The author here has a good premise, although glosses over many things. Yes, "vertical farming" is over-hyped. That said, the author didn't mention weather or pesticides/fertilizers at all. Statements such as "Current agriculture doesn’t need an artificial energy source" are plain wrong. Producing fertilizers takes quite a bit of artificial energy and the bulk of the corn and soybean farmers the author is pointing to are the ones heavily using them. And to completely ignore weather and climate is to ignore the single most important variable factor in farming.
It's also a very US-centric view. There is a ton of innovation happening in other world markets, especially with smallholder farmers. Especially around financing.
The author completely ignores financing (even saying there is no VC money in agriculture which is false), which with larger farmers is actually one of the biggest issues for farmers today. Given that farm equipment is getting bigger and more costlier, a lot of thought goes into financing that equipment. Insurance is also a huge deal, and there's certainly a lot of room for streamlining the process of insuring crops and obtaining payouts.
Also, no mention of drought and other extreme weather events. Additionally, no talk about how the Ogallala Aquifer (and others) is being decimated and continued trajectories would be catastrophic in just a few decades. The higher yield and minimal water and and getting rid of pesticides/fertilizers and removing transportation pollution are interesting things to research and see if we can do better. It is already a high bar of productivity but so where horses compared to walking but they were replaced with something better.
I'm very familiar with the Ogallalla aquifer. When the drought of 2012 hit, people were very worried about it never recovering. After several 'wet' years it appears to be fine. Mother Nature is stronger than we give her credit for
I'm not suggesting it won't ebb and flow. The issue with aquifers is that as parts go empty and stay empty for long periods of time the sand that stores the water compresses and then can never be re-expanded to be refilled. There is also the worry about what will happen if we have several "dry" years. All this to say, we don't have unlimited fresh water.
- Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
- Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.
- Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.
- The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages.
- The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient.
- The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.
Also, indoor and especially vertical farming can save precious land. Maybe the US has enough land for farming, other countries certainly do not. Rain forests burned to make space for soy or palm oil are proof of that.
Calory-dense foods are more economic to ship long distances though. From a 'power plant to plate' energy conversion viewpoint, leafy greens that don't ship well are probably the best things to grow in urban farms, assuming people will eat them anyway.
But consider my second point. If there is no caloric crop sustainability crisis in our future, then there is definitely no leafy green sustainability crisis looming on the horizon. The problems that vertical farming of kale solves are... Not very impactful ones. If all the kale in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of us wouldn't even notice.
Rain forests are being burned down because these areas are poor and farming is the simplest way to make money starting from scratch. Multi-million dollar vertical farms don't help.
Forget even about money, sometimes if you cannot participate in the 'official' economy and have no prospects, you need bare minimum capacity to cultivate land and feed yourself and your family. This is what happens in developing countries.
That land is quickly abandoned. Rain forests are burnt because once you drain the soil of nutrients (takes less than 3 years) you can just move on to a different plot. Conventional farming reuses soil by adding fertilizer to artificially replace the missing nutrients.
If you look at satellite images of Indonesia, you'll see that much of it is now just palm oil. Most of that area was burned at least a decade ago. It would be nice if they'd abandon it, presumably a new rain forest could grow over the next century or so. But they continue to grow monocultures.
>Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
Are you aware of how much water it takes to produce the output of the Midwest or Central Valley? We'd be talking about the largest desalination project in human history by orders of magnitude.
As of 2013, Israel had a desalination capacity of 500 million cubic meters per year.
> As of 2015, the US used ~450 billion cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation
I think you mean to say 450 billion liters, which would be 450 million cubic meters.
Your source says this:
"For 2015, total irrigation withdrawals were 118,000 Mgal/d"
So roughly speaking Israel desalinates in a year how much the US uses for irrigation in one day. That doesn't sound so outrageous. Israel is a small country.
Ah you're right, I read the wrong line in the wolfram alpha output. That does make it seem less crazy. It would still be a crazy project but not "entire GDP of the US" crazy.
Coastline distance is irrelevant, you could use a single mile of coastline to extract this much water. The issue is infrastructure and energy costs. Traditional irrigation is about 3 orders of magnitude cheaper than desalination.
All those rivers dumping into the ocean demonstrate how rarely it’s needed. Long term pumping water from the eastern US to the Midwest is vastly cheaper than the kind of massive and effectively pointless desalination effort required.
You know if we are already going through the effort of transporting & stacking dirt vertically for these things we might as well go all the way and integrate them into the pylons of offshore wind turbines, which'll guarantee them a viable support structure, an infinite amount of available seawater & more than enough power to desalinate it locally. Heck, the harvest logistics means it'll give fishing boats something to do off-season too.
If your nos are correct and if desalination was done at the scale of Israel in US, it would mean it would be able to provide 10% of the irrigation needs via desalination.
This is off course not a big deal in USA and desalination and economics of certain agri crops if reassigned can lead to better outcomes. However i am sure India can do with the level of desalination Israel has (scaled up to its population size) as can other middle Eastern countries. If not today, then may be a decade or 2 in the future. This can enable habitation in many areas in land and water scarce countries.
That might be possible, I don't know enough about it to say for sure. I could see us needing somewhat less just due to evaporation differences, but I'd think plants need basically the same amount of water to do what they do regardless. How do we get down to 5-10%?
I don't know how, but a different post claimed that indoor farming needs 97% less water. I imagine it has something to do with using a closed loop. (And the remaining percents are obviously due to imperfections, and the actual water content lost due to the removal of the produce from the loop.)
Most of these sound reasonable, but I've never bought into the "grow vertically" idea. It seems to ignore physics.
Sunlight is delivered as electromagnetic power (watts) proportional to surface area. Plants naturally grow on the surface of the earth, and therefore receive a small proportion of that power which they use to convert CO2 into sugars and eventually plant mass which we eat. Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much. And that's ignoring the added complexity and logistics (read: overhead) of maintaining a system that stacks plants on top of each other, which would surely obliterate whatever 2-digit% efficiency bonus you can eke out of stacking. The universe doesn't work like Minecraft.
Chemical and water use reduction seem to be a pretty good outcome, as well as being able to ignore seasonality.
I would like to see some numbers on farm equipment (in?)efficiency before throwing that out as a fact. Color me skeptical but it doesn't seem obvious at all that rebuilding a 10000-acre greenhouse every 20 years will necessarily produce less greenhouse emissions than running a few tractors. Or even that harvesting food in a greenhouse takes less energy than doing it with a tractor.
“Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much“
That assumes all light comes from straight up. That isn’t even true if the sun is straight overhead, and definitely not true close to the poles.
I don’t know whether it’s profitable, but I would think the economics of vertical farming on Iceland (sun lower in the sky, greenhouse heating cheap, imports expensive) are different from those in Equatorial Guinea.
No, it assumes that power is delivered based on surface area with respect to the sun. Vertical/3d farming can't work more than ~2 plants deep, where "depth" is measured as the number of plants between a given plant and the sun. Sure, build it vertically on the north pole, but it's still gonna be essentially "flat". You can't magically get power deep into a 3D farm when there 20 other plants on every side that would get the light first.
I have never heard anyone suggesting that vertical farms enabled 3d planting. It simply removes the linear relationship between square foot of land and number of plants.
> Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much.
I thought the common idea (and implementation) of indoor vertical farming used artificial lighting at each level. Possibly only using light in the wavelengths actually used by the plant, not "wasting" power at other wavelengths like the sun does.
Every once in a while you see some high school science fair project where a kid has the brilliant idea of making 3D solar cells... maybe little pyramids or ridges instead if a flat plane, to capture light from all angles.
The kid gets patted on the head. Those who know better, immediately recognize there is no great increase in power obtained as the 'shadows' caused by the raises structure invariably decrease the efficiency down to that of a plane.
Anyway, vertical farming reminds me of this. You would defintyl need artifical lights.
Akyway, it's amusing watching amateur would-be tomatoe growers get excited about a technology that has been around as long as Cheech and Chong.
Using these systems for decorative purposes, on the other hand, is a cool idea. It's a fast and cheap way to make an 'instant' hedge. I have a 'wall' of pole beans planted in this manner which thrive and create a solid mass of greenery within a month of planting.
It's been a few years since I've followed vertical farming, but I have recalled an argument being made that an artificial light source can be made efficiently by using a single-wavelength, super-efficient LED with a specific color that stimulates photosynthesis.
On the other hand, I've also read (old, long-lost) sources that state that the energy cost per loaf of bread is about $10 for indoor farming, vs $5 for outdoor farming.
These specialized lights won't save vertical farming today, but I will keep following the progress. If nothing else brings value to vertical farming, the fact remains that local food independence is valuable; growing food in a dense apartment or a dense city will pay dividends in the event of large-scale famine or civil unrest.
The article also doesn't mention all the diesel fuel used by tractors and harvesters during cultivation as well as trucks to move the harvested crop to the elevator and then to wherever it needs to go to be consumed.
Then again most of the crops people are talking about doing vertically are things that are planted and harvested mostly by hand, so maybe that's not such an oversight.
Efficiency and land use is indeed an issue in India as with the struggles to feed an increasing population with a higher protein intake requirement as well.
Instead of natural gas -> Fertilizers route, a solar or renewable energy -> LED route can help for certain crops provided they do grow efficiently.
Not strictly relevant to the article, but I'm not excited by the efficiencies as much by the idea that it might offer a space-efficient option for me to have my food grown locally.
Food production at the moment is very much out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I don't have a feel for what monoculture are developing in the food industry, I don't have a feel for what the supply chain risks are. If food ever stopped flowing in from wherever it comes from to my city, I'd be in trouble.
It isn't totally rational, but I dream of being able to invest in food grown a few blocks away from me. If it only cost double existing prices that'd be a solid win.
Uh, for you. Some of us live near farms -- it's neither out of sight nor out of smell (heh).
The US is the most agriculturally productive nation in the world by a fair margin. Food and fuel are two of the things that the US is unlikely to run out of even under conditions of global nuclear war.
I'm not sure how prevalent this is around the world, but in my city we can register for produce baskets. In spring, I register on a website and I choose and pay in advance of the whole season a local farmer (less than 50 km away), who comes once every week to distribute his baskets a few streets away. The produced is freshly picked the same morning, it varies from week to week, it's a small family farm and I know it doesn't contain any pesticide or artificial fertilizer.
There's only so much that can be grown and mechanically harvested, and the US surely excels at producing maize, wheat, or soybean, but vertical farms don't try to compete with those. The production of other crops does not happen in the US that much, but it also operates at a rather spectacular scale - instead relying on poorly paid laborers abroad.
