be out there making a solid effort to seek funding to be able to press on the accelerator. I think $5MM would be about right. I will also be focusing on IP, which, like it or not, can be crucially important when dealing with hardware that could potentially unlock a billion dollar business. My only attempt at fund-raising has been applying to YC, conversations with our customer (who might be interested in investing) and a good friend of mine with deep and wide business experience in globally recognized companies. I guess I will soon learn what SV has to say about indoor farming startups. Being self-funded is great in that you can just drive and not worry about anything that might compromise your ability to focus on the mission. That said, at some point, if you are going to grow, you either need a series of massive (and profitable) sales to supporting customers who will wait for you to deliver (hardware takes time to build, etc.) or a strong cash infusion to front-load development and manufacturing. In looking at this industry I see companies who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, even over a billion, and are flaming out. As an SV outsider, I see this as a syndrome of sorts. I view it as companies who might not have a reasonably solid business or product plan just trying to, in a way, force their way into a market position by burning cash. This is very, very different from self-funding a startup, doing all the R&D, manufacturing and shipping product, having a satisfied customer who wants more and, at the same time, walking away with a ~33% gross profit margin. I can understand burning cash to accelerate, yet, I think, the fundamentals have to be there in the first place. If I were to guess, I might say that this could be the part a lot of SV startups get wrong. Anyone can pretend they know how to sail with good, gentle, plentiful and steady wind.
ummonk 4y ago
Point 4 seems more like a cultural thing than a technical limitation, at least for large farms. Why not split the farm into a few pieces and apply different procedures to each piece?
jeff-davis 4y ago
Naive question: why can't A/B testing work by implementing the tech on a few fields and not on others?
- SteveGerencser 4y ago
  Farms and farmers have been doing A/B testing for generations with seeds, fertilizers, weed/pest control, feed, medicines, and on and on. And it's a PITA. Running 2 different, smaller, operations takes a lot more time and money than just one larger operation. My wife is 100% engineer and it took me 6 years to even try something different on our (her) farm.
SteveGerencser 4y ago
As someone with a foot in both worlds, I have been in tech for 30+ years and we also own a small cattle farm (can't even call it a ranch), there is a staggering amount of distrust in technology of any kind in the ag world. Every new piece of tech comes saddled with some license, or dealer only issue, or the old tractor/equipment could break down and I could fix it in the field on my own in a few hours, vs my new equipment broke down and now I have to wait for some service tech (there are never enough when you need them) to come out and reset some computer or replace a piece of software/tech at a ridiculous cost. And I can't work on it on my own. Add to that, many farmers have been farming the same piece of ground for generations and they know everything they need to know about their land to at least break even most years and no piece of tech or software will improve those numbers enough for them to justify the cost/risk or the developers to justify the minimal profit growth.
- prottog 4y ago
  I hear the same about new tech-enabled equipment. I've always been curious, is there a market for continuing production of old-school, simple tractors and the like? Or is it one of those things that people complain about a lot but won't actually spend their own money to buy dumb equipment that may be less convenient or productive?
  - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
    I'm more curious about why there isn't a market to offer what farmers want. Why not make modern, serviceable equipment with open code and published APIs and schematics? This just screams "market failure" to me.
    - SteveGerencser 4y ago
      My primary tractor is 4 years old and it has been in the shop more often than my 35 year old tractor. Most of us, especially the smaller guys, run equipment until it is quite literally gone. The biggest issue that bringing new equipment to market is incredibly expensive and you are competing with all of the green, red and blue (and now orange) guys that have been building equipment for generations. The new issue is looking for a revenue stream for the manufacturers. My Case while not on a service contract, has very few owner servicable parts to it. My '94 Kubota still does the job but Kubota makes about $200/ year on me at most since I can fix everything on it myself. It is by no means a market failure, the market is working exactly as it's supposed to. It's just that people think that the market is there for the farmers when it's really there for the equipment and inputs manufacturers.
