I've been working in ag-tech for about 10 years, having spent the prior 10 years in other kinds of startups/tech companies.
When I see the new ag-tech startups coming out of accelerators or being established by supposedly seasoned entrepreneurs, the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein.
They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere.
And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. And whilst some things could/should be improved (environmental externalities and resource consumption being the most significant), these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field.
People have no idea how efficient farming is. In 1260 the price of wheat was 6- 8 shillings (~1/3 pound sterling) per bushel (60 pounds). By the early 20th century, it was about 1 £/bushel. At that point the US became the efficient grower and dominant currency, and so switching from pounds sterling to dollars at the rate at the time of $5/£1 is appropriate. Today wheat is $6.50 per barrel. Put another way, the price of wheat in the dominant currency has ~tripled in 750 years. That's an inflation rate of ~0.1%.
Put another way, a typical Saskatchewan dryland wheat farm is about 5,000 - 10,000 acres per employee or operator in size. That 5,000-10,000 acres will produce enough calories to feed ~100,000 people. (Those acres will also require ~$10M in capital and ~$1M in annual operating expenses)
Put a third way, modern agriculture can provide enough grains and legumes to feed somebody for around 30 cents per day at bulk prices.
You raise some very good points – but I think that looking at the monetary price of wheat is a particularly bad example in England because of the Assize of Bread and Ale [1] which ran from about the 13th century until being repealed in 1836 (!) and later protectionist issues like the Corn laws [2] across "the empire".
In many ways these laws directly tied the strength of the currency to the prevailing value of wheat – a very different sort of gold standard(!) – and occasionally caused massive economic difficulties as a result (I remember a story involving the value of silver, Isaac Newton, and shippers directly clipping or smelting coins and moving the metal to amsterdam to sell at a profit compared to the value of the coin, all indirectly powered by the very variable wheat).
Your broader point about the pricing of wheat definitely stands though: in the 13th century, wheat drove the economy; as we got better at trading and ultimately the industrial agricultural revolution both served to reduce the variability of the harvest on macroeconomic climes and ever since really the black death we've been in a society where the relative power of the grain (if not its importance!) has steadily declined. [3]
> modern agriculture can provide enough grains and legumes to feed somebody for around 30 cents per day
This just 30 cents for feeding are not real. Wheat is not the same as bread. It must be processed. Baking bread for 100,000 people will require also a lot of energy and water that aren't free normally. Would be 30 + X cents.
Almost no one does that though, so I'm confused as to the point you are trying to make? Even the people who do make their own bread usually don't grind their own wheat.
But modern agriculture isn't really sustainable. It wasted land that represents ecosystem destruction, wastes groundwater, wastes soil, requires pesticides, and petroleum for fertilizers.
Not that any very farms fundamentally address these issues, but to say it's perfect is wrong.
Yes by modern economics measures it is efficient, but modern economics still treats any environmental concern like a frivolous side issue.
Certain crops are certainly efficient.
I’m not involved in ag-tech, but the ideas I’ve seen aren’t really going after the efficient (and government incentivized) crops, but rather the more labor and resource (human and natural) intensive ones as well as ones that benefit from proximity to consumers.
We can have free unlimited food for everyone today
maybe not free unlimited saffron, but flour(s), legumes and nuts, potatoes could be distributed for free (subject to some rationing, 5000Kcal per person per day). This is not utopian, this is technical possible right now.
There‘s no such thing as a free meal. Of course you could distribute free food to all your citizens (the Ancient Romans famously did), but somebody still needs to pay for it.
It‘s not just about on-farm labour, you need big machines (and lots of diesel!), fertiliser, pesticides… And that‘s before you look at all the rest of the food system, because to put a meal on the table you need the whole supply chain (ag-tech, fertiliser production, food processing, wholesale suppliers, etc.)
In modern agriculture, the farmer only gets a fraction of the money you pay for your loaf of bread, because there are so many other people involved.
Machines and free energy (solar, for example) make free meals possible.
Maybe if we can reduce the need for profit we also reduce the need for fertilizers, maybe the relation between fertilizers used and crop productivity is not linear (-20% productivity but -40% fertilizers?). Food processing won't be necessary: why have a factory for chips? or for hummus? _Most_ people can cook.
The thing is, contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible. Now more so than ever; we have everything we need to start a food UBI.
The rest are just accounting details, like how less rich the 1% should be to fund all this.
> contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible.
Of course it's possible, I'm just saying it's not (and can never be) free. "Free for consumers" simply means somebody else paid for the costs - or more likely, the consumer paid the costs through taxes rather than at the store. You will always have input costs to produce an output, and these will not be negligible.
Just a few points on what you said, and these are not "accounting details": (1) Solar energy is not free - you need to build, install, and maintain panels and a power grid. (2) Of course you can reduce fertiliser, organic farming does so and takes ~20% yield decrease (depending on the crop). But then you have higher labour and machine costs to control weeds, and an overall higher per-hectare price. (3) Food processing matters because you probably don't want to spend most of your day milling your grain ration to make flour that you can then bake into bread. Ditto for other types of staple foods (you want to make your own sausages?). (On a historical side-note, here's a write-up of how ancient food systems worked: https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they...).
There is no particular "need" for profit, but by default most people will direct their labor and capital towards whatever earns them they highest profit. Attempts to impose central planning on food production inevitably lead to shortages, rationing, black markets, and famine.
It seems to me that most modern agriculture is, at least in effect, centrally planned, between regulation and subsidy. I am curious whether you have a counterexample outside of subsistence farming.
We already have free food for those who really need it through the food stamps (SNAP) program. Very few people need as much 5000 kcal/day; that amount is only needed for people doing really hard manual labor or sports training.
Nuts would require the same amount water regardless of whatever economic system they're grown under. Maybe we can reduce the amount of water going to red meat and use it for nuts?
Big centers, like Costco, could serve as distribution centers; while software can handle the rationing.
> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine.
if insiders think it's "mostly fine", that might explain why you only see outsiders coming in with radical ideas.
Sure farming is mostly fine at producing food efficiently. And coal is mostly fine for producing electricity and oil is mostly fine to fuel our cars.
All those things are mostly fine to achieve their primary goal, they are absolutely not fine once you consider externalities. You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved. It's not small and that's why it's not a flawed premise. Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity.
I do agree with you though that this can't be solved by a bunch of technologist in isolation.
Rocket-industry insiders also thought our one-time use rockets were mostly fine and having a reusable rocket was a pipe dream anyway. That took an outsider to change the status quo and now companies that used to be at the top like Arianespace are a decade behind.
> You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved.
I understand you reading that way but it's not what I meant or at all what I think. The work I do (environmental monitoring and data display/analysis) is used heavily to reduce environmental externalities (I spent much of the past four years working on a project seeking to eradicate pesticide spray drift events) and to minimise resource utilisation (particularly irrigation water); the experience has taught me that these are major, difficult-to-solve problems, but they can be solved by people who are willing to do the work over many years to bring about the requisite changes both in technology and practices. Of course I know outsiders can sometimes bring about important changes that insiders didn't consider (indeed I've tried to be that kind of person in this and other industries, with some success at times); but it still needs thorough work over a long time to get major breakthroughs (as it did for SpaceX rockets), whereas these startups never seem to stick around for long.
> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity
I'm not convinced this is true, now we can see that the global population is flattening and likely to start declining in the foreseeable future. It's not a particularly strongly held opinion or one I need to argue about, but it just seems to me that the amount of land used for agriculture now is no great problem.
On reducing land area: as an agroecologist, I do think that this is a very important goal.
First, because in many modern agricultural landscapes (such as intensive farming regions in western Europe or the US Midwest), there is simply no space for nature. Agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in large parts of the world, and much of it has to do with lack of natural habitats.