This is correct. But the crops they target (veggies mostly) are also grown outdoors. But the higher margins on these veggies give the indoor people and hydroponic people an opportunity to compete (also year round veggies command a premium as well)
There's a need for automated harvesting machines for a few remaining crops - apples, lettuce, etc. The big field crops - wheat, corn, etc. have been fully mechanized for decades if not centuries.
There are vision guided fruit picking machines. They're too slow, too fragile, and need too much supervision. But they mostly work. What they need now is good practical mechanical engineering. The 2016 version:[1] The 2019 version.[2] When they get about 2x faster, have half the parts count, and can be routinely pressure-washed, they'll be ready. The "AI" part is done.
One of the simpler automated systems is automatic weeding. Machines come in several forms, but the most successful seem to be wide implements towed behind a tractor. Deere has some of these. They recognize weeds with cameras and do something about them. Some stomp or pull, some zap with electricity or a flame, some squirt on an overdose of fertilizer. It's "organic", too; no pesticides. You can get this as a service in a few areas.[3]
Of course they don't understand it, their field is technology. Agriculture requires years of specialisation and most people here if they do have a degree are computer scientists, doctors, biologists, etc. But it's rare to find someone who has genuine passion and knowledge of agriculture. It is far removed from the city lifestyle and it is incredibly hard to break into, both for land reasons and because it's a hard job.
Moreover, agricultural sciences is probably just not a very commonly pursued degree for people in the city (citation needed).
So that brings me to my main point: disrupting an industry is usually done by people who want money when all the other good ideas have been taken. There is nothing wrong with this, but the cost with this fast paced approach is that the oldest and most complex industries like agriculture are going to put you in your place if you haven't done the work to understand them.
Agreed. I grew up in rural Australia, when I moved to the city it was funny to see people talk about farmers in a willy nilly fashion. Farms are extremely hard to build, and the knowledge to run them has to be built into tradition. I'd wager if a governments policies bankrupted a large amount of them, you could almost starve the nation with no remedy. It would take lifetimes before anyone learnt how to till the land again.
I agree that farmers are misunderstood and under-valued by people who are only able to live in stability because of the ability of farms to deliver food to them, but isn't farm complexity able to be documented and analyzed in a similar fashion as other "very complex" fields like law and finance?
It seems like farmers are still beholden to long "if-then" chains and risk analysis (what to plant, where to plant, how to plant, etc. based on predictive yield), just that the underlying mathematics hasn't been as accessibly documented because it's not as profitable.
So "generational knowledge and tradition" are important, but I don't see how that changes the fact that this sort of thing can be written down and analyzed.
(Edit: I should clarify that I am not in favor of "disrupting agriculture" and I also do not think that mathematicians can somehow usurp farmers and plan better farms than the ones that already exist. I'm just wondering what's stopping the logic and practices of the ones that already exist from being documented and reproduced without "lifetimes" passing, as you say.)
I think you're right to believe that because it is true and I skirted over why I believe it takes generations.
It is not impossible but difficult to document how to do effective farming because every farm has its own individual needs. And what may be true for one farm will likely not be true for another. Hence relying on first hand knowledge, albeit extremely fallible, is more reliable than reading a book and then destroying your crop for a year. (Obviously farmers read, study and improve)
The main reason would be location.
- How does water irrigate around your property? Where is the clay? Where does the water lock in when it sinks in different acres? What happens when there is a drought in this area? What happens when it floods? What should you do when there is extreme weather?
- What makes the soil in this locale good? What is it naturally good at growing? How should you replenish the soil? What native wildlife contributes to the soil? What insects plague the area and do they have decade long life cycle bursts? What to do when a swarm of locust come?
- When does your first frost generally occur? What plants can you grow through a frost? Maybe Kale will survive because although there is frost, you live in a valley where the humidity is higher so the Kale can live. You can't grow X crop because the wind is ever so slightly stronger every 5 years because of atmospheric shifts.
And just to make it more fun, sprinkle on the problem of economics(supply/demand) and logistics.
Also it would be hard not to meet a farmer who calls it a "way of life" because it absolutely is. They live far away from the spoils of civilisation, work incredible hours and live isolated lifestyles. They laugh at city folk because a city man "wouldn't last a week on the farm", which is probably true. Fun fact: Australian farmers have twice the national suicide rate than the average man.
That all makes complete sense, and the misunderstanding of "tech people" made obvious from your paragraph of questions that farmers have to answer. Computers always do what you tell them to. It sounds like farms do not, even when you give them the "right" instructions.
"No farmers, no food", after all, and yet for some reason the suicide rates stay high. It's the same among American farmers. Dairy farms are shutting down at high rates in Wisconsin, where I'm from.
What can the spoiled children of civilization to do help farmers? What can I do? I didn't even know about this plight until I was out of engineering school.
Suicide rates (in Australia, at least) increase with the remoteness of an area. This shows up as an industry phenomenon because farming is an industry that is only present in rural and remote areas. However men in unrelated industries who live in remote areas are also at significantly increased risk of suicide, and recent meta-studies have found a distinct lack of work actually differentiating between "farmers" and "non-farming rural residents", or even a standard definition of "farmers" (is the farmer's wife counted? What if she works off the farm as well?). (Making this differentiation is important because it influences the approaches taken to reduce suicide - e.g all rural people lack access to mental health resources, but if only farmers were committing suicide then that would appear not to be a significant factor)
The term disrupted isn't really appropriate here IMO, it is more of a continual and rapid evolution, which actually even better captures the dynamism of technological change they have to follow. To stay as productive as possible, farmers have to keep up on and integrate new innovations on the fly, often without definitive singular signals one would describe as "disruptive" in tech.
I was actually thinking if an open source project to do this 'if then' predictive analytics that works across the world is available. It would be a great contribution to humanity if someone can work it , but like every complex problem i do not think it is that easy to distill all the information especially without sufficient profits.
This is what happened in Soviet Russia (productive farmers were deemed class traitors, shipped off to siberia, and obviously net farming productivity collapsed), Ukraine leading up to the Holodomor (knock on effects from russia’s actions), and in Mao’s china (government mandated agricultural actions forced farmers away from their evolved / cultural practices and caused food production collapse).
Systems like this are more complex than the foolish give them credit for being!
Mao's Four Pests Campaign was particularly disastrous and ended killing millions in famine.
He decided that sparrows, which ate some fruits and seeds, should be destroyed. He didn't realize that they also eat locust larva and other pests, which exploded in population without sparrows. Those pests ended up killing massive amounts of crops after the people were ordered to eliminate all sparrows and their eggs -- it ended in widespread starvation.
There are lots of not-fully-understood processes in the world that only work because we lucked into some way of doing them. If you come at these problems with a scientific mindset but with no real experience, you are going to have a bad time.
So, in my grad program in ag, we had a Bay-area ML startup come in to give a seminar on how they were revolutionizing agriculture. The presented their findings on how to increase yields (which they claimed could only be understood from their algorithm).
The problem they were diving into was well understood, and has been researched to death for the last 100+ years. And they had the relationship backwards, not understanding their "input" to increase yields was actually a response to low yields. They were the opposite of helpful, but rather a waste of our time.
As with anything, it helps to know the current state of knowledge before you jump into contribute. An understanding of math doesn't get you there.
I would hope that the savviest of SV or startup folks recognize that the actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't the thing that they are trying to innovate on.
Rather it's the disastrous logistics chain and resultant waste, leading to overproduction and augmentation of our food system, is the problem trying to be solved.
The problem with human labor in agriculture is that we've already spent a lot of effort to remove humans, the jobs that are left are really hard to automate.
It's the logistics chain from the farm to your plate that's the disaster. That's not for lack of trying. But having exposure to farming growing up, there's no good way to get a ripe berry from Washington State to Florida before it spoils without freezing it, genetically engineering it (which is fine, I'm pro GMO, it's just costly) or treating it. Even if you do, handling it will see large losses.
So the trick is, how do you reduce how far something needs to travel from the time it's ready to harvest until it's consumed.
Well, you can get it there, but berries aren't worth enough to make that journey by air. That is generally reserved for seafood and there is an equally amazing logistics system to do that. Calling one of the most amazing processes on the planet "disastrous logistics chain" is just disingenuous.
30% of all food produced - approx 1 Trillion dollars worth - is lost in the supply chain, and contributes the equivalent of the third largest CO2 producer if it were a country.
I'm not sure how to describe that other than a disaster.
I call it an unavoidable cost of making sure people have food on the table. There is no way on this planet that you can design a supply chain that you produce the same amount of food that is consumed. This isn't parts that get put in some widget, people have different tastes at different times. I'm honestly surprised its only 30% given the fickle taste of people.
The CO2 production will reduce as we steadily change from diesel to electric. Ocean going vessels are just environmental problems that treaties seem to ignore.
There is room for improvement, and there is significant financial incentive to realize that improvement. That said, I'm not sure that measure is the whole picture. If we are losing 30% of our food to the supply chain, what is the alternative? Perhaps we could farm things more locally and shorten the supply chain? If we did that, would we still get 100% of the yield of the old approach? What I am saying is that if we try and fix the waste problem, it would very like be at the expense of reducing yield. The extreme example is the tomatoes I am growing in my back yard. None of them will be wasted, but I'm fairly certain that the yield per square acre is absolutely atrocious.
There are two main options to avoid having to deliver food from (for example) Washington State to Florida.
One is to change consumer behavior to focus much more on in-season products that can be grown locally. This is a difficult social challenge.
The other is to change plant behavior so that they become products that are always in season and can be grown everywhere. This is a difficult technical challenge, but things like indoor vertical farming can potentially solve that. The problem described in this article is that it does not (yet?) work for effective farming, but making it possible to grow the appropriate berries or fruit locally throughout the year would fix the logistics chain by eliminating most of it.
This has the infuriatingly common fatal logical flaw of wrapping "farming" in one giant layer of abstraction and comparing indoor vs outdoor at the broadest scale.
Indoor farming, or greenhouse farming, or high-tunnel farming, or a zillion others are all incremental adaptations of particular plants and particular markets. You cannot compare the global corn and wheat markets to the nyc lunch salad market. "Farming" has always meant thousands of different things, and for some of those things there will be markets for indoor grow ops. This is not an assertion, we all know there's a very robust one right now.
Debating indoor vs outdoor farming at this broad a level is like debating cars vs bicycles as if we have to pick one.
If anyone would like to see an extremely deep dive into the exact scientific measurements at which certain plant markets become viable at certain energy prices you will find this half hour very well spent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk
I believe I've never actually eaten soy, and I rarely eat corn. I'm also pretty sure the amount of wheat humans eat is less than what we feed to poultry and livestock.
