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I've been working in ag-tech for about 10 years, having spent the prior 10 years in other kinds of startups/tech companies. When I see the new ag-tech startups

I've been working in ag-tech for about 10 years, having spent the prior 10 years in other kinds of startups/tech companies. When I see the new ag-tech startups coming out of accelerators or being established by supposedly seasoned entrepreneurs, the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein. They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere. And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. And whilst some things could/should be improved (environmental externalities and resource consumption being the most significant), these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field.

fennecbutt 3y ago
From horizontal to vertical is a huge deal though. The US might have a load of space but plenty of others countries would massively benefit from converting land used for farming into land used for housing where possible. Additionally it means that farming can happen on the edges of towns and cities rather than in the wops, ie fewer huge delivery trucks moving produce around; it can essentially be grown down the road.
notadev 3y ago
If not vertical farming, weed killing lasers, an ze bugs, where is innovation needed in AgTech?
nitwit005 3y ago
> these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field. Many of the revolutionary changes in agriculture in the last century came from outsiders. They just stopped being outsiders once they were part of the industry. Phrasing it like these people are going and telling growers/experts they're stupid is a false portrayal. No one is going and spitting in their faces like that. They think their new idea will improve efficiency somehow, but that's not an insult.
doener 3y ago
I believe there is already a very decisive lever for the negative ecological (and to some extent also health-related) effects of agriculture. However, this is less on the supply side than on the demand side: less animal protein and more plant protein would solve a lot of problems at once.
- realusername 3y ago
  Yes, that's basically it, most of the environmental problems are due to the inefficiencies of the meat production which you can't realistically solve by tech. What people think as a technical problem is in reality a social problem.
gizmo 3y ago
> They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere. You see the same in construction. All the real innovation is in more mundane stuff like flexible piping (as opposed to rigid), adhesives that dry quicker, insulation foam, laser levels, self-tapping screws. As opposed to prefab construction, construction robots, or VR glasses.
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  Everytime I see one of those silly concrete extruding robots with claims that it will somehow replace some portion of residential construction I just shake my head.
tristor 3y ago
The behavior here is largely because the investors and the founders don’t come from an agricultural background, they’re born and bred urbanites who think they’re inherently superior to the rubes in the flyover states, rather than realizing that agriculture is the most mature of all industries and the average successful farmer is effectively a renaissance man. My farmer family members are brilliant at math, have masters degrees (and a Ph.D in one case), and understand business accounting better than most business people because agriculture has very thin margins and is a ruthless business for smaller operators. They commonly encounter “Brads and Chads from the city” who think anyone that lives more than 20 miles from a Walmart is a stupid hick that failed out of elementary school and needs a savior that knows better than they what is good for them. The same attitudes that funnel stupid money into agtech boondoggles is the one that fuels the urban/rural sociopolitical divide in America, and I will give you a hint, it’s not the rural folks that are the condescending assholes here.
- quantified 3y ago
  Interestingly, this story is about founders from Berlin. Look past the place and business names, imagine North American ones, it fits. But it's not a Silicon Valley or American story. And in this case looks to have classic business problems, like salespeople selling things that can't be delivered. As well as the Ag issues, whether or not those would be solvable.
- theoldlove 3y ago
  I do find it a little amusing to think that proximity to a Walmart (!) is a marker of the arrogant urbanite. I’ve never gone to Walmart as frequently as I did in a town of 10k in rural Iowa, and here in the NY suburbs it looks like the closest Walmart is a 19 mile drive.
  - tristor 3y ago
    If I wanted to be snarky I would have said Whole Foods, but Walmart is universal in the US.
CipherThrowaway 3y ago
>They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere. I think we can safely say this mentality goes well beyond ag-tech. There seems to be a founder/engineer specific flavor of "epistemic trespassing" - especially with respect to fields that tech types look down on as banal or unsophisticated. Outsiders can make valuable contributions to fields beyond their own, but I'd imagine the chance of doing so steeply diminishes with arrogance. If you walk into a market thinking everyone is an idiot waiting to be disrupted, get ready to fail hard.
fusslo 3y ago
I agree and love your tone, but can I just share my naive view as someone who once interviewed for an AG startup? Farming seems vulnerable. First, we hear stories about patented crop strains and mega-companies suing small farmers. Second, we hear crops are engineered to grow fast and big, with little regard of flavor. Third, we hear about farmers having to reverse engineer their own equipment. Fourth, and most importantly, we hear how the farming industry relies heavily on the poor and vulnerable in order to pick and process crops at reasonable labor prices. It seems like there are issues in farming that fit square into that tech-meets-social-justice. On the surface it makes sense to approach the problem differently (aka 'disrupt') in order to: 1. tackle a huge industry (big problem space), 2. provide tastier food closer to home (good appeal to the market), 3. not exploit people (social justice) I used the word 'seems' a lot, because thats only the impression I've gotten. I have no idea if it's true.
- nradov 3y ago
  Picking and processing crops is hard work, but the people doing it are not particularly poor by global standards. Drive past the strawberry fields around Watsonville and look at the cars that the workers have parked along the road. A number of companies are working on berry picking robots. This is a hard engineering problem due to the fragility of the fruit. They have prototypes working reasonably well and someone will probably have a viable commercial product within a decade. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-26/strawberry-picking-robots-california https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-26/strawberry...
