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> 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 th

> 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
    It took 50 years of heavy government subsidies to get wind & solar to the scale necessary to be cheaper than coal.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Coal and oil are also heavily subsidized: companies are given tax breaks, land and discovery are often provided below market rates, and cleanup is usually subsidized by taxpayers. In aggregate, those subsidies are greater than what’s been spent on renewables by a significant margin.
    - sailingparrot 3y ago
      And I am certainly glad that 50 years ago we made to choice to invest in them at a time where it was clear they wouldn't be viable for a while, if ever.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    I don't think that is a good comparison, because plants need basically the same input - coal to solar is changing everything but the end result. Different farming isn't. If AgTech were to directly create sugar from air and water then that would be a real switch.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
tomhoward 3y ago
> You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved. I understand you reading that way but it's not what I meant or at all what I think. The work I do (environmental monitoring and data display/analysis) is used heavily to reduce environmental externalities (I spent much of the past four years working on a project seeking to eradicate pesticide spray drift events) and to minimise resource utilisation (particularly irrigation water); the experience has taught me that these are major, difficult-to-solve problems, but they can be solved by people who are willing to do the work over many years to bring about the requisite changes both in technology and practices. Of course I know outsiders can sometimes bring about important changes that insiders didn't consider (indeed I've tried to be that kind of person in this and other industries, with some success at times); but it still needs thorough work over a long time to get major breakthroughs (as it did for SpaceX rockets), whereas these startups never seem to stick around for long. > Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity I'm not convinced this is true, now we can see that the global population is flattening and likely to start declining in the foreseeable future. It's not a particularly strongly held opinion or one I need to argue about, but it just seems to me that the amount of land used for agriculture now is no great problem.
- cushychicken 3y ago
  Can you say more about the pesticide drift work you did? I can see that being valuable for a number of reasons - mainly just reducing the amount of human exposure to pesticides.
  - tomhoward 3y ago
    Sure. It's a project initiated by a group of local farmers and researchers (meteorologists and an enviro engineer) in the state of South Australia, and funded by state government grants, to install high-precision weather stations throughout all the agricultural regions of that state. Data is updated every 10 minutes, and it reports specific readings/calculations indicating whether it is safe to spray pesticides [1]. More recently (since I left the project) they've added in predictive calculations derived from ML models, that can indicate whether it's likely to become risky or stop being risky for spraying in the next two hours. It also reports conventional meteorological measurements (temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind etc) and relevant calculated values relating to fire risk, seasonal thermal accumulations (growing degree days), evapotranspiration etc - so it is a general-purpose weather/environmental data service for growers. It seems to be very powerful and useful, however it still relies on growers remembering to look at the app and make the right decision each time they're thinking of spraying, and a combination of education, social pressure and law enforcement is needed to encourage responsible conduct. The biggest issue they're trying to mitigate is damage to other crops [2] but pesticide residue in food/beverage products is another significant factor, as it can affect other producers' organic/biodynamic certification status, and some countries require imported food/bev products to pass very stringent maximum levels of pesticide residue. You can search for "south australia mesonet" for more details. [1] The most significant factor for this is the presence of thermal inversions, and this requires temperatures to be measured at ground level and 10m up, hence the need for quite elaborate/costly public infrastructure rather than relying on growers having their own weather stations. [2] I started typing "nearby crops", but one of the major issues is that the combination of thermal inversions and winds can mean that residues can be carried long distances - 40km+ before being deposited onto other crops when the inversion reverses, which means it's hard/impossible to identify where the residue came from, meaning ex-post liability attribution for statutory or civil penalties can be impossible.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Re-useable rockets predate SpaceX. The boosters of the Space shuttle or its main engines come to mind. Aircraft launched systems is another. It wasn't thought of as a pipe dream as such.
