19 ms·

Larry Ellison's half-billion-dollar quest to change farming

170 points by nradov 2y ago

spamizbad 2y ago
Ellison's strength, I felt like, has always been in the field of sales and ruthless contract negotiation rather than technical innovation - a "golden touch" that doesn't benefit disruptive scientific innovation, but might instead prove more fruitful if applied to an a mature technology that just needs to proliferate out there in the world.
- gadders 2y ago
  There was an interesting article on him linked from The Diff newsletter today. It seems a large part of his strengths are strategic M&A. "1. Larry Ellison has an insight which leads to a breakthrough initiative which has the potential to reposition Oracle to the forefront of the industry, completely bypassing the competition. 2. It works. 3. Larry Ellison checks out to go sailing or play tennis or something for like a year. 4. Oracle gets into trouble. New entrants and existing competitors are eating away at its market share, and Oracle is losing head-to-head.4 5. GOTO 1." https://www.notboring.co/p/who-is-larry-ellison https://www.notboring.co/p/who-is-larry-ellison
  - soared 2y ago
    6. Divest losing tens of billions in the industries where this strategy doesn’t work (see adtech, oracle data cloud - few billions in acquisitions just closed down not even sold) 7. Doesn’t matter, still have billions to spare and can eat huge failures
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
elzbardico 2y ago
[flagged]
- deadbabe 2y ago
  You don’t need billions of dollars to be an arrogant tech bro, just look around at Hackernews.
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    fair point
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Aurornis 2y ago
A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something. Results don’t need to be dramatic or come right away. Even failure is a learning experience. Improving agriculture is a worthy goal, even if it’s not immediately successful.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - leovingi 2y ago
    Can you please post links to some of that cheap farmland available right now because of DOGE?
    - duxup 2y ago
      I think the idea is that farm subsidies potentially being cut would make land available. That would take time.
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        It might not take a long time; many farmers are on a knife's edge in terms of solvency.
        duxup 2y ago
        Most farmers are petty involved in year to year fluctuations and financing things so hard to know how many would stick it out in hopes of legislation…. Granted this is all a hypothetical.
      - mistrial9 2y ago
        also a few suicides.. the process does take time
    - 2y ago
turtlegrids 2y ago
https://archive.ph/osGTZ https://archive.ph/osGTZ
afpx 2y ago
The guy makes $20 billion / year just sitting still. I'm sure he'll be fine. It's just play money at that point. The equivalent to one of us denting our Prius. I mean even I make passive 10% dividends on my investments every year.
biophysboy 2y ago
My first thought in looking at this headline was "let me guess, he was going to try and solve hyper-local biological/environmental problems with off the shelf AI and robots". Sure enough, that was the subheadline.
prpl 2y ago
I guess something other than a lawn mower is required to change farming
lvl155 2y ago
Just curious for the older devs on here, how seminal was Oracle in 80/90s? I feel he was actually a good dev but his career as a ruthless sales person and corporate tactician overshadows whatever accomplishments he had as a database developer.
- jordanb 2y ago
  My career started in the 2000s. Oracle was already a bit of a cancer then. It was Oracle or MS SQL for "real" databases. There were technologies that had been exciting in the 90s but were already choked out by the duopoly like InterBase and Foxpro. There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys. My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.
  - twasold 2y ago
    What ever happened to foxpro?
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Fox Software was acquired by Microsoft in 1992. Development was finally discontinued in 2007.
    - kjs3 2y ago
      Bought by Microsoft who gradually nudged users to move to Access or SQLServer until they could quietly take it out back a shoot it in the head about 20 years ago.
    - webnrrd2k 2y ago
      My vague memory of it is that MS discontinued it because it detracted from their plans with MS Access on the low-end, and MS SQL Server on the high end. I think, maybe, that it may not have fit in with Visual Basic very well.
  - 2y ago
kittikitti 2y ago
While I disagree with a majority of Larry Ellison's opinions, this is a venture that I think must be celebrated regardless of failures. There is such a lack of any green tech coming out of Silicon Valley that this one must get its due promotion. The front of agriculture and innovation is difficult but none of the technology is being used to sow hate amongst ourselves.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  Even beyond green, it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs. It's not quite as cooperative as the digital, but rather more relevant.
  - worik 2y ago
    > it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs. It would be nicer if it was not saddled by hubris and a lack of domain knowledge It would be great if it were not such a colossal waste
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      Meh results oriented thinking. Elon revolutionized rockets and electrical vehicles with 0 previous domain knowledge. In another timeline both concepts fail and he's just another clueless guy who blew a bunch of money on ideas outside his domain - doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.
- spankalee 2y ago
  Why does Silicon Valley need to be doing the innovation here? Agricultural techniques and tech are constantly improving. There's already a lot of money to be made improving all aspects of food production, incentivizing tons of non-SV companies to invest.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
josefritzishere 2y ago
Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking. All infastructure is an additional overhead cost. Yoru robot, your highrise, the soil testing kit... the short of it is just that if there is no linear increase in yeild, your tech product will probably fail. Most of this nonsense comes from tech bros who have never farmed and don't have the common sense to ask a farmer what they actually need.
- smileson2 2y ago
  If tech means generic webshit sure
- Ancapistani 2y ago
  > Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking. Ag is much more than farming, and farming is much more than dirt. Ag is very much ready - past ready - for disruption. The biggest blocker there is that "traditional" SV startups can't make a dent; their business models don't suit it well. Farmers - even mega-corporate ones - are cautious. It's a mature market with low margins, so they aren't going to make a capital investment in what they see as unproven technology. To succeed in agtech you pretty much have to exude the opposite vibe that startup founders usually have.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Farmers aren't cautious. They'll all quickly jump on something like a new hybrid seed variety if it increases yields. This isn't a "vibe" issue.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - whartung 2y ago