And secondly, because we have such a lot of pressure on land in the more densely populated regions of the world - now only exacerbated by area demands for renewable energies.
However, I agree that vertical farming is unlikely to be a workable solution. Much more promising (though also more boring and irritating to some people) is to (a) reduce food waste and (b) reduce meat consumption. We could easily triple our food output without any further technical advances if we "just" did those two things.
Sure. It's a project initiated by a group of local farmers and researchers (meteorologists and an enviro engineer) in the state of South Australia, and funded by state government grants, to install high-precision weather stations throughout all the agricultural regions of that state.
Data is updated every 10 minutes, and it reports specific readings/calculations indicating whether it is safe to spray pesticides [1]. More recently (since I left the project) they've added in predictive calculations derived from ML models, that can indicate whether it's likely to become risky or stop being risky for spraying in the next two hours.
It also reports conventional meteorological measurements (temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind etc) and relevant calculated values relating to fire risk, seasonal thermal accumulations (growing degree days), evapotranspiration etc - so it is a general-purpose weather/environmental data service for growers.
It seems to be very powerful and useful, however it still relies on growers remembering to look at the app and make the right decision each time they're thinking of spraying, and a combination of education, social pressure and law enforcement is needed to encourage responsible conduct.
The biggest issue they're trying to mitigate is damage to other crops [2] but pesticide residue in food/beverage products is another significant factor, as it can affect other producers' organic/biodynamic certification status, and some countries require imported food/bev products to pass very stringent maximum levels of pesticide residue.
You can search for "south australia mesonet" for more details.
[1] The most significant factor for this is the presence of thermal inversions, and this requires temperatures to be measured at ground level and 10m up, hence the need for quite elaborate/costly public infrastructure rather than relying on growers having their own weather stations.
[2] I started typing "nearby crops", but one of the major issues is that the combination of thermal inversions and winds can mean that residues can be carried long distances - 40km+ before being deposited onto other crops when the inversion reverses, which means it's hard/impossible to identify where the residue came from, meaning ex-post liability attribution for statutory or civil penalties can be impossible.
Agriculture doesn't use so much land because it needs to; it uses so much land because that's the cheapest way of producing food. There are lots of existing technologies that could produce more food per acre, but they are not economically viable. One example: greenhouses. Land use is primarily a political/economical problem, not a technological one.
> Agriculture doesn't use so much land because it needs to; it uses so much land because that's the cheapest way of producing food.
And that's precisely why there is an opportunity here that is attracting entrepreneurs: How to get farming techniques using less land to be as economically viable (or more) than traditional farming techniques.
Coal also was the cheapest way of producing electricity, but after 30+ years of investment in wind and solar it's now getting completely phased out. That happens only by having people seeing the long term problem and working on better ways of doing things long before they are actually economically viable.
I don't think that is a good comparison, because plants need basically the same input - coal to solar is changing everything but the end result. Different farming isn't. If AgTech were to directly create sugar from air and water then that would be a real switch.
It's not about lacking physical space to grow crops, it's about what you have to destroy to claim that land for Ag.
In brazil 80%+ of the deforestation of the Amazon is caused by cattle ranching or soybeans cultivation.
In Europe most of the land used today for Ag was once forest. But they have all been cut down so long ago that we forget.
This has an obvious massive impact on CO2 emission, habitat loss etc.
> In brazil 80%+ of the deforestation of the Amazon is caused by cattle ranching or soybeans cultivation.
Common misconception. The actual felling of trees is done by people who profit from selling tropical hardwood logs and then move on. Ranchers and farmers opportunistically move into newly deforested cheap land because it costs less than buying established farmland.
Without the (illegal) lumber export, there's very little encroaching because the opportunistic frontier farmers would not have a supply of nearly free land to expand into.
I don't really see the business model though. That's like trying to sell Chinese fishing fleets subpar nets that cost more and catch fewer fish because you think overfishing the oceans is a bad thing. It's not going to be a very successful business.
None in isolation.
But if/when countries start enacting carbon taxes & bonuses that account for the externalities, that could significantly change the cost equation, it could become more profitable for farmers to adopt farming techniques that require less land (less carbon tax to pay), and use the now unneeded land for passive income through forestry (get paid by the state to manage a carbon sink).
Coal and oil are also heavily subsidized: companies are given tax breaks, land and discovery are often provided below market rates, and cleanup is usually subsidized by taxpayers.
In aggregate, those subsidies are greater than what’s been spent on renewables by a significant margin.
And I am certainly glad that 50 years ago we made to choice to invest in them at a time where it was clear they wouldn't be viable for a while, if ever.
Land usage for food production isn't a big deal for me. I would rather see less suburban sprawl and more farms. There is a lot of good fertile land that has been cut up over the last 50 years and had the farms replaced with housing developments.
We have gotten rid of the deadliest byproducts.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/501284/volume-of-nitroge...
Rate of NOx have plummeted since the 1979 Nitrogen Oxide Protocol. If we focus on byproducts which cause Acid Rain and not just generic 'carbon', a lot of progress has been made since Nixon founded the EPA in 1970, mostly in the early years
I think his point was that the radical outsiders come up with ideas that sound great but don’t actually have any meaningful impacts towards making farming better.
This mirrors my own experience in the field to a T.
> if insiders think it's "mostly fine", that might explain why you only see outsiders coming in with radical ideas.
Radical ideas may be needed occasionally, but these techbros just set half a billion on fire trying to execute something farmers likely realized wasn't logistically feasible in their market ages ago.
In the article, employees say the leadership signed deals with contractual terms that their own researchers warned couldn't be met. The founder is now launching a Farming-as-a-service startup, presumably without any of the employee expertise they fired at their last company.
> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity.
We do know already how do do that though and the answer is to reduce meat usage which is by far what's taking the majority of the agricultural land use. The crop production is as almost as efficient as it can get after multiple agricultural revolutions.
Are you willing to reduce meat consumption? What if you don't have to give it up, you just have to commit to cutting down on it a bit? If enough people do that, it's still an incredibly valuable change.
I'm a pescatarian* not because I think eating fish is so much better for the environment than eating meat, but because it's a little harder to eat fish and I have to think more about eating meals and in general eat more vegetarian dishes. And because going full vegetarian seemed too challenging, and I wanted to take a step to improve my impact even if I couldn't go all the way.
Do I think eating vegan is ideal? Yes, but I'm not yet willing to give up dairy, and it's better to make some move than none.
If you eat meat every day, could you set one day a week when you try not to? If you eat it a few times a week, could you set like two days a week when you eat meat, and try not to outside of those?
You don't have to go 100% to make a real difference, and I think people get too caught up in trying to defend their decisions (because they feel attacked) when they could just make a small change at very little personal cost.
*Except sometimes when my food order gets incorrectly completed, or when there's no good non-meat food, or when I just really feel like eating meat
Fair enough. In fact, I do eat less meat than I used to.
However, I think calls for major changes to lifestyles are just wrong. We should all turn vegan, give up our cars, live in dense housing, etc, etc.. It's just not going to happen, and making these demands is (IMHO) counterproductive.
All the more so, because these demands are often made by people flying to climate conferences in their private jets, where the menu offers wagyu bugers, brisket, steak, etc. (Yes, that was COP28).
You've got to find measures that are realistic, that people will actually follow. And the politicians need to lead by example.
Sure there are. One example: stop subsidizing corn for ethanol. The fuel used to plant, fertilize. harvest, transport and process the corn exceeds the fuel produced.
Re-useable rockets predate SpaceX. The boosters of the Space shuttle or its main engines come to mind. Aircraft launched systems is another. It wasn't thought of as a pipe dream as such.