The author seems to conflate the purpose of the "modern row-crop farmer" (which is mainly to repay their huge debts and to feed cows and chickens), and the solution touted by vertical-urban-aqua-dome-whatever-ponics: to provide year-round, local, fresh and varied types of plants to feed humans.
This articles points out that this is a very american-centric reality. If you cook your own food from basic ingredients there's almost no corn reaching you directly.
Soy is crushed into what Americans call vegetable oil, and meal. The meal is the protein source for pork and chicken production. If you get a piece of fried chicken from KFC, the chicken was raised on soy meal and corn, battered in milled wheat, and fried in soybean oil.
About two years ago, I started with a much fancier AgTech with Hydroponics. Went all the way to the YCombinator interview in Mountain View (the last one for Indians), and rejected with something in the lines of "not advanced enough".
Spent time researching, talking, and more researching about the core problems of Agriculture in India. It is one sector where everyone loves to toss and play around, the most politically involved and abused, with huge numbers but contributing less than 20% of the total Indian GDP. Everyone seem to have a vested interest -- both good and bad.
At times, I'm shit-scared that I'm trying to help solve something so massive and gigantic that if I can make an iota of difference, it would be huge.
Of course, my hammer is Technology and I'm trying to find just the precise nail-heads to hit, one at a time.
My sense was that hydroponics were so expensive that they really only made sense for one crop: marijuana. If your plant is selling for $1000, then spending $50 per plant to increase its yield and 'baby' it so that it sells for $1200 makes sense. But for most plants, it doesn't make economic sense. (Tomatoes, maybe. But they're going to have to sell for a higher price point, in more expensive markets).
Is that accurate? I'm an amateur so if this is uninformed, feel free to correct me.
I'm not being dense here - I really thought there weren't? Like the core problem with ag as a business is that it's very low margin and it's extremely hard to make money.
I can only think of a handful: marijuana, fancy tomatoes at Whole Foods, maybe coffee or vanilla (?) beans... but even there, notice how there's either fierce competitive pressure, or it's possible to easily overwhelm the market (vanilla beans have to compete against synthetics). I mean there are surely some I'm forgetting, but it's a small number, and I thought that deterred VC investment.
For your staples - corn, soy - that's still much cheaper to grow outdoors, so hydroponics can't win that market.
Would be happy to connect to discuss more. There are plenty of opportunities in India for improvement, it is just that is a complicated market. The humanity improvement aspect here is bigger than the financial one for sure. The only way to start is with something that works low tech and cheap enough for average farmers to get into.
I spent a few months at a consulting company working with a precision agriculture startup, and my mind was totally blown when I first learned how much technology goes into agriculture these days. I feel like a lot of tech people have a mental image of outdoor farming still being somewhat primitive (I certainly did!) which could cause the misconceptions mentioned in the article.
My graduate school advisor is a big name in satellite-based navigation (e.g. GPS), and I spent a lot of time learning about state-of-the-art advances in GPS techniques such as precise positioning. I was surprised to learn that many of the former students in our lab went to work for John Deere of all places. At the time, I also had an image of outdoor farming being fairly primitive, but this was an eye-opening revelation to me.
We have auto-steer on all large equipment, full stop. Planting is a science down to the square foot to optimize yields. Spraying is optimized to 2 square inch across every field. Soil checks for nutrients, compaction, and other factors are weekly in the fall and spring, and monthly in the summer. Moisture checks are twice weekly in the summer.
For livestock - they have routine blood screenings for disease and nutrient deficiencies. Rotation through pasture is decided via nutrient content and growth rate of pasture plants. Breeding and genetic lines are strictly controlled via artificial insemination. Animal growth rates, health, and any number of other factors are tracked long-term to decide lineages to keep, modify, or eliminate. All feed supplements are planned to absolutely optimize feed/meat conversion ratios.
The problem with farming isn't that the data doesn't exist, or that the technology isn't being used. It's that the data lives in 18 different places, some in my head, and that the technology is ungodly expensive.
The only way I can see to make SV and ag work well would be to focus on what would otherwise be mid-sized businesses. Large scale operations already have the tech and data. The farmers who run operations of <2000 acres can't afford the large scale purchases, and do much of what I talked about via 'inherent' and 'inherited' knowledge (i.e. they know the north pasture needs to be emptied for two months early spring, but don't know how to improve the plant growth there without messing everything up).
I met a startup where I live during an event. The develop a solution for famers to integrate all their data in one system instead of spreadsheets, think of a farming ERP.
One of the founders worked since his early teens driving large machines during harvest season. He said that agriculture is already now able to be fully automated, from GPS controlled tractors and such to milking and feeding robots. I had the same revelation, modern farming is way more tech heavy automated than I thought.
How does vertical farming compete with traditional row crops? I have never seen a proposal to grow wheat in a skyscraper. It has always been higher value fresh foods like lettuce and spinach.
Most likely terrible. You need to gather electricity in one place, send it to the farm, emit some light, plant will absorb 5% of that light, and then 5% of that 5% will end up in the final product.
It should come as no surprise that programmers who spend all day thinking about the theoretical problems they might run into may be bad at understanding current limitations and bottlenecks in the real world. This doesn't just apply to agriculture. Think of how many startups you know aimed at addressing problems that seem imaginary outside of the bay area.
At the same time, I think we underrate the benefit of naive amateurs throwing themselves into industry. If Stripe actually fully understood the amount of work they had to do to get to the other side of a complex, messy, and competitive market, I'm going to guess they never would have done it in the first place.
Think about it. The biggest legacy of the hippies is that their critique of food and agriculture evolved into the mainstream's. (Well, that and same process with nuclear engergy.) The problem is it's incoherent mix, then and now. We have jumbled together:
- Nostalgia. First this was yeoman farmer nostalgia. Now there is also pre-agricultural nostalgia. Primitivism is coherent, but only once you embrace what it really entails, which paleo dieting absolutely does not.
- Anti-monpolization. Great idea.
- Corperations-are-bad-so-their-means are bad. Cargill might be bad, but that doesn't mean combine harvesters are.
- Concern about environmental externalities. Good idea.
- Concern about nutritional externalities. Good idea. It's crazy we gave 0 fucks about supply chain risk and other security concerns, but focus on cranking out carbs in a way that only global armageddon justifies.
GMO hysteria among heirloom lovers is a funny small example: please just say biodiversity is good, and tons of GMOs or tons of hierlooms will be good, and purely golden rice or purely sweet delishious apples not so much.
Even "locavorism": Guess what? it takes like <5 days to transport anything within continental US, easy. If your non-California produce sucks, it's not because distance, per-se, it's because warehousing.
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Now, back to the question at hand, I absolutely don't believe your average Ag wantrepreneur is immune to the current in the larger culture. I mean think about it, modern gourmet-mediocre-----fancy food culture is per-dollar, easily the Bay Area's biggest cultural export, ahead of anything SV ever did.
So what might an Ag startup look like instead? Well, conquering externalities
- without changing government policy
- still making a profit
- at a scale to actually matter
is just some liberatarian wet dream so let's not worry too much about that.
I would rather worry about the bullshit job problem. Average person is spending all their time doing useless shit, or not being paid enough doing useful shit. Ag is super efficient putting everything else into stark relief (well, super efficient when they aren't over-leveraged looking like fools and Daddy USDA bails them out). How about we give people lifetime food for a portion of their earnings?! Just like Worry-Free but fiancialized. Could actually work, certainly given today's "10 years no profit is fine" model.
Basically anyone thinking agriculture disruption should read about the Hutterites[1] rather than get caught up with some vert ag thing.
Hutterites have major capital expenses (unlike Amish), and yet they are farmers. Income-portion subscription model maybe doesn't so crazy if you consider employees can live off the surplus food on one hand, and so the subscription can largely go into capital and operational expenditures.
It sounds dual to "lifetime cut of earnings to pay for college", since education is considered the ultimate personal capex, and food the ultimate personal opex. But considering the rat-race nature of bullshit jobs, and the basic income studies, a lifetime free from fear starvation could well kick one up the hierarchy of needs enough to learn far more efficiently. So food indefinitely is actually pretty good personal capex from that perspective.
Final thing is remote work + medicare-for-all could make SNAP-for-all less inferior to $$-for-all, in that housing and healthcare, the big rent-seekers drains are decapitated, raising food costs as a portion of household budgets back where they should be.
We simply have food stamps if you find yourself too poor to afford food. That's a fine system, in my opinion. I, of course, already pay for my lifetime supply of food with a portion of my earnings, which I hand over to the grocery store.
A really great non-profit focused on more sustainable agriculture is The Land Institute. Generally people also don’t also understand that some advancements in agriculture take decades or even centuries.
One example of an advancement from The Land Institute is their focus on domesticating a perennial cousin of Modern wheat. This is no small task given humans have been domesticating modern wheat for thousands or years. Although the cousin still yields relatively less grain, it has significantly deeper roots, is much more resistant to weeds and big in turn requiring less pesticide and can harvested with existing equipment. With time it’s not unreasonable to think it would have comparable yields to modern wheat.
They have a number of projects and been focusing on sustainability since 1976.
+1 to The Land Institute. To give others context, perennials require much less input than their annual cousins, both in terms of labor and also petrochemicals.
The other big benefit is carbon sequestration. Perennials typically root far deeper into the soil, giving prairies enormous amounts of (carbon sequestering) root mass. This also has benefits in terms of erosion control — soil loss is one of the biggest, not talked about threats to society.
Finally, perennials can help — again through extensive root systems — improve water capture, recharging aquifers.
Traditional agriculture has "solved all of the scale problems" through the use of pesticides, destructive monocultures, and disruption of the natural water cycle. It's also built on the idea that diesel is cheap both for the tractors to farm in the midwest and the trucks to deliver goods to markets around the country. Should any of those fragile pillars collapse due to regulation (not likely), major environmental catastrophe (pretty likely), or disruptions in the global fossil fuel economy (possible), solutions like vertical farming start making a lot more sense.
Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because:
- You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop)
- It focus on being biodiverse
- It builds forests
So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning.
This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes instead of inputs.
There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because right now most machines are very focused on monocultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
Hello, also a developer who's interested in agroecology. I actually also left development (as a job, not as something I do) in order to pursue a more human-centric approach to agriculture. With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now, which is already alarming; small farms with synergistic crops & forestation seems like a no-brainer to achieve food sustainability. Plus, chemical pesticides are usually not used in syntropic systems, which makes it good for your health too.
I dropped out of Agroecology course in 2018 but I actively work with it or did before the pandemic at least.
I am skeptical that "more farm workers" is a trend that anyone really wants. Maybe at small scale you can sell produce at vastly higher prices to make up for the higher costs, but I don't think that what you're suggesting would be good for agriculture if adopted broadly.