    Little anecdote sort of along this line. Early 80's, in college, we had the Cyber mainframe, and PDP 11/70. The Cyber was used for computer classes (comps sci [Fortran, Pascal], infosystems [COBOL]), engineering classes (SPICE, Aeronautical Engr had some Fortran IV stuff the had to slog through), statistics runs (SPSS - lot of the sciences used that)), the school had some back office software running on it (you noticed during registration, the machine was noticeably loaded). PDP was used mostly for introduction CS classes, and it had a public game account (very nice Star Trek program on that one). Outside of a TERAK and a Textronix 4050 series computer in the Math lab, there were no real microcomputers on campus, no "public" ones used for teaching. The first micro computer lab on campus, was in the Agriculture school. They had a full lab with 9 Apple ][ computers, all running, I guess, a sophisticated software package for computing feed and what not. We were there to play Wizardry, of course, my good friend was the lab tech. But it was just interesting how the Ag school was a pioneer in the personal computing space at an, ostensibly, school known for its science and engineering programs (though it was also know for its Ag and Architecture schools).
blindriver 2y ago
I applaud him for trying and spending his own money at this.
- nobankai 2y ago
  [flagged]
- randcraw 2y ago
  Ellison's purchase of the island also included several resort hotels and homes. It's likely the income from those does a lot to cover his $500 million loss in farming. (It's curious the article says nothing about his yield from that side of the island.) In the end, it's likely that Ellison's grand farming enterprise on a luxury resort island was always just a promotional stunt and was never intended to be sustainable or profitable. His strategy was to employ none of the resources essential to any business' success, like knowing your market or hiring staff who know even the basics of the trade (farming). Instead he hires supercomputer architect Danny Hillis to reinvent agriculture? Sure. What could go wrong?
cakealert 2y ago
The killer app would be to figure out how to genetically engineer good plant flesh economically in a bioreactor. Imagine strawberry,pineapple,etc slurry production by the metric ton. With the only input into the facility being atmospheric gasses and electricity. There would also be huge room for optimization in such a process, such as introduction of antifreeze proteins (as some fish have) to allow storage of various fruit at freezing temperatures without loss of quality.
- floatrock 2y ago
  We'd name it Slurry Red or Slurry Yellow, right? Maybe Slurry Green for the melon flavor.
- kavalg 2y ago
  I already have this in production. Interested? PS: Please, don't tell anyone that it is all starch, sugar and artificial color/flavor :)
lenerdenator 2y ago
Don't tell Larry about all of the startups in the Midwest who are actually making progress on this.
- lurk2 2y ago
  Is this a joke about conventional mechanized farming working well enough as it is or has there been serious progress in the AgTech sector? The last time I read of it the big developments were hydroponics and tractors that burned weeds with a laser beam.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    There's been real progress, and Larry's got a long history of gutting people who make real progress because he just thinks of anything sitting on a database as a way to push Oracle licenses while increasing his personal net worth.
    - jjtheblunt 2y ago
      what's the real progress, though? I'm a midwesterner originally and I'm genuinely curious what you're referencing.
    - heurist 2y ago
      All the companies in this space go out of business. Who in the Midwest is doing well?
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Are those actually big developments or just incremental ones?
- nineplay 2y ago
  Why don't you tell us about all them?
azinman2 2y ago
Don’t have a WSJ account so can’t read the article, and the archive link posted doesn’t work for me. It sounds like this was a greenhouse based business? What I’m excited by (perhaps naively so) are the startups using robots to zap weeds and do other things to reduce chemical usage. Anyone know the status of these companies, and if there’s anything intrinsically wrong with the approach?
- antasvara 2y ago
  I think the approaches usually fail because commercial farming with chemical fertilizer is pretty efficient and optimized to work at a large scale. A lot of agtech startups (think vertical farming) just don't get this. They don't understand where the inefficiencies are, or how their approach loses efficiency at commercial-farming scale, or how the approach doesn't integrate with other necessary machinery, etc.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    Vertical farming might be having trouble but a very closely related cousin, the Dutch greenhouse, is doing fantastically. The differences are subtle because Dutch greenhouses have been used to vertically farm crops as well (though not separated in the same way that vertical farms are) and use artificial lighting. The subtle differences matter and that's why iteration in the space is so good. The surface level discussion in this thread griping over Ellison's approach is probably the least interesting aspect of agtech to discuss but is the one that most people have an opinion on and generates the most engagement which is why this thread is filled with it.
WillAdams 2y ago
The thing is, there are some hard numbers and some fundamental truths which someone is going to have to find answers for: - peak oil is happening (or has happened) - current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (not an inconsiderate portion of which is fertilizer runoff into waterways and oceans) - in the past century the bony fish biomass has plummeted to below the weight of shipping tonnage in the world's oceans: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ As I've noted before, my grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry that my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer viable.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  > current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy The phrase "up to" is doing heavy lifting there. In particular, this would be production of beef. Production of grains is much more efficient, as is production of poultry, fish, or pork. It should be noted that in the US, agriculture uses a very small fraction (about 1%) of total primary energy consumption (not counting the sunlight being used by the plants). We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Almonds also are notable for requiring a great deal of energy (mostly for transporting water for irrigation).
  - floatrock 2y ago
    1.9% according to this USDA link https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=87964 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-... But, > Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms. So seeing as modern industrial agriculture only exists because of the Haber-Bosch process and pesticides, but those are counted as indirect inputs, your phrase "primary energy consumption" is also doing a fair amount of heavy lifting. And that's not counting all of the supply and cold chains needed to get that food to your supermarket. All these hydroponic/indoor-fresh-greens startups are largely about breaking even on the product-to-market side of things.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
I'm no fan of Ellison, but better to be putting money into this than entertainment, social networks, the Metaverse, or even AI.