- sailingparrot 3y ago
  Arianespace exec, in 2013, talking about SpaceX before they managed to land a rocket [1]: "reusability is a dream. [...] SpaceX is selling a dream. [...] The market will wake up and realize it's a dream." the word "dream" appears 3 or 4 more times in that single sentence. I cannot find a quote, but I also remember distinctly an exec from ULA claiming reusability was a dream, because even if you could land a rocket successfully you would never be able to reuse it as the stress on the rocket from the flight would make it unable to fly again, with any material you can use to build a rocket. (SpaceX has a falcon 9 booster they have reused 17 times so far). [1]: around 3:00 https://web.archive.org/web/20210723155930oe_/https://r1---sn-4g5e6nzs.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1627077567&ei=X-f6YKHrEsu21gKE96lg&ip=2a01%3A4f8%3Ac010%3A879b%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A1&id=o-ALpPLhD0uOWHit9R0BY_Yu5g_3qAvYDhjrbi33k84ZiC&itag=18&source=youtube&requiressl=yes&vprv=1&mime=video%2Fmp4&ns=uBhGQS8xyOvB9kxXCgQ39MAG&gir=yes&clen=123551137&ratebypass=yes&dur=2609.365&lmt=1394472127907388&fexp=24001373,24007246&c=WEB&n=s1R2_ryutw8ZO8&sparams=expire%2Cei%2Cip%2Cid%2Citag%2Csource%2Crequiressl%2Cvprv%2Cmime%2Cns%2Cgir%2Cclen%2Cratebypass%2Cdur%2Clmt&sig=AOq0QJ8wRgIhAMQA_WmH78Ymn45sKL3oJnk6CzC3-DMZdMFOM4AazyhMAiEA6W8BWSe49QU_vRBOyzVq4KONFc-g-YQDo675AhL9Icg%3D&video_id=XZ-7nNw-04Q&redirect_counter=1&cm2rm=sn-4g5e6s7e&req_id=963afd5f718a3ee&cms_redirect=yes&mh=s5&mip=2a01:4f8:c010:879b::1&mm=34&mn=sn-4g5e6nzs&ms=ltu&mt=1627055795&mv=m&mvi=1&pl=49&lsparams=mh,mip,mm,mn,ms,mv,mvi,pl&lsig=AG3C_xAwRQIhANYGrZy3uzJ2fpGFjrGwpLYeElLY5HAE7slpanFcLhMKAiAMXaLPI_-jBfJXH57gccjmFAQzNmptCz6Gry1NMuk2Fg%3D%3D https://web.archive.org/web/20210723155930oe_/https://r1---s...
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Executives talking their book isn't in contrast to what I wrote.
realusername 3y ago
> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity. We do know already how do do that though and the answer is to reduce meat usage which is by far what's taking the majority of the agricultural land use. The crop production is as almost as efficient as it can get after multiple agricultural revolutions. It's a social problem, not a technical one.
- bradley13 3y ago
  That's one solution. However, I am not giving up meat, nor are a lot of other people. So: let's look for other ways to reduce land use.
  - realusername 3y ago
    Well there aren't any, it's been more of a century of technological progress in agriculture and the field is very mature.
    - bradley13 3y ago
      Sure there are. One example: stop subsidizing corn for ethanol. The fuel used to plant, fertilize. harvest, transport and process the corn exceeds the fuel produced.
      - realusername 3y ago
        That won't help very far when close to half of the land use is for meat.
        slaw 3y ago
        Stopping subsidizing corn for ethanol will help a lot. [0] > U.S. farmers have planted 91.7 million acres of corn in 2019 [1] > roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-largest-crop-2019 https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar... https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofue...
ecshafer 3y ago
Land usage for food production isn't a big deal for me. I would rather see less suburban sprawl and more farms. There is a lot of good fertile land that has been cut up over the last 50 years and had the farms replaced with housing developments.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  The amount of land used for housing is absolutely minuscule compared to farm land. Something on the order of 10-50x less. And most planning departments are competent enough to let fertile lands be zoned agricultural over residential.
cushychicken 3y ago
I think his point was that the radical outsiders come up with ideas that sound great but don’t actually have any meaningful impacts towards making farming better. This mirrors my own experience in the field to a T.
rchaud 3y ago
> if insiders think it's "mostly fine", that might explain why you only see outsiders coming in with radical ideas. Radical ideas may be needed occasionally, but these techbros just set half a billion on fire trying to execute something farmers likely realized wasn't logistically feasible in their market ages ago. In the article, employees say the leadership signed deals with contractual terms that their own researchers warned couldn't be met. The founder is now launching a Farming-as-a-service startup, presumably without any of the employee expertise they fired at their last company.