- veddox 3y ago
  All the problems you address are absolutely there. But I have to say I have become pretty allergic whenever I hear anybody talk about "disrupting" an existing industry, for two reasons: (1) Existing industries are usually that way for a reason; often outsiders don't understand this until they have tried (and failed) to change things. (2) In those cases where industries were "successfully disrupted", I have the impression the result often just ended up exploiting people in different ways (looking at you, Uber and AirBnB.)
  - 3y ago
rewmie 3y ago
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sailingparrot 3y ago
> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. if insiders think it's "mostly fine", that might explain why you only see outsiders coming in with radical ideas. Sure farming is mostly fine at producing food efficiently. And coal is mostly fine for producing electricity and oil is mostly fine to fuel our cars. All those things are mostly fine to achieve their primary goal, they are absolutely not fine once you consider externalities. You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved. It's not small and that's why it's not a flawed premise. Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity. I do agree with you though that this can't be solved by a bunch of technologist in isolation. Rocket-industry insiders also thought our one-time use rockets were mostly fine and having a reusable rocket was a pipe dream anyway. That took an outsider to change the status quo and now companies that used to be at the top like Arianespace are a decade behind.
- Whoppertime 3y ago
  We have gotten rid of the deadliest byproducts. https://www.statista.com/statistics/501284/volume-of-nitrogen-oxides-emissions-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/501284/volume-of-nitroge... Rate of NOx have plummeted since the 1979 Nitrogen Oxide Protocol. If we focus on byproducts which cause Acid Rain and not just generic 'carbon', a lot of progress has been made since Nixon founded the EPA in 1970, mostly in the early years
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Agriculture doesn't use so much land because it needs to; it uses so much land because that's the cheapest way of producing food. There are lots of existing technologies that could produce more food per acre, but they are not economically viable. One example: greenhouses. Land use is primarily a political/economical problem, not a technological one.
  - sailingparrot 3y ago
    > Agriculture doesn't use so much land because it needs to; it uses so much land because that's the cheapest way of producing food. And that's precisely why there is an opportunity here that is attracting entrepreneurs: How to get farming techniques using less land to be as economically viable (or more) than traditional farming techniques. Coal also was the cheapest way of producing electricity, but after 30+ years of investment in wind and solar it's now getting completely phased out. That happens only by having people seeing the long term problem and working on better ways of doing things long before they are actually economically viable.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
People have no idea how efficient farming is. In 1260 the price of wheat was 6- 8 shillings (~1/3 pound sterling) per bushel (60 pounds). By the early 20th century, it was about 1 £/bushel. At that point the US became the efficient grower and dominant currency, and so switching from pounds sterling to dollars at the rate at the time of $5/£1 is appropriate. Today wheat is $6.50 per barrel. Put another way, the price of wheat in the dominant currency has ~tripled in 750 years. That's an inflation rate of ~0.1%. Put another way, a typical Saskatchewan dryland wheat farm is about 5,000 - 10,000 acres per employee or operator in size. That 5,000-10,000 acres will produce enough calories to feed ~100,000 people. (Those acres will also require ~$10M in capital and ~$1M in annual operating expenses) Put a third way, modern agriculture can provide enough grains and legumes to feed somebody for around 30 cents per day at bulk prices.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  Certain crops are certainly efficient. I’m not involved in ag-tech, but the ideas I’ve seen aren’t really going after the efficient (and government incentivized) crops, but rather the more labor and resource (human and natural) intensive ones as well as ones that benefit from proximity to consumers.
- azalemeth 3y ago
  You raise some very good points – but I think that looking at the monetary price of wheat is a particularly bad example in England because of the Assize of Bread and Ale [1] which ran from about the 13th century until being repealed in 1836 (!) and later protectionist issues like the Corn laws [2] across "the empire". In many ways these laws directly tied the strength of the currency to the prevailing value of wheat – a very different sort of gold standard(!) – and occasionally caused massive economic difficulties as a result (I remember a story involving the value of silver, Isaac Newton, and shippers directly clipping or smelting coins and moving the metal to amsterdam to sell at a profit compared to the value of the coin, all indirectly powered by the very variable wheat). Your broader point about the pricing of wheat definitely stands though: in the 13th century, wheat drove the economy; as we got better at trading and ultimately the industrial agricultural revolution both served to reduce the variability of the harvest on macroeconomic climes and ever since really the black death we've been in a society where the relative power of the grain (if not its importance!) has steadily declined. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws [3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/219/1/3/1472781?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/219/1/3/14727...
adwn 3y ago
> They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere. * The car wasn't invented by insiders from the horse-drawn carriage industry. * Electric lighting wasn't invented by insiders from the candle industry. * Airplanes weren't invented by insiders from the balloon industry. * The development of the modern smartphone wasn't driven by insiders from the mobile phone industry. * The development of reusable orbital rockets wasn't driven by insiders from the rocket industry. > And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. That's exactly the kind of bias that makes industry insiders (usually) unable to revolutionize their own field. Sure, many outsiders will fail, but they'll at least try, and one of them might actually succeed. However, I believe it can be very beneficial - maybe even essential - to have experienced advisors from the established industry, provided that they haven't lost the ability to see and recognize the problems and inefficiencies of "doing it the old way".