How much of this not "good for agriculture" is a result of a mispricing that doesn't factor in the unsustainability of the current mainstream approach? Like many areas this may involve more human workers before later transitioning to smarter machines in the long run.
Sure, that's fine. I was too unclear, I don't think jobs should be a reason to intentionally make farming less automated and that if fully manual or mostly manual farming somehow became the dominant approach it would simply not scale.
I am aware that family farms are more productive per acre and more sustainable usually, but there just aren't that many farmers or people who want to be farmers as a percentage of the population... it's hard work and exactly the kind of labor I'd expect to see automated right back away again ASAP.
Helping farmers with new automation tools that enable sustainable farming seems like a far better option than trying to disrupt farming in a way that intentionally increases the labor required to feed people. If the goal is to help people get back in touch with nature that's a great goal. It's just not a goal I think could be widely adopted.
Farmers are very smart, as the article mentions. If you give them the tools they need, they will use them if they make sense. Heck, farmers are pushing hard for the right to repair and modify their equipment (i.e. http://repair.org/agriculture/)
Edit: In case this is still unclear (it's hard to phrase right), I'm trying to make the point that you're better off trying to create a win-win with existing farmers rather than trying to start from scratch. If they are given better tools they will generally prefer to make their farms and soil healthier because it improves their bottom line. I don't think it makes sense to flip it around and completely change the agriculture system twice.
Like others said, from a pov of global economics and current geopolitics, it might not make sense. But when you factor in sustainability, independence from the system and health, things begin to make more sense. Mono-cultures degrade the soil, up to a point when it'll no longer be able to sprout that culture anymore, so what do these millionaire farmers do? They just log more and more of our forests in order to plant. That's where all this logging in the amazon rainforest comes from.
All of this happens due to the green revolution & mass automation. We have papers plus empirical evidence you can turn any used up soil into good farming soil, if only we mimic the way nature does it, creating micro-climates with different cultures next to each other. One of the good outcomes of this method is that you don't even need chemical pesticides, because policultures are inherently more resistant to plagues. That and with this method, we attempt to use natural predators to cope with them too. It's basically a method of rebuilding forests, which is why it's called an agroforestry system
> With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now
I fully support the underlying message, but automation has been happening at large scale for 70+ years now, unemployment rate doesn't follow automation, jobs are just shifted to other industries/sectors.
In other words, "Automation hasn't increased unemployment in the past, even though some pesky scientists and economists said that it would eventually be a problem. Some of those people were wrong in the past, therefore automation will never increase unemployment, ever."
"Hitherto it is
questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human
being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment,
and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the
comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human
destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to
just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious
foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of
scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving
and elevating the universal lot. "
Yes; if people claim that X will cause Y, and over decades of doing X it continues to not cause Y, I'd like some very compelling reasons to suddenly believe that X is going to start causing Y.
This topic is boring me to death already. I'll keep it short. Automation+competition mean cheaper potatoes (or anything really). Cheaper potatoes means you save $10 per month. Now you can spend $10 on something else. Maybe on a movie or you save the money and go to a theme park with your kid. This represents a new employment opportunity (less farming more entertainment). Therefore automation isn't causing structural long term unemployment.
However there is a darker side to automation. What if automation is used without any competition? e.g. your company has a first mover advantage and it takes 4 years for the competition to catch up. What happens is that the potatoes stay at the same price but the company is increasing its profit margin which benefits the owners/shareholders of the company at the expense of workers. This isn't about unemployment. This is about wealth inequality. When a company replaces a worker with a machine it becomes more profitable but the worker gets nothing.
Society needs to change in a way that the laid off workers benefit from automation to the point that people are hoping their job gets automated or they decide to automate their own job. If someone gets laid off by automation for the third time that person should be happy, not sad.
Start by getting your hands dirty. Grow some herbs in a window box or something simple. Once you reap the rewards, you may get the green-thumb itch and keep going. Getting started is easy: seed, dirt, water, sunshine
decide what kind of agriculture you want to do and check what is time and money requirements and seasonality is. Next step could be doing internship to see what it it feels like. There are many options from wwoofing to more job like situations.
Well and then you are ready to decide. Being small farmer is tough: not a lot of money and a lot of work, but it is rewarding by many means.
I personally decided to be in more play farm: few acres of vineyards, small wine production. It is still professional operation but I don't expect to be making full living off it.
Agriculture is a brutal, pitiless world of perfect competition, commoditisation, and winner-takes-all consolidation. There’s an old farming joke: “What would you do if you won the lottery? I’d farm until it was all gone”.
Just do it, start getting your hands dirty as other said.
I personally started with composting and now I have a system where my food waste becomes forests, I eat lots of vegetable/fruits and I just throw the bucket on a specific place, cover with mulch and food grows. Avocado, papayas, limes, cucumber, tomatos, lots of them grow easily here just by doing this.
If you look for "agroforest academy" in youtube you may find a video course in english on this syntropic agriculture topic too.
If you are wanting to do it as a commercial venture, then livestock (particularly beef if you are in the US) is about the only way to go unless you can purchase vast tracts of land and the equipment to run it.
If you are considering vegetable farming commercially, don't unless it is an extremely boutique product like truffles or exotic mushrooms, the economies of scales are crushing. The other option that is still viable is small plot that produces and end product. e.g you own a vineyard but you are not selling grapes you are selling wine. You own a pepper farm but your end product is hot sauce. Those are still viable for small plot.
The best thing you can do with a decent tract of land is to plant it full of expensive hardwoods such as black walnut and occasionally prune the trees to promote straight growth for lumber.
I have 7 acres and I planted 4 of it with African Ebony, one of the most expensive woods in the world. They are not native to my area so there is no issue with harvesting them and they require little in the way of care. They will provide a nice cushion for my children when they mature given that a single tree is worth between $300,000 to $1,000,000 (at current market) depending on size and quality of lumber. I planted about 50 trees per acre. The math is pretty self evident and it is the best use of land agriculturally if you are looking to maximize profit via small plot agriculture.
My wife uses some of the other land for personal farming but that is her gig, I grew up on a farm (citrus) and after NAFTA swore I would never scratch a living out of dirt again. I told her she was on her own with the vegetable farming other than helping her with where to plot certain vegetables and when to plant them.
I mentioned this in another post on another topic but there was immigration reform in the 70's and 80's that opened up migrant work to the conglomerate farms. Which drove down prices most family farms where able to survive this onslaught but it kicked the legs out of any cushion they had. They then lobbied for NAFTA which allowed them to buy up tracks of farmland in Mexico that could not survive due to the new Mexican labor shortage created by the US workforce immigration reform, they then moved production to Mexico, drove prices down to an unsustainable level for small plot farmers, those farmers bankrupted, the conglomerates came in and bought up the small tracts that where now available, they then parceled those tracts together. Then they lobbied for more immigration reform and brought in workforce for their new US farms and that is why you do not see an American field worker nowadays. It's not because they do the jobs that we don't want. It's because they systematically destroyed the opportunity to do so and hold the cards to keep wages suppressed. If wages go up for farm hand work in the US, they shift scale to Mexico, if Mexico is unstable they shift scale to the US.
Most of the politicians on both sides of the isle where and are complicit in it because they view food pricing as a national security issue. The government has a vested interest in keeping the price of food and necessities low as people tend to become pretty violent when they are starving. That being said, it was a huge transfer of middle class wealth to large conglomerations.
Aren't there stories where 30 years ago lots of people had the same idea and planted similar species, resulting in a price crash when the trees matured? I'm not a tree expert so don't know the species, but I feel like I heard something like that happening in the southeast.
How did you decide on your species and how do you know other people don't have the same thing in the ground right now?
Yes there where but that was mainly from timber stock which matures faster than true hardwood stock, if you are very young say in your 20's you could plant hardwood stock for retirement but generally hardwood stock foresting is a generational investment.
Some of the limitations on everyone planting is that most of these species are protected, so you have to be able to plant them in a similar environment where they are not native or you run the risk of having to pay impacts for every tree harvested. Others are land availability and the other is many people don't want to encumber their land for a return they personally will never see. Most of the stuff you hear about from 30 years ago where faster growing trees in the pine and oak families which you could see harvestable maturity in 10 (pine) to 20 (oak) years and while it did cause a price crash, those people did make money. Just not FU money.
Contrast this with any African blackwood and you are looking at 50 years minimum till maturity and possible as long as 100 year. I don't need the money (not that I am rolling in it) but it is generational insurance for my children and their grandchildren. For a little back story I own a house that sits on 7 acres on the ocean, I plan to will the house to my descendants and keep it in the family as a place to come back to and congregate, for all generations to use. The trees are the hedge that their will be money to support that vision, as well as provide for the family if need be.
That being said the whole thing could flop, but at least I planted some trees that are in serious danger of going extinct in their native habitat and my descendants will be in possession of some really resilient hardwood.
Might not count as the great plains, but Mark Sheppard's New Forest Farm in Wisconsin is a good demonstration of a similar approach in a different context.
Not to belittle the difficulty, but as someone who just drove from WY to WI over the last couple days... east of the Mississippi is drastically wetter than western MN+.
Yes, the method applies anywhere in the planet. But for that you need to deeply understand the plants available for you, I mean those that are able to grow there in the beginning, native or not, here we use lots of african grasses and eucalyptus to start. There are a few people replicating this all over the world in very different environments.
After watching that video, it seems like you could just mulch large areas of "dry land" and it would have a similar effect more quickly. The pruning (and rotting of the wood) is what is fixing the soil right?
Yes exactly! Its what happens naturally, trees dies, falls, takes others with them with the fall, make space for newer trees and wood decompose... Natural succession.
If you don't have woody material, just leafs works too, the key is organic matter build up and photosynthesis. So we tend to cut weeds (when they start to mature/flower usually) very cleanly for them to grow bigger and better, not killing them, focus is to build soil for more demanding plants.
Wow, that's so cool. I have long been interested in permaculture, which this seems quite similar to — how would you describe the difference? Answering my own question I'd say that immediately the focus on automated harvest of non-monocrop is very important, ad the main arguments against permaculture that I've come across (here and on e.g. Reddit) are that it's not scalable with automation. Thanks so much for sharing
They are very similar actually, but permaculture is about more than just agriculture, agriculture is one of the sides of permaculture. For me syntropic agriculture is that side, some people also call it agroforestry but this term is used for other kinds of agriculture, which builds forests but differently. On syntropic the main difference is very high density of plants and extensively pruning. The video I posted in the first comment you see a few people doing research on automating this processes, there's also some people Swiss investing into this, sure with less biodiverse but its being working great for them, so yes, can be automated, also lots of machines used on fruits crops can be used on this system, specially to speed up pruning bigger trees. And usually on syntropic its not common to find "key" shapes beds and stuff that we see from permaculture, its usually straight rows, which helps a lot with automation I guess.