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
  It took 50 years of heavy government subsidies to get wind & solar to the scale necessary to be cheaper than coal.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Coal and oil are also heavily subsidized: companies are given tax breaks, land and discovery are often provided below market rates, and cleanup is usually subsidized by taxpayers. In aggregate, those subsidies are greater than what’s been spent on renewables by a significant margin.
  - sailingparrot 3y ago
    And I am certainly glad that 50 years ago we made to choice to invest in them at a time where it was clear they wouldn't be viable for a while, if ever.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  I don't think that is a good comparison, because plants need basically the same input - coal to solar is changing everything but the end result. Different farming isn't. If AgTech were to directly create sugar from air and water then that would be a real switch.
  - pfdietz 3y ago

tomhoward 3y ago

> You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved. I understand you reading that way but it's not what I meant or at all what I think. The work I do (environmental monitoring and data display/analysis) is used heavily to reduce environmental externalities (I spent much of the past four years working on a project seeking to eradicate pesticide spray drift events) and to minimise resource utilisation (particularly irrigation water); the experience has taught me that these are major, difficult-to-solve problems, but they can be solved by people who are willing to do the work over many years to bring about the requisite changes both in technology and practices. Of course I know outsiders can sometimes bring about important changes that insiders didn't consider (indeed I've tried to be that kind of person in this and other industries, with some success at times); but it still needs thorough work over a long time to get major breakthroughs (as it did for SpaceX rockets), whereas these startups never seem to stick around for long. > Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity I'm not convinced this is true, now we can see that the global population is flattening and likely to start declining in the foreseeable future. It's not a particularly strongly held opinion or one I need to argue about, but it just seems to me that the amount of land used for agriculture now is no great problem.

cushychicken 3y ago
Can you say more about the pesticide drift work you did? I can see that being valuable for a number of reasons - mainly just reducing the amount of human exposure to pesticides.
- tomhoward 3y ago
  Sure. It's a project initiated by a group of local farmers and researchers (meteorologists and an enviro engineer) in the state of South Australia, and funded by state government grants, to install high-precision weather stations throughout all the agricultural regions of that state. Data is updated every 10 minutes, and it reports specific readings/calculations indicating whether it is safe to spray pesticides [1]. More recently (since I left the project) they've added in predictive calculations derived from ML models, that can indicate whether it's likely to become risky or stop being risky for spraying in the next two hours. It also reports conventional meteorological measurements (temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind etc) and relevant calculated values relating to fire risk, seasonal thermal accumulations (growing degree days), evapotranspiration etc - so it is a general-purpose weather/environmental data service for growers. It seems to be very powerful and useful, however it still relies on growers remembering to look at the app and make the right decision each time they're thinking of spraying, and a combination of education, social pressure and law enforcement is needed to encourage responsible conduct. The biggest issue they're trying to mitigate is damage to other crops [2] but pesticide residue in food/beverage products is another significant factor, as it can affect other producers' organic/biodynamic certification status, and some countries require imported food/bev products to pass very stringent maximum levels of pesticide residue. You can search for "south australia mesonet" for more details. [1] The most significant factor for this is the presence of thermal inversions, and this requires temperatures to be measured at ground level and 10m up, hence the need for quite elaborate/costly public infrastructure rather than relying on growers having their own weather stations. [2] I started typing "nearby crops", but one of the major issues is that the combination of thermal inversions and winds can mean that residues can be carried long distances - 40km+ before being deposited onto other crops when the inversion reverses, which means it's hard/impossible to identify where the residue came from, meaning ex-post liability attribution for statutory or civil penalties can be impossible.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Re-useable rockets predate SpaceX. The boosters of the Space shuttle or its main engines come to mind. Aircraft launched systems is another. It wasn't thought of as a pipe dream as such.