aurizon 2y ago
One of the early proponents and perhaps a driver, was Dickson Despommier, who just passed. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/ https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/ Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted. It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farming https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  What he wants is automated food production in his creepy autonomous Hawaii sub-nation, which fits with all the other Atlas Shrugged "hidden valley" dreams of the SV ultrarich. He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations. He doesn't care squat about the world in general.
westurner 2y ago
Notes for Lanai island from an amateur: Hemp is useful for soil remediation because it's so absorbent; which is part of why testing is important. Is there already a composting business? Do the schools etc. already compost waste food? "Show HN: We open-sourced our compost monitoring tech" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201207 Canadian greenhouses? Chinese-Mongolian-Canadian greenhouses are wing shaped and set against a berm; "Passive Solar Greenhouse Technology From China?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=FOgyK6Jieq0& https://youtube.com/watch?v=FOgyK6Jieq0& Transparent wood requires extracting the lignin. Transparent aluminum requires a production process, too. There are polycarbonate hurricane panels. Reflective material on one wall of the wallipini greenhouse (and geothermal) is enough to grow citrus fruit through the winter in Alliance, Nebraska. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927538 Glass allows more wavelengths of light through than plastic or recyclable polycarbonate; including UV-C, which is sanitizing Hydrogen peroxide cleans out fish tanks FWIU. Various plastics are food safe, but not when they've been in the sun all day. To make aircrete, you add soap bubbles to concrete with an air compressor. /? aircrete dome build in HI and ground anchors Catalan masonry vault roofs (in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Arizona,) are strong, don't require temporary arches, and passively cool most efficiently when they have an oculus to let the heat rise out of the dome to openable vents to the wind. U.S. state and territory temperature extremes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_temperature_extremes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe... : > Hawaii: 15 °F (−9.4 °C) to 100 °F (37.8 °C) > Nebraska: -47 °F (−43.9 °C) to 118 °F (47.8 °C) "140-year-old ocean heat tech could supply islands with limitless energy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222695 : > OTEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio... North Carolina is ranked 4th in solar, has solar farms, and has hurricanes (and totally round homes on stilts). FWIU there are hurricane-rated solar panels, flexible racks, ground mounts. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20092018/hurricane-florence-solar-panel-energy-resilience-extreme-weather-damage-wind-flooding/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20092018/hurricane-floren... "Sargablock: Bricks from Seaweed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188180 "Turning pineapple skins into soap and other cleaning products" https://www.businessinsider.com/turning-pineapple-skins-into-soap-and-other-cleaning-products-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/turning-pineapple-skins-into... "Costa Rica Let a Juice Company Dump Their Orange Peels in the Forest—and It Helped" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-juice-company-dump-their-orange-peels-forestand-it-helped-180964666/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-jui... https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-orange-peel-produced-something-nobody-imagined https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-ora...
didntknowyou 2y ago
it wasn't a philantropic or revolutionary attempt. it was his venture to grow his luxury fruits for money- which is struggling because he is hiring friends with no agricultural background.
- rozap 2y ago
  "city boy tries to grow a plant" is a whole genre of hubris that is always entertaining.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    can't wait to watch the failures of agriculture on mars. well actually nevermind because people will die.
    - DebtDeflation 2y ago
      As long as you have a dozen potatoes, some human poop, a sample of earth soil for necessary nutrients and bacteria, and rocket fuel to burn to make water, it should be pretty easy.
      - ANewFormation 2y ago
        Sabatier reaction also rocks in this context. CO2 + O2 => methane with water as a byproduct. So all you really need is hydrogen. And conveniently part of the water you produce or harvest can be split into H2 and O2. The absurd convenience of such things realllly makes one think more deeply about the simulation hypothesis.
      - acdha 2y ago
        If you can’t think of reasons why it would be harder than that, consider that you might want to read up on the problem first before saying it’s easy. For example, you’re assuming compatible soil (no), nutrients (also no), and the absence of toxins (again no). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01158-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01158-6 Another way of looking at: have humans over-wintered in Antarctica without relying on outside inputs? That’s a much easier problem on multiple scales (oxygen, soil, temperature, water, etc.) so I wouldn’t take any mars proposal seriously before they’ve sent the same equipment to Antarctica and survived longer than the proposed mission.
Over3Chars 2y ago
TL;DR tech bro's underestimate the difficulty of farming. News at 11.
- dang 2y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
tycho-newman 2y ago
Farming is an old human activity and it took us thousands of years to work out how to do it competently. We had to invent Haber-Bosch fertilizers and genetic engineering to get us to basically permanent surplus. Honestly not surprised this is so hard. The area was pineapple plantation for years, and the plantation owners were not great stewards of the land. No amount of money can fix decades of shitty land stewardship. It’s just time and effort.
iugtmkbdfil834 2y ago
I am not a fan of Larry so take the next sentences as an odd way to confirm bias and maybe this is why I am responding to it now.. Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
- etchalon 2y ago
  There is a weird belief in SV that if you don't know anything, but have access to a lot of capital, you can build a better solution. This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    "<insert semi-fact taken out of context regarding something you don't know about> We are fixing this."
    - poslathian 2y ago
      https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html
      - neilv 2y ago
        > The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought that it would be interesting to see how they interacted. I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.) Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy. (I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-andy-cs-s-innovator https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )
cameron_b 2y ago
I'm fairly blown-away at the mission statement: “improve human nutrition and preserve the environment by growing food indoors" Adding a building doesn't improve the environment, so for starters you're in the hole, for energy, you're in the hole (pending solar and thermal recovery, each with environmental impact of their own)... Larry, let's talk. There's for sure a use for greenhouses, sensors, all the tech, but let's focus on the soil.