at_a_remove 3y ago
I think you're mostly right, but the weed-killing laser robots are less about efficiency and more about herbicides and pesticides. Those are a large market and diverting money from that to weed-killing laser robots could be a big payday for somebody.
oneshtein 3y ago
> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. Modern agriculture is good at producing of astonishing quantities of calorie-rich food, which makes people obese because of lack of nutrients. 4.7M dies per year because of obesity, which, of course, is not a problem for those, who produces bland food.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
The weed-killing robot products seem qualitatively different from the other tech, assuming it can be scaled. We probably should develop a technological alternative to massive herbicidal over-use, and computer vision stands a chance of being cheap enough to provide it.
- alan-crowe 3y ago
  My reference point for this kind of thing is the video cassette recorder (VCR). Trusting to memory I think that they entered the consumer market at around $700 and were down to around $100 by the time they were obsolete. But before they reached the consumer market, they were a super-expensive professional item. Getting helical scan VCRs (a high precision, complicated electro-mechanical technology) to the consumer market involved impossible price reductions, just to reach the consume price point of $700. I never expected further big price reductions to follow and was wrong. A weed killing laser robot seems obviously stupid - an expensive electro-mechanical system generating trivial value with each weed zapped. There is no way to get the price down low enough for this to make sense. But CD players have servo control of the tracking and focus of the laser. Much lower power than needed for weed wacking, but much faster and more accurate than needed and very cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplLkxBsqQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplLkxBsqQo Adequate cameras are cheap enough. AI vision processing is on a roll and we can look forward to huge price falls. The technology looks promising from the outside.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    My reference point is electric cars. They were a complete non-starter, all but physically impossible because the energy density of batteries was so incredibly much lower than that of gas. Then batteries got better, and hybrids came out that had dramatically better mileage than ICE cars. But they were expensive, and looked weird, and electric cars still weren't possible. Then electric cars came out that were expensive, and low range, but pretty viable for city driving. But the range would never match ICE cars, and they'd always be to expensive. We're now at a point where the infrastructure and economics hasn't caught up, and the range is still arguably a little low for super long road trips, but once we get working fast chargers saturating most transit corridors, and once we get cheaper, smaller cars offered, we'll be pretty much there. From "The physics really just don't seem to add up" to "Well they're a little pricey" in, what, thirty years?
jondwillis 3y ago
As a journeyman gardener, I have really been interested in how to scale up no/low-till, no/low herbicide and pesticide, regenerative soil practices. From what I have seen so far, I think the market forces (e.g. most food people eat is unconscious, taken for granted, is a total commodity) are a major driver of the status quo. Why improve your negative externality industrial practices when you can get organic certified, get your product in Amazon Whole Foods, and outcompete more “ethical” growers?
cushychicken 3y ago
…these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field. Couldn’t have said it better myself, as a former ag tech employee who worked for one of the tech god complex people.
hengheng 3y ago
> the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein. Ah, are drones finally gone? I'd love to tell farmers things about their land that I saw from above which they already know, for a horrendous price, and fly at a time that's no use to them.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
Not exactly. I've entertained the idea of vertical farming because it can make fresh food possible in the core of the densest cities. It can also reuse energy for heating buildings to heat greenhouses. So it's an energy play. Laser weed killing isn't just about efficiency. It could mean eliminating the pesticides and the diseases they may be causing. Insect protein seems to be loved by the vegetarians who don't see eating insects like eating beef. In other words, efficiency is only part of the mix.
tivert 3y ago
> When I see the new ag-tech startups coming out of accelerators or being established by supposedly seasoned entrepreneurs, the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein. > They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere. It's also based on an arrogant assumption that SV techies are smart, everyone else is stupid, and all you need to do to fix a problem is throw some techies with a bad cases of Engineer's Disease at it to "disrupt" the industry. > ...these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field. That's a message that every software engineer needs to be reminded of daily. There's a serious problem with respecting the expertise and knowledge of people in other domains.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
It's a problem with so many startups. Some arrogant observer sees an industry from the outside, makes assumptions about it, maybe catches a good wave due to investor money, then unsurprisingly flounders, because they didn't approach the problem as an insider with skin in the game, tackling a known problem with known customers. No, they did it as an outsider, with no tangible knowledge of the problem or the industry. And they're arrogant because among the assumptions they've made is that the incumbents are stupid. Especially if it's agriculture, "Oh I can do this so much better than those dumb hicks fooling around in the dirt." Reality sends these failed entrepreneurs home with a bruised ego, and hopefully newfound humility.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
If the world bans certain chemicals for *icides etc., what is the risk that clean vertical farming is required? I'm long term positive on vertical farming, I just assume it requires a future of unlimited energy backed by nuclear fusion/fission.
BMc2020 3y ago
It has not made as big impression in America with its amber waves of grain, but food insecure countries (Japan, Korea, much of the MidEast etc.) consider food security national security. And considering 1/2 of all food is wasted between the farm and the fork, there is still plenty of room for improvement.