sailingparrot 3y ago
Arianespace exec, in 2013, talking about SpaceX before they managed to land a rocket [1]: "reusability is a dream. [...] SpaceX is selling a dream. [...] The market will wake up and realize it's a dream." the word "dream" appears 3 or 4 more times in that single sentence. I cannot find a quote, but I also remember distinctly an exec from ULA claiming reusability was a dream, because even if you could land a rocket successfully you would never be able to reuse it as the stress on the rocket from the flight would make it unable to fly again, with any material you can use to build a rocket. (SpaceX has a falcon 9 booster they have reused 17 times so far). [1]: around 3:00 https://web.archive.org/web/20210723155930oe_/https://r1---sn-4g5e6nzs.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1627077567&ei=X-f6YKHrEsu21gKE96lg&ip=2a01%3A4f8%3Ac010%3A879b%3A0%3A0%3A0%3A1&id=o-ALpPLhD0uOWHit9R0BY_Yu5g_3qAvYDhjrbi33k84ZiC&itag=18&source=youtube&requiressl=yes&vprv=1&mime=video%2Fmp4&ns=uBhGQS8xyOvB9kxXCgQ39MAG&gir=yes&clen=123551137&ratebypass=yes&dur=2609.365&lmt=1394472127907388&fexp=24001373,24007246&c=WEB&n=s1R2_ryutw8ZO8&sparams=expire%2Cei%2Cip%2Cid%2Citag%2Csource%2Crequiressl%2Cvprv%2Cmime%2Cns%2Cgir%2Cclen%2Cratebypass%2Cdur%2Clmt&sig=AOq0QJ8wRgIhAMQA_WmH78Ymn45sKL3oJnk6CzC3-DMZdMFOM4AazyhMAiEA6W8BWSe49QU_vRBOyzVq4KONFc-g-YQDo675AhL9Icg%3D&video_id=XZ-7nNw-04Q&redirect_counter=1&cm2rm=sn-4g5e6s7e&req_id=963afd5f718a3ee&cms_redirect=yes&mh=s5&mip=2a01:4f8:c010:879b::1&mm=34&mn=sn-4g5e6nzs&ms=ltu&mt=1627055795&mv=m&mvi=1&pl=49&lsparams=mh,mip,mm,mn,ms,mv,mvi,pl&lsig=AG3C_xAwRQIhANYGrZy3uzJ2fpGFjrGwpLYeElLY5HAE7slpanFcLhMKAiAMXaLPI_-jBfJXH57gccjmFAQzNmptCz6Gry1NMuk2Fg%3D%3D https://web.archive.org/web/20210723155930oe_/https://r1---s...
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Executives talking their book isn't in contrast to what I wrote.

realusername 3y ago

> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity. We do know already how do do that though and the answer is to reduce meat usage which is by far what's taking the majority of the agricultural land use. The crop production is as almost as efficient as it can get after multiple agricultural revolutions. It's a social problem, not a technical one.

bradley13 3y ago
That's one solution. However, I am not giving up meat, nor are a lot of other people. So: let's look for other ways to reduce land use.
- realusername 3y ago
  Well there aren't any, it's been more of a century of technological progress in agriculture and the field is very mature.
  - bradley13 3y ago
    Sure there are. One example: stop subsidizing corn for ethanol. The fuel used to plant, fertilize. harvest, transport and process the corn exceeds the fuel produced.
    - realusername 3y ago
      That won't help very far when close to half of the land use is for meat.
      - slaw 3y ago
        Stopping subsidizing corn for ethanol will help a lot. [0] > U.S. farmers have planted 91.7 million acres of corn in 2019 [1] > roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-largest-crop-2019 https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar... https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofue...

ecshafer 3y ago

Land usage for food production isn't a big deal for me. I would rather see less suburban sprawl and more farms. There is a lot of good fertile land that has been cut up over the last 50 years and had the farms replaced with housing developments.

antisthenes 3y ago
The amount of land used for housing is absolutely minuscule compared to farm land. Something on the order of 10-50x less. And most planning departments are competent enough to let fertile lands be zoned agricultural over residential.

cushychicken 3y ago

I think his point was that the radical outsiders come up with ideas that sound great but don’t actually have any meaningful impacts towards making farming better. This mirrors my own experience in the field to a T.

rchaud 3y ago

> if insiders think it's "mostly fine", that might explain why you only see outsiders coming in with radical ideas. Radical ideas may be needed occasionally, but these techbros just set half a billion on fire trying to execute something farmers likely realized wasn't logistically feasible in their market ages ago. In the article, employees say the leadership signed deals with contractual terms that their own researchers warned couldn't be met. The founder is now launching a Farming-as-a-service startup, presumably without any of the employee expertise they fired at their last company.