- lkbm 2y ago
  > Adding a building doesn't improve the environment Depends how concerned you are about pesticides.
  - zombiwoof 2y ago
    Exactly Show me any farm that doesn’t use them I’ll wait
    - zug_zug 2y ago
      There is indoor lettuce I can buy at my supermarkets that is "zero pesticide" (you can just google it and find several, don't want to post any sort of links to products here). I suspect it's hydroponic.
      - x-complexity 2y ago
        > I suspect it's hydroponic. It's axiomatically-speaking the one of the only few ways to make it happen. "zero pesticides" implies no bugs/insects around to need spraying it in the first place, and doing that requires (A) a clean environment + (B) no regular soil (regular soil may have insect eggs / fungi in them). The only things that come to mind are hydroponics & hydrogel agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogel_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogel_agriculture
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/larry-ellison-s-half-billion-dollar-quest-to-change-farming-has-been-a-bust/ar-AA1zDBe7 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/larry-ellison-s-h... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zDBe7 https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zDBe7
darig 2y ago
[dead]
larodi 2y ago
How does s.o. in his 80s look this well? Even considering the possibility of plastic surgery. Even on his 2010 photo in wikipedia he looks so insanely younger, perhaps 45 or something...
ozten 2y ago
“People, no offense, don’t really love cucumbers. There wasn’t as sustainable a market for it,” Agus said. Maybe stick to "secret" warrantless surveillance on US citizens.
rmason 2y ago
As a former agronomist this makes as much sense to me as starting a database company where no one understands databases. Without an agronomist how do you know what could be possible from what is clearly impossible?
throw7 2y ago
I just find it funny how tech executives couldn't even make and run a stable wifi network.
mediaoracle 2y ago
Not sure why the headline has been editorialized. "Larry Ellison’s Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust"
NoPicklez 2y ago
Seeing lots of "he knows nothing about farming", sure he might not know as much about farming as the farmers who live it day to day. But he has money and access to bring farmers along for the journey and build something better. A lot of true disruption comes from people you'd never expect to have had an impact, because they aren't myopic to the pre-conceived challenges of that industry.
gunian 2y ago
baron aura quests are fascinating
tfourb 2y ago
There are some niche applications where innovative greenhouse technology, AI and similar tech can contribute to better agriculture. But this "tech think" completely misses the point, when it comes to Agriculture. We already have all the technology we need to convert Agriculture from a major emitter to a CO2-dump. We could dramatically increase current and future arable land by using known sustainable farming techniques without loosing or even while enhancing productivity per hectare. Especially the idea that we need ultra-productive greenhouses in urban settings is plainly speaking stupid and ignores basic economics. Land is actually quite plentiful, even directly adjacent to major agglomerations and (with the right tools and techniques) can be highly productive without capital intensive tech projects. Innovation is needed much more in terms of giving producers the right incentives to farm sustainably – at the moment much of government subsidies and trade incentives has a directly opposite effect. Of course it would be nice, if a farmer could use a $2,000 drone to weed their fields pesticide free by employing AI, etc. But the real holy grail would be to get a farmer to use known techniques to drastically reduce fertilizer and pesticide use while increasing the diversity of crops and the carbon content of his soil.
alecco 2y ago
Didn't China burst this bubble already? Vertical farming, etc. Western aligned farming is currently in a big downturn due to BRICS constantly breaking production records. And they are using Chinese machinery. The world is catching up to American farming yields. China is decoupling from American farming and they have been investing a lot in all the infrastructure for that. American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis) https://www.barrons.com/articles/farmers-trump-trade-war-agriculture-crop-beef-prices-2be036c2 https://www.barrons.com/articles/farmers-trump-trade-war-agr... https://farmonaut.com/usa/urgent-u-s-farmers-face-financial-crisis-as-2025-farm-bill-looms-farmonaut-analyzes-impact-on-crop-insurance-and-safety-nets/ https://farmonaut.com/usa/urgent-u-s-farmers-face-financial-...
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  There are a lot of Chinese doomsayers out there, about how they are about to collapse (zeihan). Then this, farming, or Deepseek comes out. I think their demise is over exaggerated.
  - rfwhyte 2y ago
    Deepseek or whatever farming tech they may be developing don't amount to a drop in the bucket when it comes to their looming demographic collapse. China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration. The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Netherlands as well, one of the smallest countries in the world but the 3rd largest agricultural exporter in the world.
chakintosh 2y ago
The lesson of Larry Ellison’s misadventures in farming – TechCrunch, 23/2/2025 https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/the-lesson-of-larry-ellisons-misadventures-in-farming/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/the-lesson-of-larry-elliso...
teleforce 2y ago
Well, I hope he hires an engineer. There is even such a thing as an agricultural engineer - Susan Grill (one of the WSJ article commentators).
teleforce 2y ago
The fact that billionaires can own thousand of hectares of Hawaiian lands, that was annexed by US against the Hawaiian natives people will, with many of them currently do not have proper land and housing is pretty disturbing [1]. [1] Hawaii: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): https://youtu.be/j8DxdibHibU https://youtu.be/j8DxdibHibU
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
This seems like maybe all the tech bro's should have also hired some some farmers. Even to consult. Seems like a lot of self inflicted wounds. So not an indicator that these farming techniques 'wont work' but more 'these guys can't manage a project'.
pfdietz 2y ago
The real game changer for farming would be direct synthesis of food, avoiding using plants for energy or CO2 capture. But this is tough to make work economically. The easiest target would be single cell protein, for example ICI's Pruteen or more recently Quorn. Perhaps if renewable electricity continues to decline in price it will become more feasible.
datavirtue 2y ago
Ag is a harsh mistress.
betimsl 2y ago
Equivalent to a beginner betting $500 on red. Let's see what happens.
ein0p 2y ago
What is it with tech bros thinking they can successfully operate in "deep" industries like agriculture where every last bit of efficiency has already been squeezed out over the past 100-150 years? In fact, arguably, there's way too much efficiency, and quality of the produce has suffered quite a bit by now.