fennecbutt 3y ago

From horizontal to vertical is a huge deal though. The US might have a load of space but plenty of others countries would massively benefit from converting land used for farming into land used for housing where possible. Additionally it means that farming can happen on the edges of towns and cities rather than in the wops, ie fewer huge delivery trucks moving produce around; it can essentially be grown down the road.

notadev 3y ago

If not vertical farming, weed killing lasers, an ze bugs, where is innovation needed in AgTech?

nitwit005 3y ago

> these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field. Many of the revolutionary changes in agriculture in the last century came from outsiders. They just stopped being outsiders once they were part of the industry. Phrasing it like these people are going and telling growers/experts they're stupid is a false portrayal. No one is going and spitting in their faces like that. They think their new idea will improve efficiency somehow, but that's not an insult.

doener 3y ago

I believe there is already a very decisive lever for the negative ecological (and to some extent also health-related) effects of agriculture. However, this is less on the supply side than on the demand side: less animal protein and more plant protein would solve a lot of problems at once.

realusername 3y ago
Yes, that's basically it, most of the environmental problems are due to the inefficiencies of the meat production which you can't realistically solve by tech. What people think as a technical problem is in reality a social problem.

gizmo 3y ago

mikeyouse 3y ago
Everytime I see one of those silly concrete extruding robots with claims that it will somehow replace some portion of residential construction I just shake my head.