Introducing an idea, in case you haven't encountered it elsewhere already. There are some estate-farms in England that are arriving on the same conclusion of permaculture/syntropic ag, albeit from a different angle.
They were spending a lot of money to extract marginal agricultural products from soil that wasn't well suited to monoculture, and some eccentric estate managers decided to stop spending the money, and allow the estates to "re-wild": no more shrub pruning, earth-moving, etc.
One of the "big ideas" they had, which might be useful to you, is to reintroduce "mega-fauna" to their ecosystems (in their case, ponies, "wild-ish" bovines, pigs, goats, and deer. They found that these fauna did an excellent job of pruning the wilds, but they had a new, second-order problem in pruning the fauna; they'd like to reintroduce wolves, to do the culling for them, but can't for somewhat obvious NIMBY reasons. :)
They're at the point where the estates more or less run themselves; they mostly make income from selling flowers, culled remains, and ecotourism.
Anyways, all this to say that you might consider leveraging some organic automatons to do some of the "extensive pruning" for you. Herds of goats in particular are very efficient pruners, and they can pay for themselves.
The phrase "It builds forests" is so powerfully, simply descriptive.
I think that framing agriculture's transition (hopefully) away from mono-culture into a more ecosystem focused idea seems like a tractable optimization problem. If we look at the reasons for mono-culture, I would argue part of the reason is that traditionally bigger yield is linked to bigger tools -- tractors are much larger than horses, spraying a chemical is easier when only one thing needs to survive. Monoculture makes it easy to apply big things, harvesting one row of corn is easy to scale to ten rows of corn just by making the combine harvester wider -- the harvester's problem statement is generic and scaleable in this way.
The hard problem, that you raised at the end, is how do we scale harvesting non-mono-cultures. The constraining variables are quite different when we need to perform a set of ten actions with no locality guarantees (Monoculture just guarantees locality of similar actions). I think one natural perspective is to look at how we do things non-locally at scale, which effectively reduces down to a distributed systems problem.
It’s pretty amazing what the land can do if you’re clever. I have a friend from college who makes a decent living as a flower farmer who also does horse boarding, etc.
When he slows down for retirement, he has a few million bucks worth of hardwoods that he planted right out of college on land that wasn’t good for other purposes. Mostly black walnut and maple, which he also produces syrup with and may start making booze with!
I grew up in a scenario more similar to this, though my parents didn't have the foresight to plant hardwoods for harvest (Though we did chop firewood to keep the house warm in the winter from our woods). My father still sends a supply of maple syrup each year, which is important because the syrups sold in stores are pretty questionable (The texture is too thick and the sweetness is one-dimensional).
Definitely a tension I've found in life between working in an urban software world and a more bucolic, fostering atmosphere of a farm. I hope more people find a balance in life like your friend, seems they have found the best of a couple worlds.
It is still hard, though, to scale this approach in the way that modern factory farms (Or even small family farms, to be honest - harvesting 400 acres is still non-trivial compared to the average of 150 acres in the 30s [1]) have done with the monoculture.
I would probably assume your friend has a small family style farm, which is what 90% of the farms in the US are [2]. Total farm output has tripled [3], a top of the line tractor costs nearly half a million, it really makes the equation of making an integrated farm a much more complex scenario. If I start doing a more bespoke culture, these tools are probably much less effective - that's the core challenge I think that needs to be solved, how do we increase output of heterogenous cultures.
If I had to bet (And I don't go to Vegas often for a reason), there's likely an inflection point where micro-technologies come to farming in a more direct way, possibly supplanting the way we do a lot of things today. I hate the appeal to nature, but it does seem prescient, in that a bunch of small organisms (Bees, butterflies, and birds) contribute so much to the overall health and harvest of an ecosystem. Maybe there is some, excuse me, cross-pollination to be found between that world and the one we've constructed.
Keeping the soil productive with more fertilizer costs a lot in some ways- fertilizer production is a big energy consumer. Basically attempting to accelerate using fossil or nuclear what the sun or things that eat organic matter do more slowly.
I had a small reserve, and I cut my living costs a lot. I wasn't trying to make money from agriculture in the beginning, was all about learning, I volunteered a lot and did a few courses later. This year we started actually selling produces and I get lots of calls to pruning jobs which I do decline because 2 years down this line I started working with development again because I got out of money. We would be able to live from the land today for sure, but also having economic security and being able to invest in better tools and such is also very good.
I'm now looking to merge this two worlds and work as a developer on solutions for agriculture/forests. I have a product in mind which I'm currently working on, lets see :)
I think you've just explained why farmers become coders and just buy their food from someone else. The idea of the Gentleman Farmer has been around a long time, but it's hard work and the pay is terrible.
First I wanted to just grow berries, then I realized, pesticides and so on, so add another plant to fight that attacker instead of pesticide, then add another plant to protect that plant by being attractive for those other bugs which kill the bad bugs. Then I realized, this would eventually be a forrest with just more berries and edible fruits than normal. Thats where the problem appeared, reaping it would be hard to scale, indeed even planting such a forest would be hard to scale with current mechanical means.
I have a few designs for robot-like planting and pickery, yet all I currently have in realization is 2sqm dirt with potatos, carrots, strawberries and another pot of blueberries. :-/
Then another depressing realization, even if I made this on 100ha of land and produced a lot of nice fruits, berries, roots, the pay-off in money would probably not be worth it.
Hipsters and eco-paying-premium people dont have money, not even close to the money provided to vertical ag tech farms.
Capital intensive to develop the automatic reaping bots, which will also cost more to operate compared to current "pour diesel into tractor and pull the earth up and shake it to extract so many potatoes". Destruction just costs less.
You don't do sustainable farming for the money. It can certainly pay the bills and some. Plus subsidies and incentives can help.
If you want to make money you start a vertical farming AgTech, which will not be profitable, but will attract the trendy funding. Pay yourself well while it last.
I am thinking of a similar route, as a data scientist i am eager to know what graduate level courses would you recommend ? Especially for agriculture in cold climate (Canada )
I don't know what to recommend you. I know a few people doing syntropic agriculture in Portugal which is as close as a close climate that I know. There is a guy in Florida, he have a company called GreenDreamsFL, hes the only one I know in the US doing this. But sadly this is not very much taught in academic courses down here in Brazil, but anything related to agroecology is very close, also understanding deeply plants biology helps A LOT when working with this systems, so we see a lot of people from Biology with a focus on Botany and Plant's physiology, and "florest engineering" I couldn't find a good translation to it, but its an academic course found here in Brazil which also helps a lot on understanding forests processes.
If you want to learn about agriculture, find a farm you can support close to you, and enroll in a summer program. You will learn more if you get your hands dirty.
It's not a graduate course in the traditional sense, but Paul Wheaton runs a number of hands-on permaculture classes and courses on his land in Montana. Maybe not Canada-cold, but there's a large focus on shaping land and designing buildings to use energy more efficiently.
Hi - coming from a PhD in agriculture (focus on sustainable ag), graduate level courses are going to be tough to jump into unless you have a strong background in ecology. Most of my grad-level courses assumed years of training in e.g. genetics, soil science and chemistry, plant physiology, ecology, weed science, entomology, etc. Agriculture is a very broad life science field.
That said, if you want a quick primer, "Crop ecology: productivity and management in agricultural systems" is a good primer on most of the basic ecological systems in agriculture. I've read it cover to cover many times.
However, you don't need a grad-level education to farm (believe me, I have been reminded this endlessly) - this is more for people doing research. For applied/actionable specifics for cold climates, your best friend is going to be local crop-extension services (in the US, most land-grants run an extension service). They will have tested techniques for your area and will be able to point you to good resources for farmers, not people researching agriculture.
One last thing - to be a successful farmer has very little to do with growing crops. Take business classes - the rest is relatively easy to figure out.
I have so many questions. Do the rows run north-south or east-west? Is there a formula for how widely spaced the rows need to be? Is the pruned wood buried or left on the surface?
Looking forward to the product you mentioned in another post too! :)
I think that's the first time I've actually seen farmers have an interest in improving their soil. Conventional practices are basically strip mining fertile land as if it was some finite resource.
Ok, this is very cool, but it looks like as of now it requires orders of magnitude more manual labor than existing agriculture. This means increase of produce price to about the same extent. Unless a huge paradigm shift will happen (which takes decades without a major disaster), I don't see this as feasible any time soon.
Farming is not a sustainable use of land. The article of the author assumes the massive scales of land use for farming is an invariant, but it is a massive contributor to species extinction and global warming.
Vertical farming is as important as solar is to the future sustainability of the human race.
Other than soil depletion, it's perfectly sustainable. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. Of course, we also figured out how to revitalize soil a long time ago, vis-a-vis ruminant fertilization and crop rotation. But the soil nutrients are supplemented with artificial fertilizer these days for efficiency.
Autonomous, EV mower/tedder/rake for hay fields with an integrated weather center. Would like that for my life. Bonus points for super low center of gravity, so we could get value out of the hills more than CRP checks.
Most of it is really just mowing the prairie grass. The brush has largely been mechanically removed, but the mowing is meant to suppress weeds as well as annuals which try relentlessly to suppress the native vegetation. Reduces need for spraying / extensive manual weed control.
Lol, that’s great. Would love to have grazing animals in the future but we’re not quite ready to take care of them yet. Also involves decisions on fencing etc. I have been warned a LOT about goats and their ability to destroy everything, and evade even the tallest fences.
What about goats with earphones, trained to stimuli?
I'm not actually "rural", but I have chickens. (One of which is 10 years old!) There is such a thing as a "judas goat"; or "judas chicken". I've been through three generations of chickens now. The first generation ended up a quarter mile away on Pete's garden (he wasn't that upset). It doesn't happen any more.
You're right, goats can be trouble makers. We use sheep to mow our lawn and they are very easy to deal with. They won't go over a 2 foot fence and don't need a lot of maintenance. Water, occasionally some mineral rich feed, and a shear.
Sheep is what I’d like to get eventually. I LOVE that Hawaii’s giant solar farm incorporated sheep into their design, as the method of keeping the panels clear of vegetation.
This article is at too high a level of abstraction. It doesn't make sense to talk about the huge, almost almost entirely automated farms that grow crops like corn and soybeans in the same way as the farms that grow fruits and vegetables that are still mostly picked by hand.
