12 ms·

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

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.
      - ANewFormation 2y ago
        Antarctica isn't this great example people think it is. International treaties require people leave it in as close to its natural condition as possible. Taking a piss outside is illegal, even peoples crap has to be collected and shipped back home. Any sort of development is essentially impossible. And that article is an interview with the hipster cartoonist who wrote a largely junk science book on Mars..
        acdha 2y ago
        Multiple countries have bases in Antarctica, so it seems unlikely that a spacecraft-sized addition to the 50 acre McMurdo station is the proverbial straw on the camel’s back for a continent’s environment. Reusing human waste shouldn’t be a problem, either, since the proposals are to use that as fertilizer - it’s awfully expensive not to use everything that you shipped between planets! And, yes, I linked to a best-selling popular science book at the level of the conversation here. I should note that the book has two authors, and the first one isn’t the illustrator but the professional biologist. You’re welcome to provide dissenting views if you want, I’m sure they wouldn’t claim to be the last word on the topic.
        somenameforme 2y ago
        It's far below the level of discussion here or anywhere where there is discussion with varying views. The reason is that the book is broken in near to every single argument it makes, often intentionally by relying on misleading arguments or assuming the lack of knowledge of the reader -- knowledge which, crucially, I'm fairly certain they themselves had or should have had with even cursory level research on the topic. In a forum with debate those arguments rapidly emerge. So for instance, their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant. Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way which isn't the initial event, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on. This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is because it's so different than the conditions to which we prepare for -- more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters. I wanted to dig into more of their arguments but this is already fairly lengthy. If you mention what you found most compelling, I can offer the data (or, as in this case, logic) to the contrary.
    - nuancebydefault 2y ago
      I am not sure why you got downvoted but probably they did not watch 'the Martian'.
      - DebtDeflation 2y ago
        At least someone got the reference, thank you.
    - greenie_beans 2y ago
      i hope this is sarcasm because this is exactly what i'm talking about. i will not be joining you on that endeavor but more power to you. good luck!
- floatrock 2y ago
  "how do you grow a winery with a small fortune? Start with a large fortune" - silicon valley joke since at least the dot com bubble
  - zombiwoof 2y ago
    Music industry version goes something like: how to get a million dollars making music? Spend 100 million
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  Except it's not especially hard? I, and I'm sure many of us, have decent little home gardens. For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended. Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
  - mlinhares 2y ago
    You can always count on someone thinking doing some unscalable thing and it being "easy" will scale for an actual operation that needs to make money. Farming is only easy for the people that have never farmed before.
  - tdeck 2y ago
    I once lived in a house that had an apple tree in the back yard. Tons of apples at the start of the season. But then squirrels and deer would come by and rip them off one by one, before they were ripe, taking a single bite and leaving them on the ground. These same animals ate almost my entire vegetable garden, including things deer aren't supposed to like such as potato plants and black mustard. It's a great project to get you outside but there are so many ways to be disappointed.
    - 83 2y ago
      That's just circling back on "city boy tries to grow a plant". Your garden provided you with both fruit and meat. You were just unwilling/unable to harvest the meat.
      - tdeck 2y ago
        I'm not sure it's legal to kill deer in Berkeley, but they were also very cute.
        nradov 2y ago
        It's coming right for us!
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Easy to grow plant. Hard to make living, if you don't subsidise it with other work or income. Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general. Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Margins start improving fast when you turn that fruit into booze. Licensure of course is an issue but many americans are making good money today selling moonshine locally without any of that.
iancmceachern 2y ago
I've seen this time and again in this space. Thick out the MiT openag project. Same thing, nonsense. The folks who are successful don't call themselves tech people, they're farmers. To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.
- worik 2y ago
  > To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer. Yes. That is not to say that farming is not due for some revolutionary redefining. But it will be farmers leading the change, not software people
  - iancmceachern 2y ago
    Exactly. It's companies like John Deere who automate their combines, not software/automation companies learning how to make combines, that have been (and I expect will continue to be) successful.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Not a farmer, but I think it's a mistake to say that farmers haven't modernized. I saw some videos about more modern farms, and they utilize drones, GPS, and a whole litany of other bits of modern tech to help with the farming stuff. I agree that it needs to be farmers leading the change, but I don't think that the farming world is as primitive as people seem to think it is.
    - graycat 2y ago
      Ah, my father in law was a farmer, grew wheat, corn, soy beans, but sometimes raised chickens. Along with the corn, when he fed the chickens anchovies from Chile he noticed rapid growth, called the little fish a growth factor. Wellllll, long before his growth factor, we assumed we knew what a good balanced diet for chickens was. Then, presto, bingo, the issue was what barrels of fish, soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost. Right: Linear programming, the "diet problem", applied math in farming!
tdeck 2y ago
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
hibikir 2y ago
I've worked in many an ag company: All the ideas Sensei supposedly has are in in way innovative: places like Monsanto/Bayer had been trying to do work in those directions a decade ago, and it's not as if they were short of people that understand agriculture. But as far as I am aware, most of the efforts in those companies have been scaled back. The fact of the matter is that agriculture startups have as nasty a failure rate as most other kinds of startups, but they take far longer, and far more money, until we reach the point that it's clear that they've reach said terminal state. I could name a couple that have been running for 6+ years with no revenue, and where insiders claim there's minimal prospects of the effort going anywhere, but there are some VCs that are happy keeping said 100+ employee startups running with no output anyway.
schainks 2y ago
Yeah seems like you'd want to either copy, poach, or acquire the talent at Oishii, no? They look like they know what they are doing, although it's not consumer cheap yet, and the economics might never be.
hoseja 2y ago
That seems like a perfectly fine way to start a disruptive venture. Tesla started as a way to grow luxury EVs for money, except real experts got acquired.
bondarchuk 2y ago
"Luxury fruits" lol way to go framing eating fruit as negatively as possible. Not that I have qualms with what you say otherwise.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Is he planning this for the former Dole fields on Lanai?