Arianespace exec, in 2013, talking about SpaceX before they managed to land a rocket [1]: "reusability is a dream. [...] SpaceX is selling a dream. [...] The market will wake up and realize it's a dream." the word "dream" appears 3 or 4 more times in that single sentence.
I cannot find a quote, but I also remember distinctly an exec from ULA claiming reusability was a dream, because even if you could land a rocket successfully you would never be able to reuse it as the stress on the rocket from the flight would make it unable to fly again, with any material you can use to build a rocket. (SpaceX has a falcon 9 booster they have reused 17 times so far).
I agree and love your tone, but can I just share my naive view as someone who once interviewed for an AG startup?
Farming seems vulnerable.
First, we hear stories about patented crop strains and mega-companies suing small farmers.
Second, we hear crops are engineered to grow fast and big, with little regard of flavor.
Third, we hear about farmers having to reverse engineer their own equipment.
Fourth, and most importantly, we hear how the farming industry relies heavily on the poor and vulnerable in order to pick and process crops at reasonable labor prices.
It seems like there are issues in farming that fit square into that tech-meets-social-justice. On the surface it makes sense to approach the problem differently (aka 'disrupt') in order to: 1. tackle a huge industry (big problem space), 2. provide tastier food closer to home (good appeal to the market), 3. not exploit people (social justice)
I used the word 'seems' a lot, because thats only the impression I've gotten. I have no idea if it's true.
All the problems you address are absolutely there.
But I have to say I have become pretty allergic whenever I hear anybody talk about "disrupting" an existing industry, for two reasons: (1) Existing industries are usually that way for a reason; often outsiders don't understand this until they have tried (and failed) to change things. (2) In those cases where industries were "successfully disrupted", I have the impression the result often just ended up exploiting people in different ways (looking at you, Uber and AirBnB.)
Just because existing industries are a certain way doesn't mean they have to stay that way forever - if we thought that way then everything would stagnate. Disruptive changes _can_ be good.
You don't solve most of your complaints by disrupting farming. You solve them by disrupting distribution.
The problem is that even if I'm willing to pay 10x for a "better" product I don't have the choice.
Do you want grass finished steaks? Good luck buying them in most of the US. If you want one reliably, you're probably buying an entire cow which is more than what you really want.
Do you want better tomatoes? No chance because those have higher water content and bruise more easily.
etc.
You have to solve moving farm production to consumers fast so that you can go from picked/harvested/butchered to on the doorstep in 24 hours or less. This allows you to duck the whole "food has to be able to survive being inventory" problem.
Otherwise, you simply wind up reconstituting the cold chain that we currently have with all of its faults.
For example, last I checked, all the "fresh" produce deliverers were still using UPS! That means a week or more (in reality--lots more) between picked, boxed and delivered. And everything goes through a logistics chain.
> I would want to go much further, disrupting consumption.
If you make it cheaper and easier to use tasty, varied, local production rather than factory farming, you will also disrupt consumption.
I like my meat, but I used to happily eat vegetarian at one restaurant that grew a ton of their own produce. Everything there was excellent even if it wasn't to my taste.
Picking and processing crops is hard work, but the people doing it are not particularly poor by global standards. Drive past the strawberry fields around Watsonville and look at the cars that the workers have parked along the road.
A number of companies are working on berry picking robots. This is a hard engineering problem due to the fragility of the fruit. They have prototypes working reasonably well and someone will probably have a viable commercial product within a decade.
>They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere.
I think we can safely say this mentality goes well beyond ag-tech. There seems to be a founder/engineer specific flavor of "epistemic trespassing" - especially with respect to fields that tech types look down on as banal or unsophisticated.
Outsiders can make valuable contributions to fields beyond their own, but I'd imagine the chance of doing so steeply diminishes with arrogance. If you walk into a market thinking everyone is an idiot waiting to be disrupted, get ready to fail hard.
> They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere.
You see the same in construction. All the real innovation is in more mundane stuff like flexible piping (as opposed to rigid), adhesives that dry quicker, insulation foam, laser levels, self-tapping screws. As opposed to prefab construction, construction robots, or VR glasses.
Everytime I see one of those silly concrete extruding robots with claims that it will somehow replace some portion of residential construction I just shake my head.
I believe there is already a very decisive lever for the negative ecological (and to some extent also health-related) effects of agriculture. However, this is less on the supply side than on the demand side: less animal protein and more plant protein would solve a lot of problems at once.
Yes, that's basically it, most of the environmental problems are due to the inefficiencies of the meat production which you can't realistically solve by tech.
What people think as a technical problem is in reality a social problem.
As a journeyman gardener, I have really been interested in how to scale up no/low-till, no/low herbicide and pesticide, regenerative soil practices.
From what I have seen so far, I think the market forces (e.g. most food people eat is unconscious, taken for granted, is a total commodity) are a major driver of the status quo.
Why improve your negative externality industrial practices when you can get organic certified, get your product in Amazon Whole Foods, and outcompete more “ethical” growers?
> They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere.
* The car wasn't invented by insiders from the horse-drawn carriage industry.
* Electric lighting wasn't invented by insiders from the candle industry.
* Airplanes weren't invented by insiders from the balloon industry.
* The development of the modern smartphone wasn't driven by insiders from the mobile phone industry.
* The development of reusable orbital rockets wasn't driven by insiders from the rocket industry.
> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine.
That's exactly the kind of bias that makes industry insiders (usually) unable to revolutionize their own field. Sure, many outsiders will fail, but they'll at least try, and one of them might actually succeed.
However, I believe it can be very beneficial - maybe even essential - to have experienced advisors from the established industry, provided that they haven't lost the ability to see and recognize the problems and inefficiencies of "doing it the old way".
> When I see the new ag-tech startups coming out of accelerators or being established by supposedly seasoned entrepreneurs, the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein.
> They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere.
It's also based on an arrogant assumption that SV techies are smart, everyone else is stupid, and all you need to do to fix a problem is throw some techies with a bad cases of Engineer's Disease at it to "disrupt" the industry.
> ...these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field.
That's a message that every software engineer needs to be reminded of daily. There's a serious problem with respecting the expertise and knowledge of people in other domains.
The weed-killing robot products seem qualitatively different from the other tech, assuming it can be scaled. We probably should develop a technological alternative to massive herbicidal over-use, and computer vision stands a chance of being cheap enough to provide it.
My reference point for this kind of thing is the video cassette recorder (VCR). Trusting to memory I think that they entered the consumer market at around $700 and were down to around $100 by the time they were obsolete. But before they reached the consumer market, they were a super-expensive professional item. Getting helical scan VCRs (a high precision, complicated electro-mechanical technology) to the consumer market involved impossible price reductions, just to reach the consume price point of $700. I never expected further big price reductions to follow and was wrong.
A weed killing laser robot seems obviously stupid - an expensive electro-mechanical system generating trivial value with each weed zapped. There is no way to get the price down low enough for this to make sense. But CD players have servo control of the tracking and focus of the laser. Much lower power than needed for weed wacking, but much faster and more accurate than needed and very cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplLkxBsqQo
Adequate cameras are cheap enough. AI vision processing is on a roll and we can look forward to huge price falls. The technology looks promising from the outside.
My reference point is electric cars. They were a complete non-starter, all but physically impossible because the energy density of batteries was so incredibly much lower than that of gas.
Then batteries got better, and hybrids came out that had dramatically better mileage than ICE cars. But they were expensive, and looked weird, and electric cars still weren't possible.
Then electric cars came out that were expensive, and low range, but pretty viable for city driving. But the range would never match ICE cars, and they'd always be to expensive.
We're now at a point where the infrastructure and economics hasn't caught up, and the range is still arguably a little low for super long road trips, but once we get working fast chargers saturating most transit corridors, and once we get cheaper, smaller cars offered, we'll be pretty much there.