170 points by nradov 2y ago

Ellison's strength, I felt like, has always been in the field of sales and ruthless contract negotiation rather than technical innovation - a "golden touch" that doesn't benefit disruptive scientific innovation, but might instead prove more fruitful if applied to an a mature technology that just needs to proliferate out there in the world.

gadders 2y ago
There was an interesting article on him linked from The Diff newsletter today. It seems a large part of his strengths are strategic M&A. "1. Larry Ellison has an insight which leads to a breakthrough initiative which has the potential to reposition Oracle to the forefront of the industry, completely bypassing the competition. 2. It works. 3. Larry Ellison checks out to go sailing or play tennis or something for like a year. 4. Oracle gets into trouble. New entrants and existing competitors are eating away at its market share, and Oracle is losing head-to-head.4 5. GOTO 1." https://www.notboring.co/p/who-is-larry-ellison https://www.notboring.co/p/who-is-larry-ellison
- soared 2y ago
  6. Divest losing tens of billions in the industries where this strategy doesn’t work (see adtech, oracle data cloud - few billions in acquisitions just closed down not even sold) 7. Doesn’t matter, still have billions to spare and can eat huge failures
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

elzbardico 2y ago

[flagged]

deadbabe 2y ago
You don’t need billions of dollars to be an arrogant tech bro, just look around at Hackernews.
- elzbardico 2y ago
  fair point
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Aurornis 2y ago

A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something. Results don’t need to be dramatic or come right away. Even failure is a learning experience. Improving agriculture is a worthy goal, even if it’s not immediately successful.

actionfromafar 2y ago
[flagged]
- leovingi 2y ago
  Can you please post links to some of that cheap farmland available right now because of DOGE?
  - duxup 2y ago
    I think the idea is that farm subsidies potentially being cut would make land available. That would take time.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      It might not take a long time; many farmers are on a knife's edge in terms of solvency.
      - duxup 2y ago
        Most farmers are petty involved in year to year fluctuations and financing things so hard to know how many would stick it out in hopes of legislation…. Granted this is all a hypothetical.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      also a few suicides.. the process does take time
  - 2y ago

turtlegrids 2y ago

https://archive.ph/osGTZ https://archive.ph/osGTZ

afpx 2y ago

The guy makes $20 billion / year just sitting still. I'm sure he'll be fine. It's just play money at that point. The equivalent to one of us denting our Prius. I mean even I make passive 10% dividends on my investments every year.

biophysboy 2y ago

My first thought in looking at this headline was "let me guess, he was going to try and solve hyper-local biological/environmental problems with off the shelf AI and robots". Sure enough, that was the subheadline.

prpl 2y ago

I guess something other than a lawn mower is required to change farming

lvl155 2y ago

Just curious for the older devs on here, how seminal was Oracle in 80/90s? I feel he was actually a good dev but his career as a ruthless sales person and corporate tactician overshadows whatever accomplishments he had as a database developer.

jordanb 2y ago
My career started in the 2000s. Oracle was already a bit of a cancer then. It was Oracle or MS SQL for "real" databases. There were technologies that had been exciting in the 90s but were already choked out by the duopoly like InterBase and Foxpro. There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys. My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.
- twasold 2y ago
  What ever happened to foxpro?
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Fox Software was acquired by Microsoft in 1992. Development was finally discontinued in 2007.
  - kjs3 2y ago
    Bought by Microsoft who gradually nudged users to move to Access or SQLServer until they could quietly take it out back a shoot it in the head about 20 years ago.
  - webnrrd2k 2y ago
    My vague memory of it is that MS discontinued it because it detracted from their plans with MS Access on the low-end, and MS SQL Server on the high end. I think, maybe, that it may not have fit in with Visual Basic very well.
- 2y ago

kittikitti 2y ago

While I disagree with a majority of Larry Ellison's opinions, this is a venture that I think must be celebrated regardless of failures. There is such a lack of any green tech coming out of Silicon Valley that this one must get its due promotion. The front of agriculture and innovation is difficult but none of the technology is being used to sow hate amongst ourselves.

ANewFormation 2y ago
Even beyond green, it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs. It's not quite as cooperative as the digital, but rather more relevant.
- worik 2y ago
  > it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs. It would be nicer if it was not saddled by hubris and a lack of domain knowledge It would be great if it were not such a colossal waste
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    Meh results oriented thinking. Elon revolutionized rockets and electrical vehicles with 0 previous domain knowledge. In another timeline both concepts fail and he's just another clueless guy who blew a bunch of money on ideas outside his domain - doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.
spankalee 2y ago
Why does Silicon Valley need to be doing the innovation here? Agricultural techniques and tech are constantly improving. There's already a lot of money to be made improving all aspects of food production, incentivizing tons of non-SV companies to invest.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

josefritzishere 2y ago

Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking. All infastructure is an additional overhead cost. Yoru robot, your highrise, the soil testing kit... the short of it is just that if there is no linear increase in yeild, your tech product will probably fail. Most of this nonsense comes from tech bros who have never farmed and don't have the common sense to ask a farmer what they actually need.