AngryData 4y ago
I think most people have no idea how thin agricultural margins are to start with. They see that some farmer bought a $500,000 combine and think they got money just to throw around, but that combine is expected to last the next 40+ years and work near flawlessly for every harvest while performing multiple different functions simultaneously in a dirty and uneven environment. There is no alternative to a combine harvester since it is replacing the work of reaping, threshing, and winnowing all at once which without a combine would take thousands of man hours to do by hand every harvest. They might not expect for it to pay itself off for 30+ years. Nearly all farms operate on single digit percentage returns, a large number of them have been floating along on 1% or less for decades hoping to hit a bumper crop once or twice more in their life time. If they throw a million dollars at fertilizer, fuel, seeds, maintenance for their tractors, barns, silos, dryers, and any other specialized equipment for their particular crop, then earning $50,000 on that million dollar investment would be considered a great success. Earning $10,000 would still be considered some success because it is not uncommon to run multiple negative years in a row. Yield can vary 30% in a year from normal weather patterns, and the market can vary just as much or more, and they don't always align in a farmer's favor. So if your tech can't handle 99.99% uptime, and be fixed in the field when it does break on short notice with basic hand tools, farmers don't want it. A single failure at the wrong time can dump half of your million dollar investment down the drain which you were only hoping to make a couple dollars from to start with. It could set them back a literal decade or more financially because some shitty widget or sensor failed and they either couldn't repair it or the fault wasn't detected until it was too late.
- Biologist123 4y ago
  I appreciate the risk adjusted returns are poor. My question then is why farms as assets are so valuable. Seems like a disconnect somewhere.
  - malandrew 4y ago
    I was looking into this recently and while I didn't find a great analysis, the impression I got was that financialization of the economy is a big part of this. There are tons of tax benefits for owning land and for many of them you don't even need to produce anything or even have a working farm. You just need to own eligible land. Combine this with the fact that farmers are often capital poor so a lot of farmland is leased from those that own it. We basically have the same issue that renters are facing in modern urban America but with farmers. Getting the financial industry out of assets we can't make more of seems like the obvious choice. https://farmfolio.net/articles/why-is-bill-gates-investing-in-farmland-how-much-does-he-own/ https://farmfolio.net/articles/why-is-bill-gates-investing-i... https://www.knightfrank.com/research/article/2022-06-08-why-are-uk-farmland-values-continuing-to-rise https://www.knightfrank.com/research/article/2022-06-08-why-...
dbg31415 4y ago
> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) On the ranch I grew up on, we would "A/B" test new bulls all the time. Literally the first year we would try a new bull, we'd only give him access to 15-20 cows. If the calves came out easy, and grew fast, he'd get put into circulation with the larger herd. We also tried different things with crops... plant one side of the field one way, plant the other side a different way. Different kinds of fencing in different pastures... I can't remember a year when we didn't test a new kind of fence. Fencing takes so much labor, even something that shaved a few days off the maintenance each year would have been welcome improvement. I remember we tried moving gates to the corners one year, just to see if it made moving cattle between pastures easier. It did! We tried a lot of different rotation patterns, too. Mostly to try and reduce bugs and have to spray for flies less. Perpetually testing new medicines. "This pill costs more, but you don't have to give it as often, vs. that pill costs less, but you have to give it every day..." turns out there's benefits to being out among the herd every day. Ranchers aren't very technical folks, but they tend to know their profession extremely well. Above all else, they need things that reliably work. I remember switching to electric branding irons... like they made branding faster, gave a more consistent brand, and had faster heal times -- but it wasn't just a decision to switch the whole herd, we had to test them out on a small group... and learn and then apply what we learned to the larger herd the next year. A ranch was, honestly, a sort of perpetual experiment. There's very little "We do it this way because that's the way it's always been done..." If you talk to one generation of cattlemen vs. their fathers, the sons will inherit a bunch of the equipment, but they almost always want to change things up. I'd wager no group of fathers and sons on the planet butt heads more.