From "The physics really just don't seem to add up" to "Well they're a little pricey" in, what, thirty years?
I honestly can’t imagine a future where we don’t have robots tending to each individual plant coming out of the ground like that one plant is the most important thing in the world.
We currently treat an entire field as one uniform thing because that’s the cheapest way to do it. We plant in rows to allow our simple machines to operate on them. We drive massive combines up and down the field. We spray the entire field uniformly.
I think there’s a move in the precision farming world to using remote sensing imaging to treat smaller tracts of land (like an acre) separately. But at some point the technology will be cheap enough to focus in on each individual plant.
Clearly there’s some extra growth that each plant would have if it would treated really well and harvested at the perfect time. That’s the opportunity. The cost is developing swarms of robots that go up and down the fields 24 hours a day checking on soil moisture, leaf disease, weeds and doing what it needs to tend to that plant. I think the hardware already exists and is cheap enough. It’s now just a matter of developing the software (yes, the devil is in the word “just”).
If there are 10 plants per square meter and we give the robot 1 minute per plant, and there are 10,000 square meters in a hectare, then we will need 70 robots to tend an entire hectare in a single 24 hour period. That’s the sort of math that I’ve been thinking of.
For well over 10 years it has been very common to vary treatment within a field. Any harvester made in that time has had real-time GPS tracking of the yield throughout the field. Spray applications can be applied to particular areas with an indicated need, with individual sprayer head control (all GPS tracked). Year-over-year tracking enables another level of improvement. Pairing satellite or drone imagery is also common to determine what the best move is going forward.
A decade ago I made a spreadsheet to simulate the robot tending to a field problem, working with an entrepreneur. In the end, I couldn't find a wide range of parameters where it could make sense for corn or soybeans. The robots would simply be too tiny, slow, and expensive to be feasible.
Some pros the entrepreneur was targeting were reduced soil compaction (leading to better yield), ability to operate in more marginal conditions (getting stuck in mud or slipping/spinning wheels messes up fields), and ability to deploy a fleet of robots rather than being constrained to working one part of a field in a huge piece of equipment.
I think you're mostly right, but the weed-killing laser robots are less about efficiency and more about herbicides and pesticides. Those are a large market and diverting money from that to weed-killing laser robots could be a big payday for somebody.
> these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field.
Many of the revolutionary changes in agriculture in the last century came from outsiders. They just stopped being outsiders once they were part of the industry.
Phrasing it like these people are going and telling growers/experts they're stupid is a false portrayal. No one is going and spitting in their faces like that. They think their new idea will improve efficiency somehow, but that's not an insult.
Not exactly. I've entertained the idea of vertical farming because it can make fresh food possible in the core of the densest cities. It can also reuse energy for heating buildings to heat greenhouses. So it's an energy play.
Laser weed killing isn't just about efficiency. It could mean eliminating the pesticides and the diseases they may be causing.
Insect protein seems to be loved by the vegetarians who don't see eating insects like eating beef.
In other words, efficiency is only part of the mix.
From horizontal to vertical is a huge deal though. The US might have a load of space but plenty of others countries would massively benefit from converting land used for farming into land used for housing where possible.
Additionally it means that farming can happen on the edges of towns and cities rather than in the wops, ie fewer huge delivery trucks moving produce around; it can essentially be grown down the road.
The behavior here is largely because the investors and the founders don’t come from an agricultural background, they’re born and bred urbanites who think they’re inherently superior to the rubes in the flyover states, rather than realizing that agriculture is the most mature of all industries and the average successful farmer is effectively a renaissance man.
My farmer family members are brilliant at math, have masters degrees (and a Ph.D in one case), and understand business accounting better than most business people because agriculture has very thin margins and is a ruthless business for smaller operators. They commonly encounter “Brads and Chads from the city” who think anyone that lives more than 20 miles from a Walmart is a stupid hick that failed out of elementary school and needs a savior that knows better than they what is good for them.
The same attitudes that funnel stupid money into agtech boondoggles is the one that fuels the urban/rural sociopolitical divide in America, and I will give you a hint, it’s not the rural folks that are the condescending assholes here.
Interestingly, this story is about founders from Berlin. Look past the place and business names, imagine North American ones, it fits. But it's not a Silicon Valley or American story.
And in this case looks to have classic business problems, like salespeople selling things that can't be delivered. As well as the Ag issues, whether or not those would be solvable.
I do find it a little amusing to think that proximity to a Walmart (!) is a marker of the arrogant urbanite. I’ve never gone to Walmart as frequently as I did in a town of 10k in rural Iowa, and here in the NY suburbs it looks like the closest Walmart is a 19 mile drive.
…these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, as a former ag tech employee who worked for one of the tech god complex people.
It has not made as big impression in America with its amber waves of grain, but food insecure countries (Japan, Korea, much of the MidEast etc.) consider food security national security.
And considering 1/2 of all food is wasted between the farm and the fork, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Some arrogant observer sees an industry from the outside, makes assumptions about it, maybe catches a good wave due to investor money, then unsurprisingly flounders, because they didn't approach the problem as an insider with skin in the game, tackling a known problem with known customers. No, they did it as an outsider, with no tangible knowledge of the problem or the industry. And they're arrogant because among the assumptions they've made is that the incumbents are stupid. Especially if it's agriculture, "Oh I can do this so much better than those dumb hicks fooling around in the dirt."
Reality sends these failed entrepreneurs home with a bruised ego, and hopefully newfound humility.
> the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein.
Ah, are drones finally gone? I'd love to tell farmers things about their land that I saw from above which they already know, for a horrendous price, and fly at a time that's no use to them.
> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine.
Modern agriculture is good at producing of astonishing quantities of calorie-rich food, which makes people obese because of lack of nutrients. 4.7M dies per year because of obesity, which, of course, is not a problem for those, who produces bland food.
> “Some of the facilities figured out way too late, ‘oh we should probably be checking how much we’re paying for electricity per month.’ That’s pretty basic when 30-40% of the cost of the crop is electricity,” he says.
> “Those things were just overlooked because investors will pay for it, it doesn’t matter,”
I'm always amazed when startups operate like this. I'm equally in awe when they get capital and VC's don't notice this either. I guess the later could be naive and just assume that the tech required to make it works requires this, but it is still baffling that nobody thinks its a good idea to get one of your bigger costs down
I always found it extremely weird that no one runs even the most basic back of envelope calculations on things like this. Like how much power and at what cost we need to input or what is the throughput of some system and then how much we need to charge just to cover the building costs...
Most simple multiplication and division... Just to get some idea of unit economics. Thus do things make sense even in your own fantasy world of ultra-rich tech workers.
People do. They get attacked for it actually. There was this blog post about an indoor wheat farm exhibition piece and it criticized how it actually consumes more land when you add in the land requirements for renewable energy. The comment section consisted mostly of people attacking the author.
There are plenty of people on HN who will tell you how growing LEDs are more efficient than sunlight and other nonsense to justify vertical farming.
I've always assumed VCs take gambles like this because they know it just takes a single success to cover their lost bets.
So being first to bet on a possible winner is probably statistically better than taking the time to sift through the actual details of these startup ideas.
Because in order to do this math you actually have to understand the business/product- which should tell you something - or there are is some hand waving bet that like “costs will come down with scale”
> Most simple multiplication and division... Just to get some idea of unit economics.
I always considered this to be the fundamental promise of vertical farming. Maximum efficiency and easy forecasting of outcomes. Basically, reducing farming to a function with several very controllable inputs and an easy computation yielding the outcome.
> but it is still baffling that nobody thinks its a good idea to get one of your bigger costs down
Bean counters can rarely distinguish between different types of cost. Labor costs can scale with automation and tech, but energy input can typically only make incremental efficiency gains, which decrease over time. So you really need to look at energy input vs your competition.
