7 ms·

High-tech farm startups are laid low by financing drought, pests

50 points by lxm 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago
Indoor farming is a solution in search of a problem.
- f6v 3y ago
  It’s a solution in search of pre-requisites which would be: 1. Unlimited free energy (like the Sun) 2. The earth turns into ice world 3. We build a colony on Mars.
- mym1990 3y ago
  Not everything needs to be a problem in order to push boundaries. Maybe it doesn’t make economic sense now, but hardly anything does until way down the road.
adamors 3y ago
https://archive.is/EwxbJ https://archive.is/EwxbJ
photochemsyn 3y ago
Headline's a bit misleading, it's only about indoor farming startups in the United States.
- ptsneves 3y ago
  More accurately it is about vertical greenhouses not having a path to profitability. My first invention was a machine that concentrated solar power, and then distributed to different levels of the vertical farm. Basically piped solar light. It never went anywhere but my dreams unfortunately. Still have the cad drawings and a prototype.
  - lbotos 3y ago
    What were the light losses like?
    - ptsneves 3y ago
      It depends on how much you want to spend on optics. The optics fit as slots, so you can put a standard mirror(0.8) and depending on the number of reflections(let us assume 6) you will have 0.8^6=25%. From what I researched at the time, in most latitudes you do not care about raw solar power as plants cannot stand it anyway. I also prioritized price and efficient optics are not cheap. The idea is that you compensate the small efficiency with the fact that your light is now free. The infrastructure is really simple and uses mirrors from your local hardware shop. The frame can be done in your home with steel profiles and can be done in scale if needed. An advantage to traditional usage of natural light is that if you want you can put an infra-red filter and have a spectrum that will not heat up your green house to the point you need temperature control. Another is that you can also put your green house in a space with natural cooling surrounding without concerning yourself with light availability. Given that the system is passive except for the tracking mechanism you also need minimal electricity.
mdorazio 3y ago
Can someone explain how the business model for indoor farming is supposed to work? Is it just for high-priced specialty crops? Having spent some time in central CA watching the massive scale of farming operations there I just don't see the logic of indoor.
- gravypod 3y ago
  If you could get a farm 50% as efficient at growth in an extremely dense area (think Manhattan) my guess is the transport cost reduction might be worth it for high cost growth. Obviously if you factor in land prices where this would make sense it stops making sense
  - andromeduck 3y ago
    Last mile is where all the costs are though. Shipping produce in bulk is cheap AF
    - ThorsBane 3y ago
      Hook up drones to the farms. Allow anyone to obtain as much fresh produce as they need via drone delivery summoned from smartphone or computer.
      - phito 3y ago
        Drone delivery does not work. It sounds cool but in practice it is terrible.
        hef19898 3y ago
        It always puzzpes me that people with zero idea how dirt cheap shipping is per unit believe drones, or moving production closer to consumers, woupd ever work from a price/cost point of view... And since the last mile is the most difficult one, supermarkets are pretty good in outspurcing that to customers.
        3y ago
35997279 3y ago
[flagged]
barathr 3y ago
We wrote up an analysis of this sort of thing from an energy perspective -- bottom line: there's no energy-efficient way for hydroponic setups to produce anything other than leafy green food crops. The energy balance is just all wrong. And it's going to be pretty difficult for vertical farms to compete with the Salinas Valley. https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf
- cinntaile 3y ago
  There is almost no data in that paper? No new research is presented. It's more like a meta-analysis but not really, is this an opinion piece?
  - barathr 3y ago
    It's a paper we wrote for a CS workshop -- that means it's necessarily a short paper, one that pulls together various threads to make a new argument.
- risyachka 3y ago
  In US? Or in general? Because I am pretty sure I've read there is a lot of very profitable indoor farms in Netherlands and other EU countries. Also, even if they are currently not profitable in US, they can easily become profitable in the next 5-10 years if climate changes more, fusion energy becomes cheap etc. The technology itself vastly outperforms traditional farms.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Fusion energy becoming cheap in 5-10 years? You’re the most optimistic person on HN if you think that’s possible! It takes decades to build a fission plant and that’s with tech that already exists! I’d say the real path to viability is cheaper renewables and food and water becoming far more expensive. The western part of the US uses an unsustainable amount of water for agriculture. That situation is going to implode in the near future. So this scenario might happen.
myself248 3y ago
Headline makes me wonder if "financing" also applies to "pests". Like are there loan weevils? Interest grubs? Stock locusts?
risyachka 3y ago
>>> He says his company has avoided the sector’s difficulties by making day-to-day farming the priority rather than growth. It expects to hit $100 million in sales this year and says it is profitable. High tech farms work great, it's mostly about a few companies that tried to be tech instead of agro that failed.
fredgrott 3y ago
To give some context.... In nature the sunlight a tree uses is somewhat more than the surface volume of the top part of the tree where the leaves are. That happens due to the characteristics of light wavelengths and the fact that the plant cells where the sunlight reactions occur are somewhat transparent. Similar to organisms in oceans the plant cells have more than one cell part tuned to more than one light wavelength so that the inner leaves are producing energy from a different light wavelength than the outer leaves. Tech farms need to re-invent their light tech to make it profitable but no one has looked at the biology of it to understand that aspect as current tech lighting usually is one light wavelength instead of the two that are needed. Okay rant off, my previous stint as a biology student rears its head again. I did check this recently, light pipes are still only one light frequency.
- lbotos 3y ago
  > but no one has looked at the biology of it to understand that aspect as current tech lighting usually is one light wavelength instead of the two that are needed. Wat. You can buy lights on HLG right now that will hit blues and reds. (And various wavelengths in between. https://horticulturelightinggroup.com/collections/lamps/products/hlg-scorpion-diablo https://horticulturelightinggroup.com/collections/lamps/prod... If you want fancier arize life2 have like 9 profiles? https://images.salsify.com/images/zji236jwdstg4q9dyc6d/HORT144-Arize-Life2-Spec-Sheet.pdf https://images.salsify.com/images/zji236jwdstg4q9dyc6d/HORT1... Apogee founder is also doing a ton of research into far red and its impact. https://www.apogeeinstruments.com/epar-sensors/ https://www.apogeeinstruments.com/epar-sensors/ What is this “second wavelength” that is being missed in your mind?
sagaro 3y ago
>Funding has all but dried up. The industry raised a record $895 million in last year’s first quarter. So far in the current quarter, the figure is about $10 million, according to data provider AgFunder. I think a big reason for this significant drop between last quarter of 2022 and first quarter of 2023 is AGI. All the money in the VC world is now flowing towards AI and all other industries are going to take a hit similar to AgTech