tristor 3y ago

The behavior here is largely because the investors and the founders don’t come from an agricultural background, they’re born and bred urbanites who think they’re inherently superior to the rubes in the flyover states, rather than realizing that agriculture is the most mature of all industries and the average successful farmer is effectively a renaissance man. My farmer family members are brilliant at math, have masters degrees (and a Ph.D in one case), and understand business accounting better than most business people because agriculture has very thin margins and is a ruthless business for smaller operators. They commonly encounter “Brads and Chads from the city” who think anyone that lives more than 20 miles from a Walmart is a stupid hick that failed out of elementary school and needs a savior that knows better than they what is good for them. The same attitudes that funnel stupid money into agtech boondoggles is the one that fuels the urban/rural sociopolitical divide in America, and I will give you a hint, it’s not the rural folks that are the condescending assholes here.

quantified 3y ago
Interestingly, this story is about founders from Berlin. Look past the place and business names, imagine North American ones, it fits. But it's not a Silicon Valley or American story. And in this case looks to have classic business problems, like salespeople selling things that can't be delivered. As well as the Ag issues, whether or not those would be solvable.
theoldlove 3y ago
I do find it a little amusing to think that proximity to a Walmart (!) is a marker of the arrogant urbanite. I’ve never gone to Walmart as frequently as I did in a town of 10k in rural Iowa, and here in the NY suburbs it looks like the closest Walmart is a 19 mile drive.
- tristor 3y ago
  If I wanted to be snarky I would have said Whole Foods, but Walmart is universal in the US.

CipherThrowaway 3y ago

fusslo 3y ago

I agree and love your tone, but can I just share my naive view as someone who once interviewed for an AG startup? Farming seems vulnerable. First, we hear stories about patented crop strains and mega-companies suing small farmers. Second, we hear crops are engineered to grow fast and big, with little regard of flavor. Third, we hear about farmers having to reverse engineer their own equipment. Fourth, and most importantly, we hear how the farming industry relies heavily on the poor and vulnerable in order to pick and process crops at reasonable labor prices. It seems like there are issues in farming that fit square into that tech-meets-social-justice. On the surface it makes sense to approach the problem differently (aka 'disrupt') in order to: 1. tackle a huge industry (big problem space), 2. provide tastier food closer to home (good appeal to the market), 3. not exploit people (social justice) I used the word 'seems' a lot, because thats only the impression I've gotten. I have no idea if it's true.

nradov 3y ago
Picking and processing crops is hard work, but the people doing it are not particularly poor by global standards. Drive past the strawberry fields around Watsonville and look at the cars that the workers have parked along the road. A number of companies are working on berry picking robots. This is a hard engineering problem due to the fragility of the fruit. They have prototypes working reasonably well and someone will probably have a viable commercial product within a decade. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-26/strawberry-picking-robots-california https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-26/strawberry...
veddox 3y ago
All the problems you address are absolutely there. But I have to say I have become pretty allergic whenever I hear anybody talk about "disrupting" an existing industry, for two reasons: (1) Existing industries are usually that way for a reason; often outsiders don't understand this until they have tried (and failed) to change things. (2) In those cases where industries were "successfully disrupted", I have the impression the result often just ended up exploiting people in different ways (looking at you, Uber and AirBnB.)
- 3y ago

rewmie 3y ago

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sailingparrot 3y ago

> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. if insiders think it's "mostly fine", that might explain why you only see outsiders coming in with radical ideas. Sure farming is mostly fine at producing food efficiently. And coal is mostly fine for producing electricity and oil is mostly fine to fuel our cars. All those things are mostly fine to achieve their primary goal, they are absolutely not fine once you consider externalities. You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved. It's not small and that's why it's not a flawed premise. Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity. I do agree with you though that this can't be solved by a bunch of technologist in isolation. Rocket-industry insiders also thought our one-time use rockets were mostly fine and having a reusable rocket was a pipe dream anyway. That took an outsider to change the status quo and now companies that used to be at the top like Arianespace are a decade behind.