smileson2 2y ago
If tech means generic webshit sure
Ancapistani 2y ago
> Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking. Ag is much more than farming, and farming is much more than dirt. Ag is very much ready - past ready - for disruption. The biggest blocker there is that "traditional" SV startups can't make a dent; their business models don't suit it well. Farmers - even mega-corporate ones - are cautious. It's a mature market with low margins, so they aren't going to make a capital investment in what they see as unproven technology. To succeed in agtech you pretty much have to exude the opposite vibe that startup founders usually have.
- nradov 2y ago
  Farmers aren't cautious. They'll all quickly jump on something like a new hybrid seed variety if it increases yields. This isn't a "vibe" issue.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- whartung 2y ago
  Little anecdote sort of along this line. Early 80's, in college, we had the Cyber mainframe, and PDP 11/70. The Cyber was used for computer classes (comps sci [Fortran, Pascal], infosystems [COBOL]), engineering classes (SPICE, Aeronautical Engr had some Fortran IV stuff the had to slog through), statistics runs (SPSS - lot of the sciences used that)), the school had some back office software running on it (you noticed during registration, the machine was noticeably loaded). PDP was used mostly for introduction CS classes, and it had a public game account (very nice Star Trek program on that one). Outside of a TERAK and a Textronix 4050 series computer in the Math lab, there were no real microcomputers on campus, no "public" ones used for teaching. The first micro computer lab on campus, was in the Agriculture school. They had a full lab with 9 Apple ][ computers, all running, I guess, a sophisticated software package for computing feed and what not. We were there to play Wizardry, of course, my good friend was the lab tech. But it was just interesting how the Ag school was a pioneer in the personal computing space at an, ostensibly, school known for its science and engineering programs (though it was also know for its Ag and Architecture schools).

blindriver 2y ago

I applaud him for trying and spending his own money at this.

nobankai 2y ago
[flagged]
randcraw 2y ago
Ellison's purchase of the island also included several resort hotels and homes. It's likely the income from those does a lot to cover his $500 million loss in farming. (It's curious the article says nothing about his yield from that side of the island.) In the end, it's likely that Ellison's grand farming enterprise on a luxury resort island was always just a promotional stunt and was never intended to be sustainable or profitable. His strategy was to employ none of the resources essential to any business' success, like knowing your market or hiring staff who know even the basics of the trade (farming). Instead he hires supercomputer architect Danny Hillis to reinvent agriculture? Sure. What could go wrong?

cakealert 2y ago

The killer app would be to figure out how to genetically engineer good plant flesh economically in a bioreactor. Imagine strawberry,pineapple,etc slurry production by the metric ton. With the only input into the facility being atmospheric gasses and electricity. There would also be huge room for optimization in such a process, such as introduction of antifreeze proteins (as some fish have) to allow storage of various fruit at freezing temperatures without loss of quality.

floatrock 2y ago
We'd name it Slurry Red or Slurry Yellow, right? Maybe Slurry Green for the melon flavor.
kavalg 2y ago
I already have this in production. Interested? PS: Please, don't tell anyone that it is all starch, sugar and artificial color/flavor :)

lenerdenator 2y ago

Don't tell Larry about all of the startups in the Midwest who are actually making progress on this.

lurk2 2y ago
Is this a joke about conventional mechanized farming working well enough as it is or has there been serious progress in the AgTech sector? The last time I read of it the big developments were hydroponics and tractors that burned weeds with a laser beam.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  There's been real progress, and Larry's got a long history of gutting people who make real progress because he just thinks of anything sitting on a database as a way to push Oracle licenses while increasing his personal net worth.
  - jjtheblunt 2y ago
    what's the real progress, though? I'm a midwesterner originally and I'm genuinely curious what you're referencing.
  - heurist 2y ago
    All the companies in this space go out of business. Who in the Midwest is doing well?
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Are those actually big developments or just incremental ones?
nineplay 2y ago
Why don't you tell us about all them?

azinman2 2y ago

Don’t have a WSJ account so can’t read the article, and the archive link posted doesn’t work for me. It sounds like this was a greenhouse based business? What I’m excited by (perhaps naively so) are the startups using robots to zap weeds and do other things to reduce chemical usage. Anyone know the status of these companies, and if there’s anything intrinsically wrong with the approach?

antasvara 2y ago
I think the approaches usually fail because commercial farming with chemical fertilizer is pretty efficient and optimized to work at a large scale. A lot of agtech startups (think vertical farming) just don't get this. They don't understand where the inefficiencies are, or how their approach loses efficiency at commercial-farming scale, or how the approach doesn't integrate with other necessary machinery, etc.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  Vertical farming might be having trouble but a very closely related cousin, the Dutch greenhouse, is doing fantastically. The differences are subtle because Dutch greenhouses have been used to vertically farm crops as well (though not separated in the same way that vertical farms are) and use artificial lighting. The subtle differences matter and that's why iteration in the space is so good. The surface level discussion in this thread griping over Ellison's approach is probably the least interesting aspect of agtech to discuss but is the one that most people have an opinion on and generates the most engagement which is why this thread is filled with it.

WillAdams 2y ago

The thing is, there are some hard numbers and some fundamental truths which someone is going to have to find answers for: - peak oil is happening (or has happened) - current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (not an inconsiderate portion of which is fertilizer runoff into waterways and oceans) - in the past century the bony fish biomass has plummeted to below the weight of shipping tonnage in the world's oceans: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ As I've noted before, my grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry that my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer viable.

pfdietz 2y ago
> current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy The phrase "up to" is doing heavy lifting there. In particular, this would be production of beef. Production of grains is much more efficient, as is production of poultry, fish, or pork. It should be noted that in the US, agriculture uses a very small fraction (about 1%) of total primary energy consumption (not counting the sunlight being used by the plants). We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Almonds also are notable for requiring a great deal of energy (mostly for transporting water for irrigation).
- floatrock 2y ago
  1.9% according to this USDA link https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=87964 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-... But, > Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms. So seeing as modern industrial agriculture only exists because of the Haber-Bosch process and pesticides, but those are counted as indirect inputs, your phrase "primary energy consumption" is also doing a fair amount of heavy lifting. And that's not counting all of the supply and cold chains needed to get that food to your supermarket. All these hydroponic/indoor-fresh-greens startups are largely about breaking even on the product-to-market side of things.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

I'm no fan of Ellison, but better to be putting money into this than entertainment, social networks, the Metaverse, or even AI.