skybrian 4y ago
Agricultural experiments play a prominent role in the history of statistics [1]. Yes, everything varies, so they do trials using different squares of land in the same field. So I think it's a little much to say you can't do A/B tests, but it's a good point that they have to be pilot studies, not testing things "in production" on people's farms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments
AlbertCory 4y ago
Interesting question: what other industries share some of these characteristics (but not all)? I think some people in tech assume that a lot of advantages we have are present everywhere, but they're not, entirely. A lot of industries share some of this innate conservatism, but in different degrees. The first one that occurs to me is medical. Elizabeth Holmes' big problem (besides being dishonest, of course) was that she thought she could apply the Steve Jobs paradigm to medical testing. She would say "first they fight you, then you change the world" as if that would work everywhere. It doesn't. Your risks are enormously higher in medical, and there are government regulations everywhere you look. But there are probably other industries like that, too. Autos, maybe.
ryzvonusef 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/@smartereveryday/search?query=farm https://www.youtube.com/@smartereveryday/search?query=farm Smarter everyday has some videos on practical application of agri-tech
tacitusarc 4y ago
I am friends with some local farmers who have a multigenerational farm with a few thousand acres, mostly wheat production. Talking with them, the single fact that surprised me the most is how short the lifespan of a combine is. Those things break all the time, are very difficult to repair, and parts can be insanely expensive, and only reliably last a decade or so. Another thing is that no one makes equipment for hills and that makes their lives harder. Another reason they are distrustful of new startups is they need parts and the ability to repair incredibly expensive equipment for about a decade, and often startups don’t last that long.
jmatthewpryor 4y ago
The thing that a lot of people tend to get confused about is the difference between an innovation that can delivery some sort of ROI for a farmer and a venture-backable opportunity. It is true that there is a lot of misunderstanding on the ag and tech sides, but also a lot of mis-application of 'templated' thinking - we've written quite a bit about it - one key piece is here: https://tenacious.ventures/notes/how-silicon-valley-set-agtech-back-a-decade-b9d46e0acf0d https://tenacious.ventures/notes/how-silicon-valley-set-agte... Also, it is important to understand the difference between genuine innovation in the agrifood value chain, and on-farm efficiency improvements. As has been pointed out here, farmers are only part of the story, and whilst they are often the user of an innovation, it is often the case that others downstream of them are the true economic beneficiaries - this can only really be solved with business model design, not just technological innovation. There is a tendency to confuse the user with the beneficiary - https://adnause.am/notes/confusing-user-beneficiary-messy-middle https://adnause.am/notes/confusing-user-beneficiary-messy-mi... In terms of how we review investment opportunities from founders, we need to see both elements of technological innovation and business model innovation. All the comments about the challenges in providing solutions for agriculture are valid and often present major challenges for adoption. But in my experience, adoption at scale is more often a business model problem, not a market or technical problem. It is definitely the case that many problems that are present in the agrifood value chain aren't inherently 'venture scale' - and often that can be a big challenges for founders who can't self fund. Creating and running a profitable, self-funded company is a great endeavor; possibly very rewarding and impactful, but that is not the same as looking for investment for a company that hasn't yet solved their own venture-scale business model challenges.