Whoppertime 3y ago
We have gotten rid of the deadliest byproducts. https://www.statista.com/statistics/501284/volume-of-nitrogen-oxides-emissions-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/501284/volume-of-nitroge... Rate of NOx have plummeted since the 1979 Nitrogen Oxide Protocol. If we focus on byproducts which cause Acid Rain and not just generic 'carbon', a lot of progress has been made since Nixon founded the EPA in 1970, mostly in the early years
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Agriculture doesn't use so much land because it needs to; it uses so much land because that's the cheapest way of producing food. There are lots of existing technologies that could produce more food per acre, but they are not economically viable. One example: greenhouses. Land use is primarily a political/economical problem, not a technological one.
- sailingparrot 3y ago
  > Agriculture doesn't use so much land because it needs to; it uses so much land because that's the cheapest way of producing food. And that's precisely why there is an opportunity here that is attracting entrepreneurs: How to get farming techniques using less land to be as economically viable (or more) than traditional farming techniques. Coal also was the cheapest way of producing electricity, but after 30+ years of investment in wind and solar it's now getting completely phased out. That happens only by having people seeing the long term problem and working on better ways of doing things long before they are actually economically viable.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

People have no idea how efficient farming is. In 1260 the price of wheat was 6- 8 shillings (~1/3 pound sterling) per bushel (60 pounds). By the early 20th century, it was about 1 £/bushel. At that point the US became the efficient grower and dominant currency, and so switching from pounds sterling to dollars at the rate at the time of $5/£1 is appropriate. Today wheat is $6.50 per barrel. Put another way, the price of wheat in the dominant currency has ~tripled in 750 years. That's an inflation rate of ~0.1%. Put another way, a typical Saskatchewan dryland wheat farm is about 5,000 - 10,000 acres per employee or operator in size. That 5,000-10,000 acres will produce enough calories to feed ~100,000 people. (Those acres will also require ~$10M in capital and ~$1M in annual operating expenses) Put a third way, modern agriculture can provide enough grains and legumes to feed somebody for around 30 cents per day at bulk prices.

LeafItAlone 3y ago
Certain crops are certainly efficient. I’m not involved in ag-tech, but the ideas I’ve seen aren’t really going after the efficient (and government incentivized) crops, but rather the more labor and resource (human and natural) intensive ones as well as ones that benefit from proximity to consumers.
azalemeth 3y ago
You raise some very good points – but I think that looking at the monetary price of wheat is a particularly bad example in England because of the Assize of Bread and Ale [1] which ran from about the 13th century until being repealed in 1836 (!) and later protectionist issues like the Corn laws [2] across "the empire". In many ways these laws directly tied the strength of the currency to the prevailing value of wheat – a very different sort of gold standard(!) – and occasionally caused massive economic difficulties as a result (I remember a story involving the value of silver, Isaac Newton, and shippers directly clipping or smelting coins and moving the metal to amsterdam to sell at a profit compared to the value of the coin, all indirectly powered by the very variable wheat). Your broader point about the pricing of wheat definitely stands though: in the 13th century, wheat drove the economy; as we got better at trading and ultimately the industrial agricultural revolution both served to reduce the variability of the harvest on macroeconomic climes and ever since really the black death we've been in a society where the relative power of the grain (if not its importance!) has steadily declined. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws [3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/219/1/3/1472781?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/219/1/3/14727...

adwn 3y ago

> They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere. * The car wasn't invented by insiders from the horse-drawn carriage industry. * Electric lighting wasn't invented by insiders from the candle industry. * Airplanes weren't invented by insiders from the balloon industry. * The development of the modern smartphone wasn't driven by insiders from the mobile phone industry. * The development of reusable orbital rockets wasn't driven by insiders from the rocket industry. > And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. That's exactly the kind of bias that makes industry insiders (usually) unable to revolutionize their own field. Sure, many outsiders will fail, but they'll at least try, and one of them might actually succeed. However, I believe it can be very beneficial - maybe even essential - to have experienced advisors from the established industry, provided that they haven't lost the ability to see and recognize the problems and inefficiencies of "doing it the old way".

at_a_remove 3y ago

I think you're mostly right, but the weed-killing laser robots are less about efficiency and more about herbicides and pesticides. Those are a large market and diverting money from that to weed-killing laser robots could be a big payday for somebody.

oneshtein 3y ago

> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. Modern agriculture is good at producing of astonishing quantities of calorie-rich food, which makes people obese because of lack of nutrients. 4.7M dies per year because of obesity, which, of course, is not a problem for those, who produces bland food.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

The weed-killing robot products seem qualitatively different from the other tech, assuming it can be scaled. We probably should develop a technological alternative to massive herbicidal over-use, and computer vision stands a chance of being cheap enough to provide it.