Even those willing to pay a premium for “local farming” are doing so because of the supposed environmental benefits. But if energy to grow indoors exceeds energy for regular farming + transportation then you’re bad for the environment in addition to wasting dense city space. Unless you’re in a highly unusual electric mix region.
> Right now, the economics for vertical farming make the most sense in the Middle East, where extreme heat prevents the growing of crops in fields, food security is a pressing issue and energy in the region is cheaper, says Rabobank’s van Rijswickl, as well as former Infarm employees.
LOL, case in point. Wonder where that “cheap energy” is coming from. This article is waaay to soft in their assessment.
In general, it’s not that hard to do back-of-the-napkin energy and CO2 calculations. No amount of buzzwords and green-tinted concept art changes that there are real physical quantities at play.
There's probably some well established hand waving routine that's played whenever energy comes up. Perhaps there's some paper that starts with a ridiculously high first guess for energy demand and then goes through a list of reasons why it would not be quite as bad, concluding with some multiplied percentage of how it would be so much better than expected.
Certainly including the old "photovoltaics use a wider spectrum than plants, so if we take the best panels, re-emit the energy at a wavelength that matches the plant's chemistry we could get more from a given square unit of sunlight if everything else was free". Last five words conveniently omitted.
I believe VC at this stage are willing to accept wasting money for the chance of finding that one solution/technology that will make it all worth it. They aren't paying for you to run a business, they're paying 100 crazy engineers/scientists like Sam Altman to get one Open AI for agriculture. They know you're being wasteful. They can afford it and can't be bothered to help you run your business by checking your bills.
> I'm equally in awe when they get capital and VC's don't notice this either
VCs invest other people's money (Limited partners) and get paid fees based on the size of their fund. VCs also get paid when they hit a homerun, but it's much easier for a VC to double how much they invest (and double their fees in the process) than to double the ROI by making more intelligent bets. The bigger the checks they write the more they make.
VSs don't want to to get blamed for making dumb investments, as that would interfere with their ability to raise money from LPs in the future. That's why they want another firm to take the lead in any investment round.
The incentive structure guarantees that VCs make terrible investments and have very little accountability.
I'd say that's how farmers operate if they're new farmers. They will screw up their first year and start looking for help, asking other farmers for advice, etc - but these companies aren't a part of a community, they don't want to help each other, and when they run out of the investment money the first year, they just give up.
Typical of a lot of VCs they have absolutely 0 idea how to judge a business plan. So they just gamble on people and companies that look interesting to them. This is one of the least efficient if you look at one company, but it injects so much money around that it helps people bootstrap their own ventures with the money that leaked. So indirectly it may be a not too bad model that requires pure incompetence. (last sentence is almost /s)
Which startup has everything figured out in the start? If investors are this picky, they are not investing in startup and won't be getting a deal which could grow 10x.
If Tesla failed due to high cost to manufacture or OpenAI failed because it couldn't earn revenue or Uber failed because of doing illegal stuff or overpaying drivers you would have said the same thing.
So invest a tiny amount to figure that out before investing a lot of money. There is a reason funding goes in rounds - round one we have a few smart people who want to work together, fund us for 6 months (maybe a year) to figure out where there is a market. The output of that round is those calculations, then you get more money for round two to create tiny prototypes/models to verify the problems you identified in round one are solvable, then round three to perfect the prototypes, and round four to scale it. You can add or remove rounds as needed, the important point here is that as rounds more $$$ the risk needs to go down.
No, my point was that tiny bit wouldn't have worked with this. Some startup get benefit of scale like Tesla or OpenAI or Uber. If they are constrained in how much money they could burn they wouldn't have gotten anywhere. They all chose to not do calculation on RoI and won(but most would lose). To make vertical farming successful we need new discoveries and inventions that requires money and has uncertain success probability.
Startup investors are wary of the fact that they are more likely going to loose all of the money.
I don't think you are getting my point. The math of RoI can't be run as the probability is uncertain.
One example is OpenAI invested multiple billions in research and just out of pure luck found PMF for ChatGPT which even they said they didn't expected. Vertical farming is like that. You need miracle to make it better than normal and miracle requires huge chunck of money to even have non zero probability.
Exactly this. Back of the envelope calculation tells me this concept is fundamentally NOT economically viable. Period. No amount of software engineering can change basic laws of thermodynamics or laws of demand and supply
The point of vertical farming is that land is scarce (particularly in cities) and the idea is to reduce the footprint of the farms. So yeah, of course what you’re suggesting works since it already works today…
But where are the calculations showing that the electricity, chemicals and equipment needs and their ecological cost are worth it
Most of these places are producing herbs and salads which are low weight and low volume per consumer. And they have a volume of waste that's pretty colossal (growing media for example but also electrical equipment that failed and chemical containers) all of which almost doesn't exist in traditional farming if you measure by unit produced.
Who says you need to replace it? Solar, windows… Fiber optics? Using molten salt to store and release energy… I’m sure there’s plenty of ways to use the sun’s energy.
And again, this is why we iterate… It’s never a win at first… Gotta take some risks like all new ideas
Windows? So a semi-transparent layer to help isolate the farm from the elements? Kind of like a greenhouse? That thing that existed for several hundred years.
> I’m sure there’s plenty of ways to use the sun’s energy.
Solar panel to Inverter to Battery to LED lights is just a way to throw away some of that energy. Sure, you're still using it, but a LED is never as efficient as sunlight.
Do you get the core concept of vertical farming? It’s just stacked layers of farmland. Greenhouses cannot pack as many layers vertically. It’s pretty straight-forward.
If you’re strictly optimizing for just sunlight then sure, greenhouses sound fine. But there’s more factors at play here - like the cost and availability of land now and into the future.
The sunlight incident on a vertical farm is the same as would be incident on a regular farm. Having windows or fiber optics doesn't make up for that, especially because anywhere it would be worth it to have a vertical farm, it would be worth it to have other tall buildings.
In addition, if you are making up this energy with solar power, you've negated the land use advantage.
Yeah. The only way vertical farming could make sense would be with crops that usually get much more sunlight than they need. Even then, if it's a crop that allows to use machines with massive throughput in conventional farming - vertical farming would need something similarly cheap, too.
Why on earth would you want to take farming “footprint” and transpose it in an expensive real estate environment like a city where it would need much more intensive energy to produce anything?
There are a few products that are viable, but not very many.
Moving footprint from farmland to city is the opposite of reducing carbon footprint. It’s foolhardy.
Terracing hillsides comes before vertical farming.
Depends on place. Look at satellite images of Germany or parts of Europe in general and it looks like it's all farms with some fake forest interspersed (the "forest" is itself farmland for wood).
Very few places left that are free from intrusion on land (and none if you count biochemical or atmospheric disturbance). And it's mostly spots that can't be exploited for physical infrastructure, tourism or agriculture.
I've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations with a farmer acquaintance of mine. To preserve a sizable naturally developing habitat you'd need to at least halve Germany's population given current consumption patterns...
Because then you get money from traditional banks which costs you a lot. VC money is free, especially if you fail. And the next time is always easier because they like people who failed "they learned something".
If a guy shows up and says "Give me 25 mil to open 10 acre potato farm" nobody would give him money because there is no chance of 10x+ return on investment. However his contribution to society is 10x+ than 99% of the startups.
Many many many farmers rely on loans to start their ventures. VCs fund because of possible returns to them not to society. Banks and Gov do the heavy lifting on ag funding.
Regular greenhouses use way more water and resources.
In 1/8 an acre I can produce in a vertical farm the same amount of animal fodder grass that a regular greenhouse would need a whole acre for, and use 99% less water.