118 points by rmason 4y ago

"Imagine getting paid 50 times in your career instead of 50 times a year".

coin 4y ago

> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) This is done all the time. When evaluating a new seed variety, a different seed spacing, a new nitrogen application, farmers will do a test plot next to the control. If things looks good then they'll expand the new change to more acreage.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
This is really funny to me after living near a place that has done exactly that for ~100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Experimental_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Experimental_Farm
- monsieurbanana 4y ago
  Or the Incas, experimenting with micro climates 500 years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin)
- fastaguy88 4y ago
  Or almost 150. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrow_Plots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrow_Plots The US Dept of Agriculture funds comparative research and agricultural extension agents help put it into practice. They actually know quite a bit about technology adoption in agriculture.
kcb 4y ago
That is a pretty wild statement. I would assume A/B testing in farming has happened for centuries. Farms are made up of a multitude of fields. And so are a perfect environment for A/B testing. I did A in one field but stuck with method B in the other and saw that the former crops had higher yield, etc. etc.
jvm___ 4y ago
There's farms near me that have a field of corn, every 5 rows has a different sign up with some sort of code and a logo for a seed company. I'd always assumed thats what they were testing.
- robbiep 4y ago
  Those are field trials of different varieties. It’s not at scale
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    Could also be producing hybrid seed.
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      This. The big clue is signs for a seed company. As a teen I detasseled corn for a couple of summers - pulling the male tassels off the female rows of corn to create hybrids.
    - jcampbell1 4y ago
      I have worked on a corn seed farm detassling odd rows of corn. It is every other row for seed hybridization. The rows were marked, but it was pretty obvious because the two heirloom varieties were distinct. If there were more that two varieties, it is not seed production.
      - hinkley 4y ago
        I used to live in a town in farm country and saw a lot of it from the back of a bicycle. There’s not much to look at when the corn is high except the corn. I don’t know if things have changed in the last couple of decades but it was pretty common for detassling to remove the pollen from four or five rows at a go, rather than odd/even pairings.
bagels 4y ago
I came in to make the same point. You can reserve a small part of your crop for the experiment. This is exactly akin to how social media companies do growth hacking. Try something new out on x% of the users/crops, measure the results. You don't have to risk your whole farm on it, unless there is a huge capital expense on equipment.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
Some of the newer farm equipment can actually apply different amounts of fertilizer (or whatever) to different parts of the same field, based on GPS and a grid of soil samples.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  This is precision ag and it’s been around for quite some time.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Someone wa pitching a project for this when I was at NCSA (which was less than two miles from corn fields) in the 90’s, as Netscape was taking over browser development and they needed something else to do (NSF is not fond of competing with commercial interests.) That would have been an excellent match but I was barely interested and others were less enthusiastic. They started a collaborative software project instead. Which was cool but CRDT wouldn’t be invented for another five to ten years so I wonder what happened with that project.
HPsquared 4y ago
It's hard to have a truly controlled experiment though. The result will be valid for that farm, on that year - but next year the conditions will be different, etc.
- Kamq 4y ago
  That's true of all A/B testing for real world things isn't it? You could have measured increased traffic because something was trending on twitter/HN instead of the UI changes you just deployed. Might be completely different tomorrow.
- jeltz 4y ago
  That is true for A/B tests too in tech.
hinkley 4y ago
I’m in the permaculture community and most of these guys have stories about their neighbors looking at them like they’re crazy for years until there’s a catastrophic event and they see the land across their fence is doing better than theirs and only then do they start asking for advice, which they then take very slowly. For the people who think this is where we need to go to fight soil loss and global warming, this sort of learning by osmosis is very, very frustrating. People blame these guys for making their money off of speaking engagements and consulting, but it’s going to take a lot to get to the point where your neighbors are on board. If you want to teach someone you have to seek them out, not just work locally.
vharuck 4y ago
If I picked up a random statistics textbook printed before 1990, I'd be very surprised to not see numerous word problems about crop treatments.

rgarrett88 4y ago

> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) Pretty sure you can subdivide a farm however you want and use different methods across them. Iteration cycles are in the year time frame but otherwise seems pretty easy to test whatever you want.

elcritch 4y ago
A buddy of mine works at Simplot and does exactly that. He works on a team that designs experiments and run them on crops. Now smaller farms probably don’t, but then again smaller startups often don’t have A/B infrastructure setup either. Edit: Come to think of it, despite this being an article on what SV doesn’t get about AG they talk of A/B testing as some special SV only thing. In every other field they’d just call it “scientific experiments”.

Animats 4y ago

The key insight Silicon Valley lacks about agriculture is that there is little potential for a big win. Major improvements mean 10% of something, not 10x. US agriculture is already highly efficient. On the down side, there's potential for a big loss if you screw up.

ijoijiuiuni 4y ago
Vertical farming can do 10X, GMOs can do 10x, urban farming can cut out 90% of transportation costs, (not exactly what you mean but getting people to eat less meat would 100x our efficiencies) there is still room for improvement.
- Teever 4y ago
  Even in a place like Canada where so much food is imported, transportation only adds up to about 12pc of the total energy cost. I'm not aware of any vertical farm that is 10x as efficient as a regular farm.
  - boomanaiden154 4y ago
    It depends upon what you're defining efficiency as. In terms of yield per acre, there are estimates that yield per acre can increase by a lot more [1]. I haven't seen anything more efficient energy or cost wise (outside of a couple types of plants, really just microgreens). [1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002655117
    - itsyaboi 4y ago
      Land is cheap. Efficiency in this context is units of product per dollar spent.
      - musasabi 4y ago
        Or, perhaps, carbon emitted. Either way vertical farms are a huge loser for anything outside of niche products.