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.
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      Antarctica isn't this great example people think it is. International treaties require people leave it in as close to its natural condition as possible. Taking a piss outside is illegal, even peoples crap has to be collected and shipped back home. Any sort of development is essentially impossible. And that article is an interview with the hipster cartoonist who wrote a largely junk science book on Mars..
      - acdha 2y ago
        Multiple countries have bases in Antarctica, so it seems unlikely that a spacecraft-sized addition to the 50 acre McMurdo station is the proverbial straw on the camel’s back for a continent’s environment. Reusing human waste shouldn’t be a problem, either, since the proposals are to use that as fertilizer - it’s awfully expensive not to use everything that you shipped between planets! And, yes, I linked to a best-selling popular science book at the level of the conversation here. I should note that the book has two authors, and the first one isn’t the illustrator but the professional biologist. You’re welcome to provide dissenting views if you want, I’m sure they wouldn’t claim to be the last word on the topic.
        somenameforme 2y ago
        It's far below the level of discussion here or anywhere where there is discussion with varying views. The reason is that the book is broken in near to every single argument it makes, often intentionally by relying on misleading arguments or assuming the lack of knowledge of the reader -- knowledge which, crucially, I'm fairly certain they themselves had or should have had with even cursory level research on the topic. In a forum with debate those arguments rapidly emerge. So for instance, their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant. Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way which isn't the initial event, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on. This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is because it's so different than the conditions to which we prepare for -- more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters. I wanted to dig into more of their arguments but this is already fairly lengthy. If you mention what you found most compelling, I can offer the data (or, as in this case, logic) to the contrary.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    I am not sure why you got downvoted but probably they did not watch 'the Martian'.
    - DebtDeflation 2y ago
      At least someone got the reference, thank you.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    i hope this is sarcasm because this is exactly what i'm talking about. i will not be joining you on that endeavor but more power to you. good luck!
floatrock 2y ago
"how do you grow a winery with a small fortune? Start with a large fortune" - silicon valley joke since at least the dot com bubble
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  Music industry version goes something like: how to get a million dollars making music? Spend 100 million
ANewFormation 2y ago
Except it's not especially hard? I, and I'm sure many of us, have decent little home gardens. For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended. Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  You can always count on someone thinking doing some unscalable thing and it being "easy" will scale for an actual operation that needs to make money. Farming is only easy for the people that have never farmed before.
- tdeck 2y ago
  I once lived in a house that had an apple tree in the back yard. Tons of apples at the start of the season. But then squirrels and deer would come by and rip them off one by one, before they were ripe, taking a single bite and leaving them on the ground. These same animals ate almost my entire vegetable garden, including things deer aren't supposed to like such as potato plants and black mustard. It's a great project to get you outside but there are so many ways to be disappointed.
  - 83 2y ago
    That's just circling back on "city boy tries to grow a plant". Your garden provided you with both fruit and meat. You were just unwilling/unable to harvest the meat.
    - tdeck 2y ago
      I'm not sure it's legal to kill deer in Berkeley, but they were also very cute.
      - nradov 2y ago
        It's coming right for us!
Ekaros 2y ago
Easy to grow plant. Hard to make living, if you don't subsidise it with other work or income. Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general. Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Margins start improving fast when you turn that fruit into booze. Licensure of course is an issue but many americans are making good money today selling moonshine locally without any of that.