aurizon 2y ago

One of the early proponents and perhaps a driver, was Dickson Despommier, who just passed. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/ https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/ Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted. It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farming https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
What he wants is automated food production in his creepy autonomous Hawaii sub-nation, which fits with all the other Atlas Shrugged "hidden valley" dreams of the SV ultrarich. He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations. He doesn't care squat about the world in general.

westurner 2y ago

Notes for Lanai island from an amateur: Hemp is useful for soil remediation because it's so absorbent; which is part of why testing is important. Is there already a composting business? Do the schools etc. already compost waste food? "Show HN: We open-sourced our compost monitoring tech" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201207 Canadian greenhouses? Chinese-Mongolian-Canadian greenhouses are wing shaped and set against a berm; "Passive Solar Greenhouse Technology From China?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=FOgyK6Jieq0& https://youtube.com/watch?v=FOgyK6Jieq0& Transparent wood requires extracting the lignin. Transparent aluminum requires a production process, too. There are polycarbonate hurricane panels. Reflective material on one wall of the wallipini greenhouse (and geothermal) is enough to grow citrus fruit through the winter in Alliance, Nebraska. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927538 Glass allows more wavelengths of light through than plastic or recyclable polycarbonate; including UV-C, which is sanitizing Hydrogen peroxide cleans out fish tanks FWIU. Various plastics are food safe, but not when they've been in the sun all day. To make aircrete, you add soap bubbles to concrete with an air compressor. /? aircrete dome build in HI and ground anchors Catalan masonry vault roofs (in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Arizona,) are strong, don't require temporary arches, and passively cool most efficiently when they have an oculus to let the heat rise out of the dome to openable vents to the wind. U.S. state and territory temperature extremes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_temperature_extremes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe... : > Hawaii: 15 °F (−9.4 °C) to 100 °F (37.8 °C) > Nebraska: -47 °F (−43.9 °C) to 118 °F (47.8 °C) "140-year-old ocean heat tech could supply islands with limitless energy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222695 : > OTEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio... North Carolina is ranked 4th in solar, has solar farms, and has hurricanes (and totally round homes on stilts). FWIU there are hurricane-rated solar panels, flexible racks, ground mounts. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20092018/hurricane-florence-solar-panel-energy-resilience-extreme-weather-damage-wind-flooding/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20092018/hurricane-floren... "Sargablock: Bricks from Seaweed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188180 "Turning pineapple skins into soap and other cleaning products" https://www.businessinsider.com/turning-pineapple-skins-into-soap-and-other-cleaning-products-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/turning-pineapple-skins-into... "Costa Rica Let a Juice Company Dump Their Orange Peels in the Forest—and It Helped" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-juice-company-dump-their-orange-peels-forestand-it-helped-180964666/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-jui... https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-orange-peel-produced-something-nobody-imagined https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-ora...

didntknowyou 2y ago

it wasn't a philantropic or revolutionary attempt. it was his venture to grow his luxury fruits for money- which is struggling because he is hiring friends with no agricultural background.

rozap 2y ago
"city boy tries to grow a plant" is a whole genre of hubris that is always entertaining.
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  can't wait to watch the failures of agriculture on mars. well actually nevermind because people will die.
  - DebtDeflation 2y ago
    As long as you have a dozen potatoes, some human poop, a sample of earth soil for necessary nutrients and bacteria, and rocket fuel to burn to make water, it should be pretty easy.
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      Sabatier reaction also rocks in this context. CO2 + O2 => methane with water as a byproduct. So all you really need is hydrogen. And conveniently part of the water you produce or harvest can be split into H2 and O2. The absurd convenience of such things realllly makes one think more deeply about the simulation hypothesis.
    - acdha 2y ago
      If you can’t think of reasons why it would be harder than that, consider that you might want to read up on the problem first before saying it’s easy. For example, you’re assuming compatible soil (no), nutrients (also no), and the absence of toxins (again no). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01158-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01158-6 Another way of looking at: have humans over-wintered in Antarctica without relying on outside inputs? That’s a much easier problem on multiple scales (oxygen, soil, temperature, water, etc.) so I wouldn’t take any mars proposal seriously before they’ve sent the same equipment to Antarctica and survived longer than the proposed mission.

Over3Chars 2y ago

TL;DR tech bro's underestimate the difficulty of farming. News at 11.

dang 2y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

tycho-newman 2y ago

Farming is an old human activity and it took us thousands of years to work out how to do it competently. We had to invent Haber-Bosch fertilizers and genetic engineering to get us to basically permanent surplus. Honestly not surprised this is so hard. The area was pineapple plantation for years, and the plantation owners were not great stewards of the land. No amount of money can fix decades of shitty land stewardship. It’s just time and effort.

iugtmkbdfil834 2y ago

I am not a fan of Larry so take the next sentences as an odd way to confirm bias and maybe this is why I am responding to it now.. Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.

etchalon 2y ago
There is a weird belief in SV that if you don't know anything, but have access to a lot of capital, you can build a better solution. This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  "<insert semi-fact taken out of context regarding something you don't know about> We are fixing this."
  - poslathian 2y ago
    https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html
    - neilv 2y ago
      > The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought that it would be interesting to see how they interacted. I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.) Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy. (I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-andy-cs-s-innovator https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )

cameron_b 2y ago

I'm fairly blown-away at the mission statement: “improve human nutrition and preserve the environment by growing food indoors" Adding a building doesn't improve the environment, so for starters you're in the hole, for energy, you're in the hole (pending solar and thermal recovery, each with environmental impact of their own)... Larry, let's talk. There's for sure a use for greenhouses, sensors, all the tech, but let's focus on the soil.