> In 1/8 an acre I can produce in a vertical farm the same amount of animal fodder grass that a regular greenhouse would need a whole acre for, and use 99% less water.
And use 1000% more energy (or more than that, likely). Which is actually lost, unlike water which doesn't actually disappear when used to water plants.
Why do vertical farms use less water than greenhouses?
I can see why they'd use less water than outdoor farming - the water is lost to the atmosphere. But surely whatever mechanism a vertical farm uses for collecting and recycling water, a greenhouse could use too? Surely vertical farms are the same plants and growing methods in a greenhouse, but stacked?
I worked for a hydroponic tech startup, in no world is it cost effective if you're a large company. Small scale in a basement or backyard, yes, but this stuff doesn't scale, largely because it's priced for the marijuana industry. If you are growing lettuce with your hydroponics equipment that you paid weed prices for, you will never see your way out of the red.
I'd love to hear about these. I joined that startup because I wanted to be a part of the alt-ag world, I left because I found out I was just part of the stoner world.
But is that the cost of fabrication, or the cost of off-the-shelf? Like you said it's priced for the marijuana industry, but if you scale up enough you can make your own manufacturing deals, no?
The company I worked for had three "core" child companies. A consumer online store, brick and mortar stores, and a "we don't respond to your emails unless you're talking six figures per transaction". Even the at-scale business was running sticker prices that make it hard to do business if you're not growing something with a marijuana-level return.
I don't understand vertical farming for anything other than crops that aren't eaten for their calorie content.
To me, it seems like an expensive way to increase the land needed to grow food. Land use is increased, assuming the energy to light the greenhouse comes from solar panels. You need ~ 10 m^2 of solar panels to provide 1 m^2 of sun-equivalent light, sure there might be some optimization to be done with wavelengths and intensity, but I haven't seen anything to indicate you could ever break even.
Why build a solar farm to convert light to electricity, then a big greenhouse where that electricity is converted back into light? Just plant the crops where you were going to put the solar panels!
A farm that uses artificial light (vertical, greenhouse, or otherwise) could actually be a perfect electrical load shedding mechanism. Keep the lights at nominal levels during normal grid operation, and turn them up to absorb grid load. Preferably you're colocating this near the source of excess solar / wind energy. The farm would be providing the grid a valuable service, while also dumping that excess energy into usable calories.
> Keep the lights at nominal levels during normal grid operation, and turn them up to absorb grid load.
That's a great way to light-burn the sensitive plants and to shorten the life of LED lights. There are approximately hundreds of better ways to shed grid load.
Israel, Ukraine, Climate Tech, Green Tech, there's a little bit of everything for everybody in this article. There's a common theme in all these things. Ah yes, disappearing money.
After the later rounds closed at insane valuations, the early VC investors in infarm were seen as legends. This created jealously amongst other VC investors who felt they had 'missed out' which resulted in more money being invested into infarm and other vertical farming companies e.g. Bowery/Plenty.
Decisions to invest were made on FOMO, not a first-principles analysis of the farming technique which shows very clearly that vertical farming is unfeasible.
Vertical farming is a nice PoC but it’s not financially viable when there is ample land for farming.
Indoor Automation for leafy greens and some high value produce like edible/gastronomic mushrooms and others like controlled drug producing products does make economic sense, but it’s overkill for other things when you have proven transportation networks to bring things to market from the hinterlands.
Ok it may make sense in st Helena and Tristan da Cunha islands for some things.
> it’s not financially viable when there is ample land for farming.
I've not heard of it being financially viable even when farmland is very constrained - say, in Holland.
The numbers probably work on the ISS, Moon, or Mars...so those places will probably be "stars of the show", in the next round of hype which vertical farming companies use to bilk idiot VC's.
(St. Helena has a reasonable latitude and low population density - so at most you'd need some greenhouses.)
Most of the big hydroponic cannabis growers here in SoCal use vertical farms for sea of green operations. Financially-viable? Those people rake in MILLIONS yearly. Those systems consume very little in the way of resources, with tightly-controlled NFT hydroponic application and targeted-spectrum LED lighting running the show.
In a small footprint you need drastically-lower energy requirements. Also, with the advent of LED lighting, you use even less in atmospheric regulation, which becomes the major power-saver outside of the lighting itself.
Also, the trick to vertical tomatoes is not what most people expect. They should look more into the upside-down pot idea and think about how best to take advantage of a top-down hanging system, like near-360 degree lighting between rows of hanging tomato plants to maximize exposure along the entire length of the curtain. These can be mounted horizontally under the nft channels the hanging plants grow from, allowing them to receive all the light they want while leaving walkway space (and overhead human-vision lighting space.)
It takes a LOT of research to make things work and everyone just promises a turn-key system. THAT can't work. My systems work because of research and lots of first-principles thinking.
We accounted for high margin things like drug producing plants and high value gastronomic things like mushrooms and leafy greens. These are the only viable crops and are exceptional, not normal.
This is like saying mice are a desirable pest because drug labs use them for research. Yes, sure but it’s a very specific use case, but don’t pretend it’s the norm.
"These are the only viable crops and are exceptional, not normal."
No, they are not the only viable crops. I'll guarantee your studies don't take into account various methods of hydroponics for various crop types. Almost every study I've ever seen is purely focused on NFT vertical farming. NO JOKE it doesn't cover everything. You aren't growing corn in an NFT system. You will do it in a vertical DWC system.
I took ag/hort-sci in high school, where I learned about these systems (hanging gardens of Babylon, anyone?) I was running vertical farming systems in the 90s in high school. The tech works. Learn which method of hydroponics is required for which crop. Plan your economic requirements.
Literally basic high school education requirements and most of you don't seem to get it. not sure what happened between the 90s and now for y'all to mess up basic technology so badly.
Right, I agree about Holland. Same would apply to Belgium or Luxembourg. But what about 90% of the countries that do not have this problem? Everything east of France is just fields and fields of nothing.
That's not true. There are lot of forests and mountains. To get to nothing you have to go all the way to Ukraine. It is relatively featureless south and east of Kyiv.
Land farming isn't financially viable either under market prices, that's why there's huge farming subsidies to ensure crops remain affordable to the average citizen. I don't know if vertical farming receives less or more subsidies than regular farming, but "financially viable" in the food industry is an entire field of study, not something that can be determined in a single HN post.
>Land farming isn't financially viable either under market prices
Is that the reason subsidies exist?
From my experience in farming, subsidies exist to ensure I can stay afloat if a crop fails for whatever reason, or if the market tanks, or just ensures a minimum income to make sure I don't go out of business.
It seems like ag subsidies are one place we actually want government intervention (but I am surely biased). We don't really want our food supply to be open directly to the whims of both nature and direct market changes. There is too much of a ramp up time needed if a large share of farms go out of business. It's not like we don't need food next year just because we had a bumper crop this year that caused prices to tank, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
For example - look at pork in the 90's. The price fell, and hard, causing most family pork farms went out. This is the reason we have like 2-3 producers of pork for the US now with mega factory pork farms. Is that good? I can't be convinced it is.
That all underscores the folly of vertical farming. Regular farming has thin enough margins. Vertical farming is multiple times more expensive and would require hoodwinking consumers into paying multiples for their produce through payments at the cash register or through tax subsidies for it to survive. Farm subsidies are much cheaper than this goldbergian alternative.
Should send it to the investors. The charlatans know they're charlatans. They know vertical farming is bull. They don't care. It's the investors who should do their due diligence. They should know better. Alas, a fool and his money...
Funny, I run vertical farming and it works great. Perhaps those charlatans are listening to the wrong experts on the subject? I've been doing it for over two decades.
The the majority of the systems my clients bought were primarily fodder grass systems. Scale? UAE, Saudi Arabia, Yemen. Pretty large scale, you need a lot of fodder grass to help support a burgeoning livestock industry in a desert.