50 points by lxm 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago

Indoor farming is a solution in search of a problem.

f6v 3y ago
It’s a solution in search of pre-requisites which would be: 1. Unlimited free energy (like the Sun) 2. The earth turns into ice world 3. We build a colony on Mars.
mym1990 3y ago
Not everything needs to be a problem in order to push boundaries. Maybe it doesn’t make economic sense now, but hardly anything does until way down the road.

adamors 3y ago

https://archive.is/EwxbJ https://archive.is/EwxbJ

photochemsyn 3y ago

Headline's a bit misleading, it's only about indoor farming startups in the United States.

ptsneves 3y ago
More accurately it is about vertical greenhouses not having a path to profitability. My first invention was a machine that concentrated solar power, and then distributed to different levels of the vertical farm. Basically piped solar light. It never went anywhere but my dreams unfortunately. Still have the cad drawings and a prototype.
- lbotos 3y ago
  What were the light losses like?
  - ptsneves 3y ago
    It depends on how much you want to spend on optics. The optics fit as slots, so you can put a standard mirror(0.8) and depending on the number of reflections(let us assume 6) you will have 0.8^6=25%. From what I researched at the time, in most latitudes you do not care about raw solar power as plants cannot stand it anyway. I also prioritized price and efficient optics are not cheap. The idea is that you compensate the small efficiency with the fact that your light is now free. The infrastructure is really simple and uses mirrors from your local hardware shop. The frame can be done in your home with steel profiles and can be done in scale if needed. An advantage to traditional usage of natural light is that if you want you can put an infra-red filter and have a spectrum that will not heat up your green house to the point you need temperature control. Another is that you can also put your green house in a space with natural cooling surrounding without concerning yourself with light availability. Given that the system is passive except for the tracking mechanism you also need minimal electricity.

mdorazio 3y ago

Can someone explain how the business model for indoor farming is supposed to work? Is it just for high-priced specialty crops? Having spent some time in central CA watching the massive scale of farming operations there I just don't see the logic of indoor.