Sytten 4y ago

Farmers also hate to be dependant on closed technology they can't fix themselves. When you are out in the field and something breaks, you can't wait 3 days for the dealer to come around and plug a computer in to fix things... There is a reason farmers hack their John Deer or use older equipment like my dad does.

seydor 4y ago

thats a bit of hyperbole, farmers do like to experiment as well, and bad yields do happen, they are not risk averse. at this point there are many places in the world that crave for more agtech

daniel-cussen 4y ago
[dead]

radicalbyte 4y ago

Silicon Valley is great at tech because it has a high concentration of tech companies and top universities. It doesn't have that for agriculture. The "Silicon Valley" of agriculture is in Wageningen, a small university town in The Netherlands. In the surrounding area you have a huge number of food/agri-tech firms.

nradov 4y ago
There is a huge amount of agriculture within driving distance of Silicon Valley. The main obstacle is culture, not distance. Most people I meet in Silicon Valley have zero clue how food is actually produced, and lack the proper respect for farmers and ranchers.
- golemiprague 4y ago
  [dead]
marvindanig 4y ago
i’m not sure if silicon valley is great at technical prowess anymore. the hype machine has run its course and the tech is more proliferated and distributed than ever before.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It depends what counts as "technical prowess". You've got to go elsewhere if you want microchips with the finest available features.
genocidicbunny 4y ago
It's not exactly Silicon Valley, but UC Davis, which has a lot of Ag programs, is within fairly short driving distance of the bay area (to the point where some consider it potentially part of the 'greater bay area')
Biologist123 4y ago
I had a visit to Wageningen and really enjoyed it. As a gift for delivering a lecture I received a cookbook for insects. I never used it, but the cookbook has pride of place on my shelf.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lostlogin 4y ago

World food production needs to double by 2050? Why? Population modelling doesn’t have a doubling in that time. I’ve read the link but suspect I need a EILI5. https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth

ido 4y ago
Perhaps improvement in the quality of life (=wealth) of the population as well as population increase? The world is incredibly richer today than in 1992 (particularly Asia, which accounts for about 60% of the world's population).
bagels 4y ago
Increasing worldwide living standards of living leading to increased consumption, and increased meat consumption?
dredmorbius 4y ago
I suspect a large aspect of this is not merely caloric sufficiency (already an issue), but protein, for which much of the world remains deficient. Protein, whether animal or plant-based, is both an essential macronutrient and sees far lower productivity than staple (carbohydrate) crops. The Green Revolution and following developments have seen major enhancements in the productivity of rice, wheat, and maize. Far less so of soyabeans, whether for human or animal consumption. Beef cattle is amongst the least productive (and most desired) animal proteins. But pork, poultry, eggs, and dairy, as well as farmed fish also require feed, including protein-rich feeds, to develop. (I'm not making arguments over the morality or benefits of meat vs. vegetarian or vegan diets, though that's also a concern, especially concerning land-use, degradation, and greenhouse-gas emissions, of which animal metabolism alone is a very significant source.) Protein-deficient diets, especially amongst infants and children, are a major contributing factor to developmental and cognitive deficiencies. So improving global standards of living will be dependent on increasing overall protein availability.

boomanaiden154 4y ago

> To feed a growing population, we need to double global food production by 2050, but we can't double agricultural acres. We need more food (or more high-quality calories and nutrients) per acre. That's where technology comes in. While it's true that increasing global food production is one way to enable food security for a growing population, I think it's also pertinent to analyze the inefficiencies within our current supply chains. Food waste is a big issue[1] and efficiencies gained in this area could also have a big impact. [1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.123952 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.123952

mlindner 4y ago
Food is ridiculously cheap to create right now to the point much of it is turned into fuel. Once it becomes more constrained, food production will increase as demand causes additional supply. Those inefficiencies similarly become removed once demand is higher.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

I used to specialize in Agtech as a consultant. It's a weird space. [Disclaimer, this is my experience of the Australia and NZ scene, not much Silicon Valley involved] The gap between "people who know ag" and "people who know tech" is just vast. And I sensed no great urgency to bridge the gap. I tried myself - talked to every farmer I could, moved to a working farm, even had a go at weighing cattle and applying treatment [0] (yes I am wearing slacks here!) but I didn't see a lot of people around me really interested in understanding the "other side". There's also reluctance to address the connectivity issues. For most software developers internet connectivity is an ever present resource and it's a fault if it's gone. That doesn't really apply if you're deploying rurally, but multi-master distributed systems are hard and few people want to accept that's what they're dealing with. In the end I came to the conclusion that no one appreciated my industry knowledge in AgTech (I must be one of the most experienced livestock identification software professionals on planet earth...) and it wasn't really worth investing my time in. That's not to say I would never work in the field again, but it would be in the capacity of working in offline systems, not my fairly extensive knowledge of cattle identification tags. [0] https://lewiscampbell.tech/img/CattleTreatment.jpg https://lewiscampbell.tech/img/CattleTreatment.jpg

