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bad example in England because of the Assize of Bread and Ale [1] which ran from about the 13th century until being repealed in 1836 (!)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.
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.