iancmceachern 2y ago

I've seen this time and again in this space. Thick out the MiT openag project. Same thing, nonsense. The folks who are successful don't call themselves tech people, they're farmers. To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.

worik 2y ago
> To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer. Yes. That is not to say that farming is not due for some revolutionary redefining. But it will be farmers leading the change, not software people
- iancmceachern 2y ago
  Exactly. It's companies like John Deere who automate their combines, not software/automation companies learning how to make combines, that have been (and I expect will continue to be) successful.
- tombert 2y ago
  Not a farmer, but I think it's a mistake to say that farmers haven't modernized. I saw some videos about more modern farms, and they utilize drones, GPS, and a whole litany of other bits of modern tech to help with the farming stuff. I agree that it needs to be farmers leading the change, but I don't think that the farming world is as primitive as people seem to think it is.
  - graycat 2y ago
    Ah, my father in law was a farmer, grew wheat, corn, soy beans, but sometimes raised chickens. Along with the corn, when he fed the chickens anchovies from Chile he noticed rapid growth, called the little fish a growth factor. Wellllll, long before his growth factor, we assumed we knew what a good balanced diet for chickens was. Then, presto, bingo, the issue was what barrels of fish, soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost. Right: Linear programming, the "diet problem", applied math in farming!

tdeck 2y ago

Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.

hibikir 2y ago

I've worked in many an ag company: All the ideas Sensei supposedly has are in in way innovative: places like Monsanto/Bayer had been trying to do work in those directions a decade ago, and it's not as if they were short of people that understand agriculture. But as far as I am aware, most of the efforts in those companies have been scaled back. The fact of the matter is that agriculture startups have as nasty a failure rate as most other kinds of startups, but they take far longer, and far more money, until we reach the point that it's clear that they've reach said terminal state. I could name a couple that have been running for 6+ years with no revenue, and where insiders claim there's minimal prospects of the effort going anywhere, but there are some VCs that are happy keeping said 100+ employee startups running with no output anyway.

schainks 2y ago

Yeah seems like you'd want to either copy, poach, or acquire the talent at Oishii, no? They look like they know what they are doing, although it's not consumer cheap yet, and the economics might never be.

hoseja 2y ago

That seems like a perfectly fine way to start a disruptive venture. Tesla started as a way to grow luxury EVs for money, except real experts got acquired.

bondarchuk 2y ago

"Luxury fruits" lol way to go framing eating fruit as negatively as possible. Not that I have qualms with what you say otherwise.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Is he planning this for the former Dole fields on Lanai?