lkbm 2y ago
> Adding a building doesn't improve the environment Depends how concerned you are about pesticides.
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  Exactly Show me any farm that doesn’t use them I’ll wait
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    There is indoor lettuce I can buy at my supermarkets that is "zero pesticide" (you can just google it and find several, don't want to post any sort of links to products here). I suspect it's hydroponic.
    - x-complexity 2y ago
      > I suspect it's hydroponic. It's axiomatically-speaking the one of the only few ways to make it happen. "zero pesticides" implies no bugs/insects around to need spraying it in the first place, and doing that requires (A) a clean environment + (B) no regular soil (regular soil may have insect eggs / fungi in them). The only things that come to mind are hydroponics & hydrogel agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogel_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogel_agriculture

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/larry-ellison-s-half-billion-dollar-quest-to-change-farming-has-been-a-bust/ar-AA1zDBe7 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/larry-ellison-s-h... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zDBe7 https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zDBe7

darig 2y ago

[dead]

larodi 2y ago

How does s.o. in his 80s look this well? Even considering the possibility of plastic surgery. Even on his 2010 photo in wikipedia he looks so insanely younger, perhaps 45 or something...

ozten 2y ago

“People, no offense, don’t really love cucumbers. There wasn’t as sustainable a market for it,” Agus said. Maybe stick to "secret" warrantless surveillance on US citizens.

rmason 2y ago

As a former agronomist this makes as much sense to me as starting a database company where no one understands databases. Without an agronomist how do you know what could be possible from what is clearly impossible?

throw7 2y ago

I just find it funny how tech executives couldn't even make and run a stable wifi network.

mediaoracle 2y ago

Not sure why the headline has been editorialized. "Larry Ellison’s Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust"

NoPicklez 2y ago

Seeing lots of "he knows nothing about farming", sure he might not know as much about farming as the farmers who live it day to day. But he has money and access to bring farmers along for the journey and build something better. A lot of true disruption comes from people you'd never expect to have had an impact, because they aren't myopic to the pre-conceived challenges of that industry.

gunian 2y ago

baron aura quests are fascinating

tfourb 2y ago

There are some niche applications where innovative greenhouse technology, AI and similar tech can contribute to better agriculture. But this "tech think" completely misses the point, when it comes to Agriculture. We already have all the technology we need to convert Agriculture from a major emitter to a CO2-dump. We could dramatically increase current and future arable land by using known sustainable farming techniques without loosing or even while enhancing productivity per hectare. Especially the idea that we need ultra-productive greenhouses in urban settings is plainly speaking stupid and ignores basic economics. Land is actually quite plentiful, even directly adjacent to major agglomerations and (with the right tools and techniques) can be highly productive without capital intensive tech projects. Innovation is needed much more in terms of giving producers the right incentives to farm sustainably – at the moment much of government subsidies and trade incentives has a directly opposite effect. Of course it would be nice, if a farmer could use a $2,000 drone to weed their fields pesticide free by employing AI, etc. But the real holy grail would be to get a farmer to use known techniques to drastically reduce fertilizer and pesticide use while increasing the diversity of crops and the carbon content of his soil.

alecco 2y ago

Didn't China burst this bubble already? Vertical farming, etc. Western aligned farming is currently in a big downturn due to BRICS constantly breaking production records. And they are using Chinese machinery. The world is catching up to American farming yields. China is decoupling from American farming and they have been investing a lot in all the infrastructure for that. American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis) https://www.barrons.com/articles/farmers-trump-trade-war-agriculture-crop-beef-prices-2be036c2 https://www.barrons.com/articles/farmers-trump-trade-war-agr... https://farmonaut.com/usa/urgent-u-s-farmers-face-financial-crisis-as-2025-farm-bill-looms-farmonaut-analyzes-impact-on-crop-insurance-and-safety-nets/ https://farmonaut.com/usa/urgent-u-s-farmers-face-financial-...

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
There are a lot of Chinese doomsayers out there, about how they are about to collapse (zeihan). Then this, farming, or Deepseek comes out. I think their demise is over exaggerated.
- rfwhyte 2y ago
  Deepseek or whatever farming tech they may be developing don't amount to a drop in the bucket when it comes to their looming demographic collapse. China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration. The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Netherlands as well, one of the smallest countries in the world but the 3rd largest agricultural exporter in the world.

chakintosh 2y ago

The lesson of Larry Ellison’s misadventures in farming – TechCrunch, 23/2/2025 https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/the-lesson-of-larry-ellisons-misadventures-in-farming/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/the-lesson-of-larry-elliso...

teleforce 2y ago

Well, I hope he hires an engineer. There is even such a thing as an agricultural engineer - Susan Grill (one of the WSJ article commentators).

teleforce 2y ago

The fact that billionaires can own thousand of hectares of Hawaiian lands, that was annexed by US against the Hawaiian natives people will, with many of them currently do not have proper land and housing is pretty disturbing [1]. [1] Hawaii: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): https://youtu.be/j8DxdibHibU https://youtu.be/j8DxdibHibU

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

This seems like maybe all the tech bro's should have also hired some some farmers. Even to consult. Seems like a lot of self inflicted wounds. So not an indicator that these farming techniques 'wont work' but more 'these guys can't manage a project'.

pfdietz 2y ago

The real game changer for farming would be direct synthesis of food, avoiding using plants for energy or CO2 capture. But this is tough to make work economically. The easiest target would be single cell protein, for example ICI's Pruteen or more recently Quorn. Perhaps if renewable electricity continues to decline in price it will become more feasible.

datavirtue 2y ago

Ag is a harsh mistress.

betimsl 2y ago

Equivalent to a beginner betting $500 on red. Let's see what happens.

ein0p 2y ago

What is it with tech bros thinking they can successfully operate in "deep" industries like agriculture where every last bit of efficiency has already been squeezed out over the past 100-150 years? In fact, arguably, there's way too much efficiency, and quality of the produce has suffered quite a bit by now.