The biggest opportunity for disruption is the checkoffs.
>These types of programs represent an already existing framework of farmers ‘paying’ for this type of knowledge. This model has proven scalable, even more so with the internet and social media making information readily available. Note this doesn’t prevent bad information from being shared, but since savvy farmers will try and eventually ignore unprofitable methods, one can assume this is an efficient system.
No. It is one of the most wasteful systems I've ever seen. Take one look at the reports they put out to justify their existence and you'll see that it is filled with ridiculous math, where ROI is based on outputs instead of outcomes. The data being collected is junk, all the vendors are super-insidery and collaboration is a political minefield at best. There's so much room for improvement you could throw a dart at any of the checkoff 5-year ROI reports and blindly hit an area to innovate on.
What numerous Netflix documentaries and now Covid has revealed is that ag industry is perhaps too efficient from a people perspective. Those people closest to production carry a disproportionate risk of the supply chain with very little compensation. This is problematic in that it creates funnels too close to the raw materials that can break without adequate redundancy.
Where ag industry is less efficient is in material usage like fertilizer, water, and waste products. For example it takes about 18 gallons of water to produce one avocado fruit and there are concerns about a future shortage of phosphorus. Then there are also the environmental footprints as well.
For what it’s worth the loss of resource efficiency inversely drives land use efficiency. When resource inputs/outputs are a concern land use is compressed to consolidate management concerns while land use concerns relax when resources are more abundant.
One segment that really seems to nail resource efficiency, at least in North America, is commercial lumber but then they operate on long time horizon unlike edibles.
Robotics on traditional farms is where it's at. Weed/Pest killing, fertilizing/watering, and tilling robots will cut down on fertilizer/water usage and will alleviate the need for GMO and pesticides.
I hope to run a droid farm in 10 years like uncle Owen Lars. I just don't want to be charred at the end :D
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 370 ms ] threadBut solely because I want a farm, and land in Brazil is crazy expensive.
But if I had a 1000 hectare farm I would gladly use it in a sustainable non-SV tech but still tech way.
It's also a very US-centric view. There is a ton of innovation happening in other world markets, especially with smallholder farmers. Especially around financing.
The author completely ignores financing (even saying there is no VC money in agriculture which is false), which with larger farmers is actually one of the biggest issues for farmers today. Given that farm equipment is getting bigger and more costlier, a lot of thought goes into financing that equipment. Insurance is also a huge deal, and there's certainly a lot of room for streamlining the process of insuring crops and obtaining payouts.
- Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
- Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.
- Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.
- The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages.
- The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient.
- The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.
The only things I ever see grown in those vertical farms are low calory, short-shelf-life leafy greens, and the occasional bland tomato.
Greens are nice and all, but calories are what keep us alive. Until they can produce calories, I will continue seeing them as a pointless distraction.
I will also note that in 2020, we have no shortage of leafy greens.
If you count using fossil fuels to make fertilizer as unsustainable, you're probably right. But that is very debatable.
But consider my second point. If there is no caloric crop sustainability crisis in our future, then there is definitely no leafy green sustainability crisis looming on the horizon. The problems that vertical farming of kale solves are... Not very impactful ones. If all the kale in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of us wouldn't even notice.
Are you aware of how much water it takes to produce the output of the Midwest or Central Valley? We'd be talking about the largest desalination project in human history by orders of magnitude.
As of 2013, Israel had a desalination capacity of 500 million cubic meters per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
As of 2015, the US used ~450 million (edit: fixed from billion) cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation.
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/i...
Obviously not exactly a fair comparison for numerous reasons, but it gives a sense of the scale we're talking about here.
I think you mean to say 450 billion liters, which would be 450 million cubic meters.
Your source says this: "For 2015, total irrigation withdrawals were 118,000 Mgal/d"
So roughly speaking Israel desalinates in a year how much the US uses for irrigation in one day. That doesn't sound so outrageous. Israel is a small country.
US coastline (not including Alaska): 5,800 miles
So the US has 33 times the coastline. It sounds like we're only one order of magnitude off to meet those desal needs.
ps. If we include Alaska, which is another 6,600 miles of coastline, we could again halve that need.
All those rivers dumping into the ocean demonstrate how rarely it’s needed. Long term pumping water from the eastern US to the Midwest is vastly cheaper than the kind of massive and effectively pointless desalination effort required.
This is off course not a big deal in USA and desalination and economics of certain agri crops if reassigned can lead to better outcomes. However i am sure India can do with the level of desalination Israel has (scaled up to its population size) as can other middle Eastern countries. If not today, then may be a decade or 2 in the future. This can enable habitation in many areas in land and water scarce countries.
That might be possible, I don't know enough about it to say for sure. I could see us needing somewhat less just due to evaporation differences, but I'd think plants need basically the same amount of water to do what they do regardless. How do we get down to 5-10%?
Sunlight is delivered as electromagnetic power (watts) proportional to surface area. Plants naturally grow on the surface of the earth, and therefore receive a small proportion of that power which they use to convert CO2 into sugars and eventually plant mass which we eat. Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much. And that's ignoring the added complexity and logistics (read: overhead) of maintaining a system that stacks plants on top of each other, which would surely obliterate whatever 2-digit% efficiency bonus you can eke out of stacking. The universe doesn't work like Minecraft.
Chemical and water use reduction seem to be a pretty good outcome, as well as being able to ignore seasonality.
I would like to see some numbers on farm equipment (in?)efficiency before throwing that out as a fact. Color me skeptical but it doesn't seem obvious at all that rebuilding a 10000-acre greenhouse every 20 years will necessarily produce less greenhouse emissions than running a few tractors. Or even that harvesting food in a greenhouse takes less energy than doing it with a tractor.
That assumes all light comes from straight up. That isn’t even true if the sun is straight overhead, and definitely not true close to the poles.
I don’t know whether it’s profitable, but I would think the economics of vertical farming on Iceland (sun lower in the sky, greenhouse heating cheap, imports expensive) are different from those in Equatorial Guinea.
I thought the common idea (and implementation) of indoor vertical farming used artificial lighting at each level. Possibly only using light in the wavelengths actually used by the plant, not "wasting" power at other wavelengths like the sun does.
The kid gets patted on the head. Those who know better, immediately recognize there is no great increase in power obtained as the 'shadows' caused by the raises structure invariably decrease the efficiency down to that of a plane.
Anyway, vertical farming reminds me of this. You would defintyl need artifical lights.
Akyway, it's amusing watching amateur would-be tomatoe growers get excited about a technology that has been around as long as Cheech and Chong.
Using these systems for decorative purposes, on the other hand, is a cool idea. It's a fast and cheap way to make an 'instant' hedge. I have a 'wall' of pole beans planted in this manner which thrive and create a solid mass of greenery within a month of planting.
On the other hand, I've also read (old, long-lost) sources that state that the energy cost per loaf of bread is about $10 for indoor farming, vs $5 for outdoor farming.
These specialized lights won't save vertical farming today, but I will keep following the progress. If nothing else brings value to vertical farming, the fact remains that local food independence is valuable; growing food in a dense apartment or a dense city will pay dividends in the event of large-scale famine or civil unrest.
If you're thinking pipes, the water might become toxic after 500km or so.
Then again most of the crops people are talking about doing vertically are things that are planted and harvested mostly by hand, so maybe that's not such an oversight.
Instead of natural gas -> Fertilizers route, a solar or renewable energy -> LED route can help for certain crops provided they do grow efficiently.
Food production at the moment is very much out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I don't have a feel for what monoculture are developing in the food industry, I don't have a feel for what the supply chain risks are. If food ever stopped flowing in from wherever it comes from to my city, I'd be in trouble.
It isn't totally rational, but I dream of being able to invest in food grown a few blocks away from me. If it only cost double existing prices that'd be a solid win.
The US is the most agriculturally productive nation in the world by a fair margin. Food and fuel are two of the things that the US is unlikely to run out of even under conditions of global nuclear war.
There are vision guided fruit picking machines. They're too slow, too fragile, and need too much supervision. But they mostly work. What they need now is good practical mechanical engineering. The 2016 version:[1] The 2019 version.[2] When they get about 2x faster, have half the parts count, and can be routinely pressure-washed, they'll be ready. The "AI" part is done.
One of the simpler automated systems is automatic weeding. Machines come in several forms, but the most successful seem to be wide implements towed behind a tractor. Deere has some of these. They recognize weeds with cameras and do something about them. Some stomp or pull, some zap with electricity or a flame, some squirt on an overdose of fertilizer. It's "organic", too; no pesticides. You can get this as a service in a few areas.[3]
[1] https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU
[2] https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ
[3] https://www.robovator.com/
Moreover, agricultural sciences is probably just not a very commonly pursued degree for people in the city (citation needed).
So that brings me to my main point: disrupting an industry is usually done by people who want money when all the other good ideas have been taken. There is nothing wrong with this, but the cost with this fast paced approach is that the oldest and most complex industries like agriculture are going to put you in your place if you haven't done the work to understand them.
It seems like farmers are still beholden to long "if-then" chains and risk analysis (what to plant, where to plant, how to plant, etc. based on predictive yield), just that the underlying mathematics hasn't been as accessibly documented because it's not as profitable.
So "generational knowledge and tradition" are important, but I don't see how that changes the fact that this sort of thing can be written down and analyzed.
(Edit: I should clarify that I am not in favor of "disrupting agriculture" and I also do not think that mathematicians can somehow usurp farmers and plan better farms than the ones that already exist. I'm just wondering what's stopping the logic and practices of the ones that already exist from being documented and reproduced without "lifetimes" passing, as you say.)
It is not impossible but difficult to document how to do effective farming because every farm has its own individual needs. And what may be true for one farm will likely not be true for another. Hence relying on first hand knowledge, albeit extremely fallible, is more reliable than reading a book and then destroying your crop for a year. (Obviously farmers read, study and improve)
The main reason would be location.
- How does water irrigate around your property? Where is the clay? Where does the water lock in when it sinks in different acres? What happens when there is a drought in this area? What happens when it floods? What should you do when there is extreme weather? - What makes the soil in this locale good? What is it naturally good at growing? How should you replenish the soil? What native wildlife contributes to the soil? What insects plague the area and do they have decade long life cycle bursts? What to do when a swarm of locust come? - When does your first frost generally occur? What plants can you grow through a frost? Maybe Kale will survive because although there is frost, you live in a valley where the humidity is higher so the Kale can live. You can't grow X crop because the wind is ever so slightly stronger every 5 years because of atmospheric shifts.
And just to make it more fun, sprinkle on the problem of economics(supply/demand) and logistics.