devwastaken 4y ago
I recall my father hating technology because the irrigation systems for crop circles would call him when they stop functioning at night. Likely could just wait until morning for a motor or solenoid to be replaced.
- kirubakaran 4y ago
  RFS[0]: PageDuty for AgTech [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
EdwardDiego 4y ago
I've often wanted to look into AgTech (grew up chasing sheep in Canterbury) but people I've talked to in that space say that it's incredibly hard to grow sales, farmers are inherently conservative on new expenses, what was your experience of that?

agtech_startup 4y ago

I launched a self-funded startup to focus on technologies I developed that have the potential to deliver significant benefits to indoor farming operations. We launched in 2019, yet, the pandemic put everything on hold for almost two years. This year we finally completed our first installation (paying customer) at a farm in Singapore. Yes, we are US-based. Due to circumstances and opportunity our first installation happens to be abroad. I applied to YC for multiple batches (I don't remember if it was three or four times). Rejected every time. I think it was an algo-rejection far more so than someone explicitly rejecting the company. We have shipping hardware and software products, a sizable first sale and at least one happy customer. This isn't an idea, it's a validated opportunity with solid execution. Our customer is looking to expand and wants more of our product. Lots more. We also have a product plan that will expand into other related domains. I don't know if I have a solid opinion about SV and agriculture. Starting 2023 I will be out there making a solid effort to seek funding to be able to press on the accelerator. I think $5MM would be about right. I will also be focusing on IP, which, like it or not, can be crucially important when dealing with hardware that could potentially unlock a billion dollar business. My only attempt at fund-raising has been applying to YC, conversations with our customer (who might be interested in investing) and a good friend of mine with deep and wide business experience in globally recognized companies. I guess I will soon learn what SV has to say about indoor farming startups. Being self-funded is great in that you can just drive and not worry about anything that might compromise your ability to focus on the mission. That said, at some point, if you are going to grow, you either need a series of massive (and profitable) sales to supporting customers who will wait for you to deliver (hardware takes time to build, etc.) or a strong cash infusion to front-load development and manufacturing. In looking at this industry I see companies who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, even over a billion, and are flaming out. As an SV outsider, I see this as a syndrome of sorts. I view it as companies who might not have a reasonably solid business or product plan just trying to, in a way, force their way into a market position by burning cash. This is very, very different from self-funding a startup, doing all the R&D, manufacturing and shipping product, having a satisfied customer who wants more and, at the same time, walking away with a ~33% gross profit margin. I can understand burning cash to accelerate, yet, I think, the fundamentals have to be there in the first place. If I were to guess, I might say that this could be the part a lot of SV startups get wrong. Anyone can pretend they know how to sail with good, gentle, plentiful and steady wind.

ummonk 4y ago

Point 4 seems more like a cultural thing than a technical limitation, at least for large farms. Why not split the farm into a few pieces and apply different procedures to each piece?

jeff-davis 4y ago

Naive question: why can't A/B testing work by implementing the tech on a few fields and not on others?

SteveGerencser 4y ago
Farms and farmers have been doing A/B testing for generations with seeds, fertilizers, weed/pest control, feed, medicines, and on and on. And it's a PITA. Running 2 different, smaller, operations takes a lot more time and money than just one larger operation. My wife is 100% engineer and it took me 6 years to even try something different on our (her) farm.