Then I had California clients. Cannabis left and right. I only had one unhappy client and that's because the system worked TOO well for their chosen strain - the buds it produced were so thick that they got no air circulation and molded on the inside.
Former AppHarvest employee - similar company, similar outcome.
The absolute naivety / arrogance of some of these green tech companies is astounding. The basic assumption of a lot of these types of companies are “We’re smart tech people who are good at fundraising. We are absolutely equipped to solve this problem of indoor horticulture.” Almost all of them think that they have nothing to learn from an existing industry with decades of experience in growing produce at scale in greenhouses.
Warning signs:
1. Not hiring anyone with prior experience working in industrial scale greenhouse ag. (They’re the sort of people you would expect to know about basic operations, labor, pest control, etc.)
2. Not listening to those people once they did hire them.
3. Trying to position / advertise themselves as tech companies rather than agriculture companies for the express purpose of inflating their valuation.
The experience really soured me on green tech and agtech. The problems they need to solve aren’t technological at all. They have to do with distribution of the produce.
Jonathan Webb and the entire AppHarvest leadership team can absolutely go fuck themselves. They are at best disingenuous, at worst, cash-grabbing liars.
I’m not at all interested in chatting. I’ve already given enough of my limited lifetime to the ag tech space, and I never want to go back - even via a phone call.
The main problem isn’t growing the fruit - it’s selling and distributing it.
Mastronardi has a monopoly on North American distribution in all but name. (For tomatoes, at least. ) You can grow as much produce as you want, but they’re going to figure out a way to capture any consumer surplus produced by the growers as part of the distribution chain.
That didn’t really matter so much for AppHarvest because they couldn’t profitably produce fruit at Mastronardi’s market rate. But if they did, Mastronardi would figure out a way to shift the market pricing they negotiated with them. Since they control most of the foodservice and retail grocery supply, and have those contracts pretty sewn up, Mastronardi is basically the only way to get fruit into store shelves. That gives them a ton of power negotiating with greenhouses that are otherwise commodities - water and sun go in, tomatoes come on.
Mismanagement and poor execution seems to have doomed this project, but the idea still seems viable to me. Some of the price disparities with vertical hydroponics fall away when compared against pure "organics."
Admittedly, I'm no expert, but I'd be interested in a comparison of economics and impacts with regenerative farming for turning out high quality organic produce.
Is it truly regenerative farming, when your produce is made from non renewable energy at high cost, inside a large urban structure (which takes away land area for housing, hence more homes have to be built elsewhere) with water supply transported from rural to urban areas?
Enormous US government ag regulations severely harm both farmers and innovation in farming.
For example, did you know that there are only four meat processors in the United States due to USDA regulations (full regulatory capture) and they have monopolized meat processing so much that farmers get the same prices for their cattle they received twenty years ago while meat prices have gone up multiple times?
Or that food handling regulations are so archaic and overdone that it is nearly impossible to bring healthier options to market?
Dramatically shrink or eliminate the USDA and regulations and you will see an exponential increase in new ideas and better products at lower prices.
Never trust an ag startup that's not near UC Davis, Salinas, Waginenigen NL, UIUC, Cornell, or Iowa State. I grew up on a farm, my parents still farm, and if anyone wants to be an ag-tech VC feel free to hire me but I'll give you one piece of advice gratis: never invest in an ag-tech company with HQ in a big city. Any farm boy could tell you this nonsense would never pencil out.
Half of this ag-tech shit is so stupid I wonder if it's not just straight-up money laundering.
I would like to second this. There are a large amount of comments on this site, just as one example, when anything ag is talked about that are just insanely uninformed. The assumption seems to be that farming is just good old boys doing what they've always done, instead of the massively data informed, extremely sophisticated business it is, even for family operations.
I was a full-time farmer until after graduate school. The guy who rents the family farm now farms to the square foot and sometimes even at precision even tighter than that (applying chemicals sometimes is based on the 1/2 square foot)! And that is over the entire 7-10k acres he rents/owns in total.
The amount and variety of data he uses is startling.
I shared this with my spouse, who worked for an ag startup in Boston (still exists, different leadership, who knows what they're up to now). They had this to say on the matter:
One big competitive advantage of [company] was that we were able to hire smart, young ag scientists, especially LBGTQ+ ones, who wanted to live in a big, queer-friendly city. We had a lot of great people who were really excited that they didn't have to live in Davis or Ithaca, as well as people whose partners' careers tied them to a big city in some way (doctors, lawyers, finance).
(They would also add UMich, University of Minnesota, and the Research Triangle in NC to your list.)
The idea of vertical farming doesn't really appeal to me. I mean it sounds efficient, but as we see we are throwing electricity to simulate natural processes. With all the organic hype isn't there a much higher demand on traditional grown food in an organic way. The idea of growing food in a city laboratory seems counter-intuitive to me. Isn't there much more market in developing supportive technology for efficient classic organic farming? Or am I completely wrong here?
There's a lot of interest in vertical farming in city-states like Singapore that want to become more self-sufficient with food. There is just legit no land here for any traditional farms. I'm sure for non-city-states there are other factors like eco friendliness (efficient on land and resources), lowering transport costs, etc.
I feel certain there was no shortage of people mentioning the impracticality of these schemes when the company was soliciting for investors.
"Told you so" is cheap afterwards.
Does anyone actually value it beforehand? Or is it no longer considered socially acceptable to avoid obvious mistakes?
Is the difference "spending someone else's money?" Were people investing their own funds major participants here, or was this a darling of "fund managers" who are looting other people's purses?
The people who are said it wouldn't work lost credibility as these startups raised rounds at progressively higher valuations. After all, money talks, so clearly the naysayers were missing something...
1. Vertical farming is only for where farming in greenhouses would be impossible.
2. There is nothing particularly special or defensible about farming. Anyone can get into it.
And why not just use large greenhouses with open frame, endless conveyors?
I think it can and will need to be done to ensure the food supply from weather and other hazards, and to increase yield and water efficiency, but it doesn't need to be anything other than any ordinary business that seeks continual process and capital optimizations.
One desperately needed goal of an improved food supply approach is fully-ripened organic food, not this pretty, artificially-ripened trash offered at commercial grocery stores. "Live Lettuce" and such, but extended to tomatoes and more.
It’s a hedged statement meaning you might find some bit of it laying around, but that it has functionally disappeared.
It’s a common way of phrasing things in articles so they aren’t accused of lying because someone found the equivalent of a single dollar bill of assets and points to that as evidence that it hasn’t “disappeared”
“Word crimes” is a great song indeed. More than learning English, I am a Weird Al fan.
In this case, it translates well to ”nearly disappeared”. Which matches a sibling comment explanation that it means “everything happened for it to disappear except it didn’t quite disappeared yet”. But also makes sense another sibling comment explanation that it is a hedge. Like “for all purposes it actually disappeared, but let me say it nearly disappeared for those who will point out that the site and the company still technically exists”.
No, it actually means "everything else" happened, except disappearing. The usage in the title is wrong, IMHO, but I aḿ not a native speaker. (Though I would bet there is David Mitchell video out there ranting about this topic.)
You're correct, but the specific usage "all but disappeared" is used in English in this case to mean it has declined so much that there is almost nothing left (everything bad has happened to it, the only thing left is for it to be gone completely). Like right now I would say the snow we had last week has all but disappeared, because there technically are small piles where people had shoveled it or built snowmen, but it has functionally gone.
Mitchell is funny but I doubt he ranted about this one because it strikes me as old-timey and posh, and he tends to rant about new things ;)
I interviewed at Infarm a while back. The process was pretty great, and I got an offer.