Also it would be hard not to meet a farmer who calls it a "way of life" because it absolutely is. They live far away from the spoils of civilisation, work incredible hours and live isolated lifestyles. They laugh at city folk because a city man "wouldn't last a week on the farm", which is probably true. Fun fact: Australian farmers have twice the national suicide rate than the average man.
"No farmers, no food", after all, and yet for some reason the suicide rates stay high. It's the same among American farmers. Dairy farms are shutting down at high rates in Wisconsin, where I'm from.
What can the spoiled children of civilization to do help farmers? What can I do? I didn't even know about this plight until I was out of engineering school.
A super short paper that points to lots of references - https://www.crrmh.com.au/content/uploads/Briefing-Paper_FINA...
Back then 90-95% of people worked in food production. Now it's 2-3%, and they produce vastly more food per person.
So it's not like farmers are not used to change.
Systems like this are more complex than the foolish give them credit for being!
He decided that sparrows, which ate some fruits and seeds, should be destroyed. He didn't realize that they also eat locust larva and other pests, which exploded in population without sparrows. Those pests ended up killing massive amounts of crops after the people were ordered to eliminate all sparrows and their eggs -- it ended in widespread starvation.
Unless agriculture is built on trade secrets or art, you can contribute.
This is one of my criticisms of Medical. It's not a science or the barrier to entry would be significantly lower, and as a result cost would be lower.
Degrees are good, but not necessary if you can do math and get experience.
This is the problem.
The problem they were diving into was well understood, and has been researched to death for the last 100+ years. And they had the relationship backwards, not understanding their "input" to increase yields was actually a response to low yields. They were the opposite of helpful, but rather a waste of our time.
As with anything, it helps to know the current state of knowledge before you jump into contribute. An understanding of math doesn't get you there.
Rather it's the disastrous logistics chain and resultant waste, leading to overproduction and augmentation of our food system, is the problem trying to be solved.
There are enormous problems there, such as a heavy reliance on human labour for picking and processing.
The problem with going after waste reduction is that the tab for that is picked up through subsidies. The inefficiency is in policy.
So the trick is, how do you reduce how far something needs to travel from the time it's ready to harvest until it's consumed.
I'm not sure how to describe that other than a disaster.
http://www.fao.org/3/a-bt300e.pdf
The CO2 production will reduce as we steadily change from diesel to electric. Ocean going vessels are just environmental problems that treaties seem to ignore.
One is to change consumer behavior to focus much more on in-season products that can be grown locally. This is a difficult social challenge.
The other is to change plant behavior so that they become products that are always in season and can be grown everywhere. This is a difficult technical challenge, but things like indoor vertical farming can potentially solve that. The problem described in this article is that it does not (yet?) work for effective farming, but making it possible to grow the appropriate berries or fruit locally throughout the year would fix the logistics chain by eliminating most of it.
Indoor farming, or greenhouse farming, or high-tunnel farming, or a zillion others are all incremental adaptations of particular plants and particular markets. You cannot compare the global corn and wheat markets to the nyc lunch salad market. "Farming" has always meant thousands of different things, and for some of those things there will be markets for indoor grow ops. This is not an assertion, we all know there's a very robust one right now.
Debating indoor vs outdoor farming at this broad a level is like debating cars vs bicycles as if we have to pick one.
If anyone would like to see an extremely deep dive into the exact scientific measurements at which certain plant markets become viable at certain energy prices you will find this half hour very well spent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk
The author seems to conflate the purpose of the "modern row-crop farmer" (which is mainly to repay their huge debts and to feed cows and chickens), and the solution touted by vertical-urban-aqua-dome-whatever-ponics: to provide year-round, local, fresh and varied types of plants to feed humans.
1:Corn has made its way into everything: a Washington Post article
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how-c...
Spent time researching, talking, and more researching about the core problems of Agriculture in India. It is one sector where everyone loves to toss and play around, the most politically involved and abused, with huge numbers but contributing less than 20% of the total Indian GDP. Everyone seem to have a vested interest -- both good and bad.
At times, I'm shit-scared that I'm trying to help solve something so massive and gigantic that if I can make an iota of difference, it would be huge.
Of course, my hammer is Technology and I'm trying to find just the precise nail-heads to hit, one at a time.
My sense was that hydroponics were so expensive that they really only made sense for one crop: marijuana. If your plant is selling for $1000, then spending $50 per plant to increase its yield and 'baby' it so that it sells for $1200 makes sense. But for most plants, it doesn't make economic sense. (Tomatoes, maybe. But they're going to have to sell for a higher price point, in more expensive markets).
Is that accurate? I'm an amateur so if this is uninformed, feel free to correct me.
I can only think of a handful: marijuana, fancy tomatoes at Whole Foods, maybe coffee or vanilla (?) beans... but even there, notice how there's either fierce competitive pressure, or it's possible to easily overwhelm the market (vanilla beans have to compete against synthetics). I mean there are surely some I'm forgetting, but it's a small number, and I thought that deterred VC investment.
For your staples - corn, soy - that's still much cheaper to grow outdoors, so hydroponics can't win that market.
For livestock - they have routine blood screenings for disease and nutrient deficiencies. Rotation through pasture is decided via nutrient content and growth rate of pasture plants. Breeding and genetic lines are strictly controlled via artificial insemination. Animal growth rates, health, and any number of other factors are tracked long-term to decide lineages to keep, modify, or eliminate. All feed supplements are planned to absolutely optimize feed/meat conversion ratios.
The problem with farming isn't that the data doesn't exist, or that the technology isn't being used. It's that the data lives in 18 different places, some in my head, and that the technology is ungodly expensive.
The only way I can see to make SV and ag work well would be to focus on what would otherwise be mid-sized businesses. Large scale operations already have the tech and data. The farmers who run operations of <2000 acres can't afford the large scale purchases, and do much of what I talked about via 'inherent' and 'inherited' knowledge (i.e. they know the north pasture needs to be emptied for two months early spring, but don't know how to improve the plant growth there without messing everything up).
One of the founders worked since his early teens driving large machines during harvest season. He said that agriculture is already now able to be fully automated, from GPS controlled tractors and such to milking and feeding robots. I had the same revelation, modern farming is way more tech heavy automated than I thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw
And here's a video from Techno Farm he mentioned
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfyPlyJfKA
https://www.waterbit.com/
Takes advantage of current massive farm scale and extant automation, simply increasing yield by adding precision to watering.
It should come as no surprise that programmers who spend all day thinking about the theoretical problems they might run into may be bad at understanding current limitations and bottlenecks in the real world. This doesn't just apply to agriculture. Think of how many startups you know aimed at addressing problems that seem imaginary outside of the bay area.
At the same time, I think we underrate the benefit of naive amateurs throwing themselves into industry. If Stripe actually fully understood the amount of work they had to do to get to the other side of a complex, messy, and competitive market, I'm going to guess they never would have done it in the first place.
- Nostalgia. First this was yeoman farmer nostalgia. Now there is also pre-agricultural nostalgia. Primitivism is coherent, but only once you embrace what it really entails, which paleo dieting absolutely does not.
- Anti-monpolization. Great idea.
- Corperations-are-bad-so-their-means are bad. Cargill might be bad, but that doesn't mean combine harvesters are.
- Concern about environmental externalities. Good idea.
- Concern about nutritional externalities. Good idea. It's crazy we gave 0 fucks about supply chain risk and other security concerns, but focus on cranking out carbs in a way that only global armageddon justifies.
GMO hysteria among heirloom lovers is a funny small example: please just say biodiversity is good, and tons of GMOs or tons of hierlooms will be good, and purely golden rice or purely sweet delishious apples not so much.
Even "locavorism": Guess what? it takes like <5 days to transport anything within continental US, easy. If your non-California produce sucks, it's not because distance, per-se, it's because warehousing.
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Now, back to the question at hand, I absolutely don't believe your average Ag wantrepreneur is immune to the current in the larger culture. I mean think about it, modern gourmet-mediocre-----fancy food culture is per-dollar, easily the Bay Area's biggest cultural export, ahead of anything SV ever did.
So what might an Ag startup look like instead? Well, conquering externalities
- without changing government policy - still making a profit - at a scale to actually matter
is just some liberatarian wet dream so let's not worry too much about that.
I would rather worry about the bullshit job problem. Average person is spending all their time doing useless shit, or not being paid enough doing useful shit. Ag is super efficient putting everything else into stark relief (well, super efficient when they aren't over-leveraged looking like fools and Daddy USDA bails them out). How about we give people lifetime food for a portion of their earnings?! Just like Worry-Free but fiancialized. Could actually work, certainly given today's "10 years no profit is fine" model.
Hutterites have major capital expenses (unlike Amish), and yet they are farmers. Income-portion subscription model maybe doesn't so crazy if you consider employees can live off the surplus food on one hand, and so the subscription can largely go into capital and operational expenditures.
It sounds dual to "lifetime cut of earnings to pay for college", since education is considered the ultimate personal capex, and food the ultimate personal opex. But considering the rat-race nature of bullshit jobs, and the basic income studies, a lifetime free from fear starvation could well kick one up the hierarchy of needs enough to learn far more efficiently. So food indefinitely is actually pretty good personal capex from that perspective.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites
I can't imagine what would happened on their stock price if they didn't acquire YOUTUBE.
One example of an advancement from The Land Institute is their focus on domesticating a perennial cousin of Modern wheat. This is no small task given humans have been domesticating modern wheat for thousands or years. Although the cousin still yields relatively less grain, it has significantly deeper roots, is much more resistant to weeds and big in turn requiring less pesticide and can harvested with existing equipment. With time it’s not unreasonable to think it would have comparable yields to modern wheat.
They have a number of projects and been focusing on sustainability since 1976.
https://landinstitute.org/
https://kernza.org/
https://www.dallasnews.com/food/cooking/2019/05/23/can-cerea...
The other big benefit is carbon sequestration. Perennials typically root far deeper into the soil, giving prairies enormous amounts of (carbon sequestering) root mass. This also has benefits in terms of erosion control — soil loss is one of the biggest, not talked about threats to society.
Finally, perennials can help — again through extensive root systems — improve water capture, recharging aquifers.
- You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests
So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning.
This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes instead of inputs.
There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because right now most machines are very focused on monocultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
I dropped out of Agroecology course in 2018 but I actively work with it or did before the pandemic at least.
I am aware that family farms are more productive per acre and more sustainable usually, but there just aren't that many farmers or people who want to be farmers as a percentage of the population... it's hard work and exactly the kind of labor I'd expect to see automated right back away again ASAP.
Helping farmers with new automation tools that enable sustainable farming seems like a far better option than trying to disrupt farming in a way that intentionally increases the labor required to feed people. If the goal is to help people get back in touch with nature that's a great goal. It's just not a goal I think could be widely adopted.