gravypod 3y ago
If you could get a farm 50% as efficient at growth in an extremely dense area (think Manhattan) my guess is the transport cost reduction might be worth it for high cost growth. Obviously if you factor in land prices where this would make sense it stops making sense
- andromeduck 3y ago
  Last mile is where all the costs are though. Shipping produce in bulk is cheap AF
  - ThorsBane 3y ago
    Hook up drones to the farms. Allow anyone to obtain as much fresh produce as they need via drone delivery summoned from smartphone or computer.
    - phito 3y ago
      Drone delivery does not work. It sounds cool but in practice it is terrible.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        It always puzzpes me that people with zero idea how dirt cheap shipping is per unit believe drones, or moving production closer to consumers, woupd ever work from a price/cost point of view... And since the last mile is the most difficult one, supermarkets are pretty good in outspurcing that to customers.
      - 3y ago

35997279 3y ago

[flagged]

barathr 3y ago

We wrote up an analysis of this sort of thing from an energy perspective -- bottom line: there's no energy-efficient way for hydroponic setups to produce anything other than leafy green food crops. The energy balance is just all wrong. And it's going to be pretty difficult for vertical farms to compete with the Salinas Valley. https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf

cinntaile 3y ago
There is almost no data in that paper? No new research is presented. It's more like a meta-analysis but not really, is this an opinion piece?
- barathr 3y ago
  It's a paper we wrote for a CS workshop -- that means it's necessarily a short paper, one that pulls together various threads to make a new argument.
risyachka 3y ago
In US? Or in general? Because I am pretty sure I've read there is a lot of very profitable indoor farms in Netherlands and other EU countries. Also, even if they are currently not profitable in US, they can easily become profitable in the next 5-10 years if climate changes more, fusion energy becomes cheap etc. The technology itself vastly outperforms traditional farms.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Fusion energy becoming cheap in 5-10 years? You’re the most optimistic person on HN if you think that’s possible! It takes decades to build a fission plant and that’s with tech that already exists! I’d say the real path to viability is cheaper renewables and food and water becoming far more expensive. The western part of the US uses an unsustainable amount of water for agriculture. That situation is going to implode in the near future. So this scenario might happen.

myself248 3y ago

Headline makes me wonder if "financing" also applies to "pests". Like are there loan weevils? Interest grubs? Stock locusts?

risyachka 3y ago

>>> He says his company has avoided the sector’s difficulties by making day-to-day farming the priority rather than growth. It expects to hit $100 million in sales this year and says it is profitable. High tech farms work great, it's mostly about a few companies that tried to be tech instead of agro that failed.

fredgrott 3y ago

To give some context.... In nature the sunlight a tree uses is somewhat more than the surface volume of the top part of the tree where the leaves are. That happens due to the characteristics of light wavelengths and the fact that the plant cells where the sunlight reactions occur are somewhat transparent. Similar to organisms in oceans the plant cells have more than one cell part tuned to more than one light wavelength so that the inner leaves are producing energy from a different light wavelength than the outer leaves. Tech farms need to re-invent their light tech to make it profitable but no one has looked at the biology of it to understand that aspect as current tech lighting usually is one light wavelength instead of the two that are needed. Okay rant off, my previous stint as a biology student rears its head again. I did check this recently, light pipes are still only one light frequency.

lbotos 3y ago
> but no one has looked at the biology of it to understand that aspect as current tech lighting usually is one light wavelength instead of the two that are needed. Wat. You can buy lights on HLG right now that will hit blues and reds. (And various wavelengths in between. https://horticulturelightinggroup.com/collections/lamps/products/hlg-scorpion-diablo https://horticulturelightinggroup.com/collections/lamps/prod... If you want fancier arize life2 have like 9 profiles? https://images.salsify.com/images/zji236jwdstg4q9dyc6d/HORT144-Arize-Life2-Spec-Sheet.pdf https://images.salsify.com/images/zji236jwdstg4q9dyc6d/HORT1... Apogee founder is also doing a ton of research into far red and its impact. https://www.apogeeinstruments.com/epar-sensors/ https://www.apogeeinstruments.com/epar-sensors/ What is this “second wavelength” that is being missed in your mind?

sagaro 3y ago

>Funding has all but dried up. The industry raised a record $895 million in last year’s first quarter. So far in the current quarter, the figure is about $10 million, according to data provider AgFunder. I think a big reason for this significant drop between last quarter of 2022 and first quarter of 2023 is AGI. All the money in the VC world is now flowing towards AI and all other industries are going to take a hit similar to AgTech