One of the founders took me on a tour of their Berlin factory, and it was super impressive - they had adapted these gigantic 3 storey automatic German tool storage cupboards for growing.
I thinking I would accept, when on the last day I was walking back from a function with one of the team members. I mentioned that I was leaving because I didn’t like the amount of politics at my current place, and he stopped in his tracks for a moment, then said “yeah…”.
I got caught up in this. I even had several meetings with Caleb Harper. In the end a co-founder and I had a provisional patent on a wifi controlled relay ac power strip before they were ubiquitous. He chose to not pursue the patent and ended up patenting a bunch of software nonsense that's not dependable or understandable or usable. Meanwhile the folks making the power strip are doing well. There are some ag focused ones, check out Amazon.
In the end it was like a lot of VC cycles I've been through, all hat no cowboy.
The most successful form of vertical farming is agroforestry, or tree-based agriculture. It provides habitat, shade, carbon sequestration, and water retention while raising per acre productivity over that of 2-D cropping. Agroforestry is a well studied, widely implemented practice that big talking green tech "big thinkers" tend to ignore if not openly scoff at.
I mean in summer, the sun delivers almost 100,000 Lumen / m² to crops for free, you'll have a hard time competing with that alone using indoor LED lighting, which has efficiencies of around 200 Lumen / Watt. Of course you don't need the full sunlight to grow crops but anyone with an aquarium can tell you that even keeping a very small number of plants thriving using artificial light and nutrients isn't cheap. So many other factors like the price of real estate in cities and the logistics seem to doom these indoor farming companies as well, I can't imagine they will ever serve anything but a niche market. There wasn't even real innovation here, Ag-focused countries like Spain and the Netherlands have the most efficient growing processes figured out for a long time, so all this vertical farming stuff was nonsensical from the beginning. Savings in transportation costs can't possibly offset the other costs either.
So really the only surprising thing is how long they managed to keep alive without producing anything of value. I guess what really killed them in the end was the end of dumb and cheap money.
It can and does work, its just this company was incompetent and arrogant as covered by the article.
Artificial lamps provide the same uv light that the sun does. The "just water" is regularly cycled with nutrients because yes plants need those. Different crops do better or worse with this. It's already used at scale for certain crops, ironically often because it decreases water usage (evaporation losses on large fields are enormous, plus runoff)
Vertical farming is based on the premise that land is no longer available. Technology can be used to free up land from understanding where it is wasted. We waste ~160 million acres for biofuels[1]. 60 million acres just in the US[2].
A small fraction of this land can be solar PV, or even zero[4]. You can drive about 150 times as far from a solar-powered electric car compared to using corn bioethanol[3].
Switching to EVs starts a virtuous cycle of (1) accelerating renewables (EVs are parked >90% of the time, have flexible demand, perfect for solar/wind), (2) freeing up 160 million acres of land and the associated water usage, fertilizer, etc (3) Freeing up water usage, 47.5 trillion gallons (just in US!), 40% of water withdrawals[5,6]. Availability of this 40% water allows us to farm a lot more land than whats possible currently. EVs + renewables will also free up 40% of global shipping, stop 10 million deaths from air pollution and save us trillions in fossil fuel subsidies [7,8,9].
[4] Solar land usage can be zero from agrivoltaics and from not using farm land at all, covering water bodies (lakes, reservoirs) or land along the highways.
[6]According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453
Anyone who is involved in farming knew this start up was a pie in the sky project. One thing about farming and especially farming in Europe is how regulated it is.
For example, you are not permitted to spread cow manure at certain times of the year due to risk of run-off or you get fined. That is one small example amongst dozens or hundreds (for beef farming). A cow is better tracked in Europe than a person is and I am not exaggerating. It can tracked its entire life from farm to farm and its entire health history is tracked. There are genomics testing, various other iniatives to ensure standards are adhered to. If you sell produce (milk/beef) that has antibiotics or too much bacteria in it, you can forbidden to sell that produce.
You cannot negotiate the price if selling to an abattoir or a creamery. The same exists for vegatables. There is no negotiation. On the Continent food prices change once a month. In the UK it is once a year. The farmer gets assessed for quality of his produce and receives a pre-determined price. No wiggle room no negotiation.
Farming mostly runs at an abject loss and the idea is you have a sliver of profit that is buffetted by a subsidies. It caps at 300k. The objective of this subsidy is also to protect small farms from being crushed by bad seasons and give economic stability to far flung regions and isolated villages.
Europe is also protected by immense tariffs and
barriers to entry that made it difficult for crops that are washed with pesticides (ie Ukranian wheat prior the war) to get into the market.
These tarriffs are reciprocated by other nations. It is functionally impossible for a US farmer to export beef or chicken to the EU due to rules on the presence of hormone, antibiotics for beef and chlorine washed carcasses for chicken.
The historical objective of the farm subsidies was to:
1. protect farmers from what national governments thought of as unfair competition
2. Avoid a repeat of the 'hungry 30's' (especially in Germany). Which destroyed the support for democracy and fuelled the rise of the extremist parties.
3. Give protection to massive peasant populations and stop them from supportng Communist parties post WWII. (France and Italy most especially).
In return other countries got expanded market accessses.
The biggest innovation in Europe specifically in crop growing since the 90s was the greenhouse produced vegatables created mostly in the Netherlands or Andalucia in Spain. However the crops are extremely sensitive to diseasea and blights and any kind of contamination can rapidly spoil a crop.
Agriculture is as highly regulated as pharmaceuticals or aviation, it is more politically rife and riven with competing lobby groups who still have immense sway in many national governments.
Also the European Union as a whole has some really odd views on specific technologies. The eurocrats are very skeptical and horrified by GMO food and effectively ban any usage in this area. This would be crucial for this particular start up for the aforementioned pollution and disease control.
Even pesticide you have to register your name with the local supplier and it is cross checked and verified and you can be subject to an inspection by a Agricultural officer to check if its stored correctly.
My point is this industry is so complex and regulated any disruption should be viewed with heavy skeptism if it isnt coming from either a biotechnology lab or a University with a heavy bankground in Agri-science. (ie Wageningen University in the Netherlands is one of the best in the world).
If you any commenter wants a decent picture of European farming have a look at 'Clarkson Farm' produced by Jeremy Clarkson.
As per the GMO, that is one of the few areas/subject on which Eurocrats are on the same side with the majority of the EU citizens. Related, if left to the same citizens there’s no way in hell that the US beef/chicken would enter the EU market, but that might be subject to change depending on what the Americans will further ask from us in exchange for their defense umbrella (the same goes for GMOs, of course).
Of course, your comment is spot on, just wanted to add some small stuff.
The whole idea is idiotic. There is enough land to provide agriculture development. The problem is that farmers are gettin paid too little and taxed too much.
If real prices reflected the production costs, the cost of meat would be 3X, 4X the cost. Milk is alreaded traded at a loss by the supermarkets. You'd also see most small medium sized farms gone within 5-10 years and see mass unemployment in many those same isolated villages
Countries like Brazil will become even bigger agri superpowers and finish converting all of the Amazon into a giant pasture for beef.
> finish converting all of the Amazon into a giant pasture for beef.
I do not believe that it's going to be so simple like that, since the government has social and environment pressures as well. And being completely pragmatic, the issue with the pastures is more structural due to the Military Regime from 70s [1] in a failed strategy than to some availability of land to do it [2].
Will the cost be more than $32 USD (28 CHF) per kilogram or $14.53 per pound of chicken? That's what people pay for chicken at the Migros supermarkets in the tiny landlocked country of Liechtenstein which is part of the Swiss customs union.
I think the closest thing to that chicken is organic free range, which cost $5.79 a pound a few years ago in the US at Trader Joes.
So the 3x multiple is in line with what you're suggesting if we assume Swiss customs union area chicken cost reflects reality.
