4 ms·

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 mass

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!
- datavirtue 2y ago
  If you are disappointed, you didn't plant enough.
tuumi 2y ago
I grew up in NW lower Michigan. Cherry and other fruit tree country. Orchards need a lot of labor to maintain to get marketable fruit. I've seen several go wild and become deer feed. Also, they don't really scale as the grow as you need to spend more on infrastructure. Orchards now plant dwarf rootstock. This results in trees that bear fruit quicker but don't grow much larger that a human can pick by hand. They need a lot of care (water and pruning) relative to larger trees but the economics of the larger trees don't work as well as they take many years to bear fruit and then they need the infrastructure to prune and harvest because they are so big. It's not a simple thing at all.
hermannj314 2y ago
You should tell all the PhD agronomists at ISU they are wasting their lives before it's too late. Running a farm profitably vs planting a tree or garden is the difference between a successful startup and a hello world app. You are incorrect to trivialize farming.
rozap 2y ago
Scaling crops is not like scaling software.
acdha 2y ago
> 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. What are you growing and where? In Southern California, I got high yields of lemons but had to irrigate more water than is naturally available, fertilize, and worry about frost damage every winter. Apples were similar except they didn’t mind the cold snaps but they needed careful thinning. On the East coast, all fruit requires heavy efforts to avoid animals taking most of the harvest and there are diseases like rust which lowered the apple, pear, and service berry yields to zero. Things like persimmons do better but need consistent pruning to avoid storm damage.
- aweiland 2y ago
  I'm on the east coast. I have 5 apple and 3 pear trees. I'm lucky to get 5 fruit by the end of summer due to squirrels.
  - acdha 2y ago
    I’ve gotten one persimmon in ten years: the squirrels wait until the start of November when all of the other food is gone and eat all of them a week or two before they ripen.
sensanaty 2y ago
Perfect showcase of aforementioned city boy hubris, equating a small home garden with some trees to a modern day farming operation. Growing 100 potatoes is not even in the same stratosphere of complexity and logistics as growing 100,000 potatoes.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Potatoes are not a good counter example because they are indeed stupidly easy to grow and scale. You can easily grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes per year indoors with fairly small potato boxes going through a few harvests per year. The main limiting factor is energy costs - you'll end up paying more per kg of potato than you would if you just bought them at the grocery store. But there's a very good reason potatoes will be one of the early staples for fresh food on Mars. It's really hard to go wrong with them. It's also the reason it was chosen as the first food to ever be grown in space, back in 1995!
  - sensanaty 2y ago
    I'm aware, I grew up on a farm growing potatoes (amongst other things). My point is, again, growing a few potatoes is very, very different to growing multiple field fulls of potatoes at an industrial scale and the whole hubris thing is people thinking such a thing is scaleable. Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      It's possible to go to extremes in either direction in this topic, because there are things you can do objectively better but are cost constrained. For instance with indoor potato farms you can harvest multiple times per year anywhere, get crazy yields/health by jacking up CO2 levels, grow in absolutely perfect temperature/humidity conditions, have far less issue with pests/weeds, and so on endlessly. And in the context of an early Mars expedition, which probably wouldn't have more than a dozen people anyhow, you could get practically infinite potatoes in a very small land area. This is all dramatically better and more efficient than classical farming with long sprawling fields in every way except for cost/kg, but in contemporary industrial farming the only thing that matters is cost/kg.

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!
datavirtue 2y ago
If you are disappointed, you didn't plant enough.

tuumi 2y ago

I grew up in NW lower Michigan. Cherry and other fruit tree country. Orchards need a lot of labor to maintain to get marketable fruit. I've seen several go wild and become deer feed. Also, they don't really scale as the grow as you need to spend more on infrastructure. Orchards now plant dwarf rootstock. This results in trees that bear fruit quicker but don't grow much larger that a human can pick by hand. They need a lot of care (water and pruning) relative to larger trees but the economics of the larger trees don't work as well as they take many years to bear fruit and then they need the infrastructure to prune and harvest because they are so big. It's not a simple thing at all.

hermannj314 2y ago

You should tell all the PhD agronomists at ISU they are wasting their lives before it's too late. Running a farm profitably vs planting a tree or garden is the difference between a successful startup and a hello world app. You are incorrect to trivialize farming.

rozap 2y ago

Scaling crops is not like scaling software.

acdha 2y ago

> 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. What are you growing and where? In Southern California, I got high yields of lemons but had to irrigate more water than is naturally available, fertilize, and worry about frost damage every winter. Apples were similar except they didn’t mind the cold snaps but they needed careful thinning. On the East coast, all fruit requires heavy efforts to avoid animals taking most of the harvest and there are diseases like rust which lowered the apple, pear, and service berry yields to zero. Things like persimmons do better but need consistent pruning to avoid storm damage.

aweiland 2y ago
I'm on the east coast. I have 5 apple and 3 pear trees. I'm lucky to get 5 fruit by the end of summer due to squirrels.
- acdha 2y ago
  I’ve gotten one persimmon in ten years: the squirrels wait until the start of November when all of the other food is gone and eat all of them a week or two before they ripen.

sensanaty 2y ago

Perfect showcase of aforementioned city boy hubris, equating a small home garden with some trees to a modern day farming operation. Growing 100 potatoes is not even in the same stratosphere of complexity and logistics as growing 100,000 potatoes.

somenameforme 2y ago
Potatoes are not a good counter example because they are indeed stupidly easy to grow and scale. You can easily grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes per year indoors with fairly small potato boxes going through a few harvests per year. The main limiting factor is energy costs - you'll end up paying more per kg of potato than you would if you just bought them at the grocery store. But there's a very good reason potatoes will be one of the early staples for fresh food on Mars. It's really hard to go wrong with them. It's also the reason it was chosen as the first food to ever be grown in space, back in 1995!
- sensanaty 2y ago
  I'm aware, I grew up on a farm growing potatoes (amongst other things). My point is, again, growing a few potatoes is very, very different to growing multiple field fulls of potatoes at an industrial scale and the whole hubris thing is people thinking such a thing is scaleable. Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    It's possible to go to extremes in either direction in this topic, because there are things you can do objectively better but are cost constrained. For instance with indoor potato farms you can harvest multiple times per year anywhere, get crazy yields/health by jacking up CO2 levels, grow in absolutely perfect temperature/humidity conditions, have far less issue with pests/weeds, and so on endlessly. And in the context of an early Mars expedition, which probably wouldn't have more than a dozen people anyhow, you could get practically infinite potatoes in a very small land area. This is all dramatically better and more efficient than classical farming with long sprawling fields in every way except for cost/kg, but in contemporary industrial farming the only thing that matters is cost/kg.