SteveGerencser 4y ago

As someone with a foot in both worlds, I have been in tech for 30+ years and we also own a small cattle farm (can't even call it a ranch), there is a staggering amount of distrust in technology of any kind in the ag world. Every new piece of tech comes saddled with some license, or dealer only issue, or the old tractor/equipment could break down and I could fix it in the field on my own in a few hours, vs my new equipment broke down and now I have to wait for some service tech (there are never enough when you need them) to come out and reset some computer or replace a piece of software/tech at a ridiculous cost. And I can't work on it on my own. Add to that, many farmers have been farming the same piece of ground for generations and they know everything they need to know about their land to at least break even most years and no piece of tech or software will improve those numbers enough for them to justify the cost/risk or the developers to justify the minimal profit growth.

prottog 4y ago
I hear the same about new tech-enabled equipment. I've always been curious, is there a market for continuing production of old-school, simple tractors and the like? Or is it one of those things that people complain about a lot but won't actually spend their own money to buy dumb equipment that may be less convenient or productive?
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  I'm more curious about why there isn't a market to offer what farmers want. Why not make modern, serviceable equipment with open code and published APIs and schematics? This just screams "market failure" to me.
  - SteveGerencser 4y ago
    My primary tractor is 4 years old and it has been in the shop more often than my 35 year old tractor. Most of us, especially the smaller guys, run equipment until it is quite literally gone. The biggest issue that bringing new equipment to market is incredibly expensive and you are competing with all of the green, red and blue (and now orange) guys that have been building equipment for generations. The new issue is looking for a revenue stream for the manufacturers. My Case while not on a service contract, has very few owner servicable parts to it. My '94 Kubota still does the job but Kubota makes about $200/ year on me at most since I can fix everything on it myself. It is by no means a market failure, the market is working exactly as it's supposed to. It's just that people think that the market is there for the farmers when it's really there for the equipment and inputs manufacturers.

AngryData 4y ago

I think most people have no idea how thin agricultural margins are to start with. They see that some farmer bought a $500,000 combine and think they got money just to throw around, but that combine is expected to last the next 40+ years and work near flawlessly for every harvest while performing multiple different functions simultaneously in a dirty and uneven environment. There is no alternative to a combine harvester since it is replacing the work of reaping, threshing, and winnowing all at once which without a combine would take thousands of man hours to do by hand every harvest. They might not expect for it to pay itself off for 30+ years. Nearly all farms operate on single digit percentage returns, a large number of them have been floating along on 1% or less for decades hoping to hit a bumper crop once or twice more in their life time. If they throw a million dollars at fertilizer, fuel, seeds, maintenance for their tractors, barns, silos, dryers, and any other specialized equipment for their particular crop, then earning $50,000 on that million dollar investment would be considered a great success. Earning $10,000 would still be considered some success because it is not uncommon to run multiple negative years in a row. Yield can vary 30% in a year from normal weather patterns, and the market can vary just as much or more, and they don't always align in a farmer's favor. So if your tech can't handle 99.99% uptime, and be fixed in the field when it does break on short notice with basic hand tools, farmers don't want it. A single failure at the wrong time can dump half of your million dollar investment down the drain which you were only hoping to make a couple dollars from to start with. It could set them back a literal decade or more financially because some shitty widget or sensor failed and they either couldn't repair it or the fault wasn't detected until it was too late.

Biologist123 4y ago
I appreciate the risk adjusted returns are poor. My question then is why farms as assets are so valuable. Seems like a disconnect somewhere.
- malandrew 4y ago
  I was looking into this recently and while I didn't find a great analysis, the impression I got was that financialization of the economy is a big part of this. There are tons of tax benefits for owning land and for many of them you don't even need to produce anything or even have a working farm. You just need to own eligible land. Combine this with the fact that farmers are often capital poor so a lot of farmland is leased from those that own it. We basically have the same issue that renters are facing in modern urban America but with farmers. Getting the financial industry out of assets we can't make more of seems like the obvious choice. https://farmfolio.net/articles/why-is-bill-gates-investing-in-farmland-how-much-does-he-own/ https://farmfolio.net/articles/why-is-bill-gates-investing-i... https://www.knightfrank.com/research/article/2022-06-08-why-are-uk-farmland-values-continuing-to-rise https://www.knightfrank.com/research/article/2022-06-08-why-...