alan-crowe 3y ago
My reference point for this kind of thing is the video cassette recorder (VCR). Trusting to memory I think that they entered the consumer market at around $700 and were down to around $100 by the time they were obsolete. But before they reached the consumer market, they were a super-expensive professional item. Getting helical scan VCRs (a high precision, complicated electro-mechanical technology) to the consumer market involved impossible price reductions, just to reach the consume price point of $700. I never expected further big price reductions to follow and was wrong. A weed killing laser robot seems obviously stupid - an expensive electro-mechanical system generating trivial value with each weed zapped. There is no way to get the price down low enough for this to make sense. But CD players have servo control of the tracking and focus of the laser. Much lower power than needed for weed wacking, but much faster and more accurate than needed and very cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplLkxBsqQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplLkxBsqQo Adequate cameras are cheap enough. AI vision processing is on a roll and we can look forward to huge price falls. The technology looks promising from the outside.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  My reference point is electric cars. They were a complete non-starter, all but physically impossible because the energy density of batteries was so incredibly much lower than that of gas. Then batteries got better, and hybrids came out that had dramatically better mileage than ICE cars. But they were expensive, and looked weird, and electric cars still weren't possible. Then electric cars came out that were expensive, and low range, but pretty viable for city driving. But the range would never match ICE cars, and they'd always be to expensive. We're now at a point where the infrastructure and economics hasn't caught up, and the range is still arguably a little low for super long road trips, but once we get working fast chargers saturating most transit corridors, and once we get cheaper, smaller cars offered, we'll be pretty much there. From "The physics really just don't seem to add up" to "Well they're a little pricey" in, what, thirty years?

jondwillis 3y ago

As a journeyman gardener, I have really been interested in how to scale up no/low-till, no/low herbicide and pesticide, regenerative soil practices. From what I have seen so far, I think the market forces (e.g. most food people eat is unconscious, taken for granted, is a total commodity) are a major driver of the status quo. Why improve your negative externality industrial practices when you can get organic certified, get your product in Amazon Whole Foods, and outcompete more “ethical” growers?

cushychicken 3y ago

…these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field. Couldn’t have said it better myself, as a former ag tech employee who worked for one of the tech god complex people.

hengheng 3y ago

> the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein. Ah, are drones finally gone? I'd love to tell farmers things about their land that I saw from above which they already know, for a horrendous price, and fly at a time that's no use to them.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

Not exactly. I've entertained the idea of vertical farming because it can make fresh food possible in the core of the densest cities. It can also reuse energy for heating buildings to heat greenhouses. So it's an energy play. Laser weed killing isn't just about efficiency. It could mean eliminating the pesticides and the diseases they may be causing. Insect protein seems to be loved by the vegetarians who don't see eating insects like eating beef. In other words, efficiency is only part of the mix.

tivert 3y ago

> When I see the new ag-tech startups coming out of accelerators or being established by supposedly seasoned entrepreneurs, the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein. > They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere. It's also based on an arrogant assumption that SV techies are smart, everyone else is stupid, and all you need to do to fix a problem is throw some techies with a bad cases of Engineer's Disease at it to "disrupt" the industry. > ...these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field. That's a message that every software engineer needs to be reminded of daily. There's a serious problem with respecting the expertise and knowledge of people in other domains.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

It's a problem with so many startups. Some arrogant observer sees an industry from the outside, makes assumptions about it, maybe catches a good wave due to investor money, then unsurprisingly flounders, because they didn't approach the problem as an insider with skin in the game, tackling a known problem with known customers. No, they did it as an outsider, with no tangible knowledge of the problem or the industry. And they're arrogant because among the assumptions they've made is that the incumbents are stupid. Especially if it's agriculture, "Oh I can do this so much better than those dumb hicks fooling around in the dirt." Reality sends these failed entrepreneurs home with a bruised ego, and hopefully newfound humility.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

If the world bans certain chemicals for *icides etc., what is the risk that clean vertical farming is required? I'm long term positive on vertical farming, I just assume it requires a future of unlimited energy backed by nuclear fusion/fission.

BMc2020 3y ago

It has not made as big impression in America with its amber waves of grain, but food insecure countries (Japan, Korea, much of the MidEast etc.) consider food security national security. And considering 1/2 of all food is wasted between the farm and the fork, there is still plenty of room for improvement.