dbg31415 4y ago

> 4. You can't A/B test a farm (yet) On the ranch I grew up on, we would "A/B" test new bulls all the time. Literally the first year we would try a new bull, we'd only give him access to 15-20 cows. If the calves came out easy, and grew fast, he'd get put into circulation with the larger herd. We also tried different things with crops... plant one side of the field one way, plant the other side a different way. Different kinds of fencing in different pastures... I can't remember a year when we didn't test a new kind of fence. Fencing takes so much labor, even something that shaved a few days off the maintenance each year would have been welcome improvement. I remember we tried moving gates to the corners one year, just to see if it made moving cattle between pastures easier. It did! We tried a lot of different rotation patterns, too. Mostly to try and reduce bugs and have to spray for flies less. Perpetually testing new medicines. "This pill costs more, but you don't have to give it as often, vs. that pill costs less, but you have to give it every day..." turns out there's benefits to being out among the herd every day. Ranchers aren't very technical folks, but they tend to know their profession extremely well. Above all else, they need things that reliably work. I remember switching to electric branding irons... like they made branding faster, gave a more consistent brand, and had faster heal times -- but it wasn't just a decision to switch the whole herd, we had to test them out on a small group... and learn and then apply what we learned to the larger herd the next year. A ranch was, honestly, a sort of perpetual experiment. There's very little "We do it this way because that's the way it's always been done..." If you talk to one generation of cattlemen vs. their fathers, the sons will inherit a bunch of the equipment, but they almost always want to change things up. I'd wager no group of fathers and sons on the planet butt heads more.

skybrian 4y ago

Agricultural experiments play a prominent role in the history of statistics [1]. Yes, everything varies, so they do trials using different squares of land in the same field. So I think it's a little much to say you can't do A/B tests, but it's a good point that they have to be pilot studies, not testing things "in production" on people's farms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments

AlbertCory 4y ago

Interesting question: what other industries share some of these characteristics (but not all)? I think some people in tech assume that a lot of advantages we have are present everywhere, but they're not, entirely. A lot of industries share some of this innate conservatism, but in different degrees. The first one that occurs to me is medical. Elizabeth Holmes' big problem (besides being dishonest, of course) was that she thought she could apply the Steve Jobs paradigm to medical testing. She would say "first they fight you, then you change the world" as if that would work everywhere. It doesn't. Your risks are enormously higher in medical, and there are government regulations everywhere you look. But there are probably other industries like that, too. Autos, maybe.

ryzvonusef 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/@smartereveryday/search?query=farm https://www.youtube.com/@smartereveryday/search?query=farm Smarter everyday has some videos on practical application of agri-tech

tacitusarc 4y ago

I am friends with some local farmers who have a multigenerational farm with a few thousand acres, mostly wheat production. Talking with them, the single fact that surprised me the most is how short the lifespan of a combine is. Those things break all the time, are very difficult to repair, and parts can be insanely expensive, and only reliably last a decade or so. Another thing is that no one makes equipment for hills and that makes their lives harder. Another reason they are distrustful of new startups is they need parts and the ability to repair incredibly expensive equipment for about a decade, and often startups don’t last that long.

jmatthewpryor 4y ago

The thing that a lot of people tend to get confused about is the difference between an innovation that can delivery some sort of ROI for a farmer and a venture-backable opportunity. It is true that there is a lot of misunderstanding on the ag and tech sides, but also a lot of mis-application of 'templated' thinking - we've written quite a bit about it - one key piece is here: https://tenacious.ventures/notes/how-silicon-valley-set-agtech-back-a-decade-b9d46e0acf0d https://tenacious.ventures/notes/how-silicon-valley-set-agte... Also, it is important to understand the difference between genuine innovation in the agrifood value chain, and on-farm efficiency improvements. As has been pointed out here, farmers are only part of the story, and whilst they are often the user of an innovation, it is often the case that others downstream of them are the true economic beneficiaries - this can only really be solved with business model design, not just technological innovation. There is a tendency to confuse the user with the beneficiary - https://adnause.am/notes/confusing-user-beneficiary-messy-middle https://adnause.am/notes/confusing-user-beneficiary-messy-mi... In terms of how we review investment opportunities from founders, we need to see both elements of technological innovation and business model innovation. All the comments about the challenges in providing solutions for agriculture are valid and often present major challenges for adoption. But in my experience, adoption at scale is more often a business model problem, not a market or technical problem. It is definitely the case that many problems that are present in the agrifood value chain aren't inherently 'venture scale' - and often that can be a big challenges for founders who can't self fund. Creating and running a profitable, self-funded company is a great endeavor; possibly very rewarding and impactful, but that is not the same as looking for investment for a company that hasn't yet solved their own venture-scale business model challenges.