Farmers are very smart, as the article mentions. If you give them the tools they need, they will use them if they make sense. Heck, farmers are pushing hard for the right to repair and modify their equipment (i.e. http://repair.org/agriculture/)
Edit: In case this is still unclear (it's hard to phrase right), I'm trying to make the point that you're better off trying to create a win-win with existing farmers rather than trying to start from scratch. If they are given better tools they will generally prefer to make their farms and soil healthier because it improves their bottom line. I don't think it makes sense to flip it around and completely change the agriculture system twice.
All of this happens due to the green revolution & mass automation. We have papers plus empirical evidence you can turn any used up soil into good farming soil, if only we mimic the way nature does it, creating micro-climates with different cultures next to each other. One of the good outcomes of this method is that you don't even need chemical pesticides, because policultures are inherently more resistant to plagues. That and with this method, we attempt to use natural predators to cope with them too. It's basically a method of rebuilding forests, which is why it's called an agroforestry system
I fully support the underlying message, but automation has been happening at large scale for 70+ years now, unemployment rate doesn't follow automation, jobs are just shifted to other industries/sectors.
"Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot. "
However there is a darker side to automation. What if automation is used without any competition? e.g. your company has a first mover advantage and it takes 4 years for the competition to catch up. What happens is that the potatoes stay at the same price but the company is increasing its profit margin which benefits the owners/shareholders of the company at the expense of workers. This isn't about unemployment. This is about wealth inequality. When a company replaces a worker with a machine it becomes more profitable but the worker gets nothing.
Society needs to change in a way that the laid off workers benefit from automation to the point that people are hoping their job gets automated or they decide to automate their own job. If someone gets laid off by automation for the third time that person should be happy, not sad.
Same advice I'd give someone in agriculture looking to get into code.
Well and then you are ready to decide. Being small farmer is tough: not a lot of money and a lot of work, but it is rewarding by many means.
I personally decided to be in more play farm: few acres of vineyards, small wine production. It is still professional operation but I don't expect to be making full living off it.
Agriculture is a brutal, pitiless world of perfect competition, commoditisation, and winner-takes-all consolidation. There’s an old farming joke: “What would you do if you won the lottery? I’d farm until it was all gone”.
Even with the more realistic mods, which brings the most basic things like seasons(!!!), it is a futile fight against the bugs and bad UI.
farm sim is nothing but an advert for tractor brands.
Watch a couple youtube videos but NEVER pay it. you've been warned :)
If you look for "agroforest academy" in youtube you may find a video course in english on this syntropic agriculture topic too.
If you are considering vegetable farming commercially, don't unless it is an extremely boutique product like truffles or exotic mushrooms, the economies of scales are crushing. The other option that is still viable is small plot that produces and end product. e.g you own a vineyard but you are not selling grapes you are selling wine. You own a pepper farm but your end product is hot sauce. Those are still viable for small plot.
The best thing you can do with a decent tract of land is to plant it full of expensive hardwoods such as black walnut and occasionally prune the trees to promote straight growth for lumber.
I have 7 acres and I planted 4 of it with African Ebony, one of the most expensive woods in the world. They are not native to my area so there is no issue with harvesting them and they require little in the way of care. They will provide a nice cushion for my children when they mature given that a single tree is worth between $300,000 to $1,000,000 (at current market) depending on size and quality of lumber. I planted about 50 trees per acre. The math is pretty self evident and it is the best use of land agriculturally if you are looking to maximize profit via small plot agriculture.
My wife uses some of the other land for personal farming but that is her gig, I grew up on a farm (citrus) and after NAFTA swore I would never scratch a living out of dirt again. I told her she was on her own with the vegetable farming other than helping her with where to plot certain vegetables and when to plant them.
Most of the politicians on both sides of the isle where and are complicit in it because they view food pricing as a national security issue. The government has a vested interest in keeping the price of food and necessities low as people tend to become pretty violent when they are starving. That being said, it was a huge transfer of middle class wealth to large conglomerations.
How did you decide on your species and how do you know other people don't have the same thing in the ground right now?
Some of the limitations on everyone planting is that most of these species are protected, so you have to be able to plant them in a similar environment where they are not native or you run the risk of having to pay impacts for every tree harvested. Others are land availability and the other is many people don't want to encumber their land for a return they personally will never see. Most of the stuff you hear about from 30 years ago where faster growing trees in the pine and oak families which you could see harvestable maturity in 10 (pine) to 20 (oak) years and while it did cause a price crash, those people did make money. Just not FU money.
Contrast this with any African blackwood and you are looking at 50 years minimum till maturity and possible as long as 100 year. I don't need the money (not that I am rolling in it) but it is generational insurance for my children and their grandchildren. For a little back story I own a house that sits on 7 acres on the ocean, I plan to will the house to my descendants and keep it in the family as a place to come back to and congregate, for all generations to use. The trees are the hedge that their will be money to support that vision, as well as provide for the family if need be.
That being said the whole thing could flop, but at least I planted some trees that are in serious danger of going extinct in their native habitat and my descendants will be in possession of some really resilient hardwood.
https://newforestfarm.us/about/
Having trees increases rainfall but need to grow the trees with little rainfall first!
If you don't have woody material, just leafs works too, the key is organic matter build up and photosynthesis. So we tend to cut weeds (when they start to mature/flower usually) very cleanly for them to grow bigger and better, not killing them, focus is to build soil for more demanding plants.
They were spending a lot of money to extract marginal agricultural products from soil that wasn't well suited to monoculture, and some eccentric estate managers decided to stop spending the money, and allow the estates to "re-wild": no more shrub pruning, earth-moving, etc.
One of the "big ideas" they had, which might be useful to you, is to reintroduce "mega-fauna" to their ecosystems (in their case, ponies, "wild-ish" bovines, pigs, goats, and deer. They found that these fauna did an excellent job of pruning the wilds, but they had a new, second-order problem in pruning the fauna; they'd like to reintroduce wolves, to do the culling for them, but can't for somewhat obvious NIMBY reasons. :)
They're at the point where the estates more or less run themselves; they mostly make income from selling flowers, culled remains, and ecotourism. Anyways, all this to say that you might consider leveraging some organic automatons to do some of the "extensive pruning" for you. Herds of goats in particular are very efficient pruners, and they can pay for themselves.
Sources (great reading/listening): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma... and https://www.econtalk.org/isabella-tree-on-wilding/
I think that framing agriculture's transition (hopefully) away from mono-culture into a more ecosystem focused idea seems like a tractable optimization problem. If we look at the reasons for mono-culture, I would argue part of the reason is that traditionally bigger yield is linked to bigger tools -- tractors are much larger than horses, spraying a chemical is easier when only one thing needs to survive. Monoculture makes it easy to apply big things, harvesting one row of corn is easy to scale to ten rows of corn just by making the combine harvester wider -- the harvester's problem statement is generic and scaleable in this way.
The hard problem, that you raised at the end, is how do we scale harvesting non-mono-cultures. The constraining variables are quite different when we need to perform a set of ten actions with no locality guarantees (Monoculture just guarantees locality of similar actions). I think one natural perspective is to look at how we do things non-locally at scale, which effectively reduces down to a distributed systems problem.
edit: few small changes
When he slows down for retirement, he has a few million bucks worth of hardwoods that he planted right out of college on land that wasn’t good for other purposes. Mostly black walnut and maple, which he also produces syrup with and may start making booze with!
Definitely a tension I've found in life between working in an urban software world and a more bucolic, fostering atmosphere of a farm. I hope more people find a balance in life like your friend, seems they have found the best of a couple worlds.
It is still hard, though, to scale this approach in the way that modern factory farms (Or even small family farms, to be honest - harvesting 400 acres is still non-trivial compared to the average of 150 acres in the 30s [1]) have done with the monoculture.
I would probably assume your friend has a small family style farm, which is what 90% of the farms in the US are [2]. Total farm output has tripled [3], a top of the line tractor costs nearly half a million, it really makes the equation of making an integrated farm a much more complex scenario. If I start doing a more bespoke culture, these tools are probably much less effective - that's the core challenge I think that needs to be solved, how do we increase output of heterogenous cultures.
If I had to bet (And I don't go to Vegas often for a reason), there's likely an inflection point where micro-technologies come to farming in a more direct way, possibly supplanting the way we do a lot of things today. I hate the appeal to nature, but it does seem prescient, in that a bunch of small organisms (Bees, butterflies, and birds) contribute so much to the overall health and harvest of an ecosystem. Maybe there is some, excuse me, cross-pollination to be found between that world and the one we've constructed.
Postnote:
Interesting history of farming I found https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-american-agriculture-fa....
[1] http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/AgCensusImages/1969/02/...
[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/march/large-family...
[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
I'm now looking to merge this two worlds and work as a developer on solutions for agriculture/forests. I have a product in mind which I'm currently working on, lets see :)
First I wanted to just grow berries, then I realized, pesticides and so on, so add another plant to fight that attacker instead of pesticide, then add another plant to protect that plant by being attractive for those other bugs which kill the bad bugs. Then I realized, this would eventually be a forrest with just more berries and edible fruits than normal. Thats where the problem appeared, reaping it would be hard to scale, indeed even planting such a forest would be hard to scale with current mechanical means.
I have a few designs for robot-like planting and pickery, yet all I currently have in realization is 2sqm dirt with potatos, carrots, strawberries and another pot of blueberries. :-/
Then another depressing realization, even if I made this on 100ha of land and produced a lot of nice fruits, berries, roots, the pay-off in money would probably not be worth it.
Soon I'll be pumping it into the house for plumbing, etc.
My reasoning is, in 20 years I'll have a cool project to talk about, or I'll be sitting on a fortune in freshwater.
Capital intensive to develop the automatic reaping bots, which will also cost more to operate compared to current "pour diesel into tractor and pull the earth up and shake it to extract so many potatoes". Destruction just costs less.
If you want to make money you start a vertical farming AgTech, which will not be profitable, but will attract the trendy funding. Pay yourself well while it last.
https://wheaton-labs.com/
That said, if you want a quick primer, "Crop ecology: productivity and management in agricultural systems" is a good primer on most of the basic ecological systems in agriculture. I've read it cover to cover many times.
However, you don't need a grad-level education to farm (believe me, I have been reminded this endlessly) - this is more for people doing research. For applied/actionable specifics for cold climates, your best friend is going to be local crop-extension services (in the US, most land-grants run an extension service). They will have tested techniques for your area and will be able to point you to good resources for farmers, not people researching agriculture.
That syntropic agriculture video was powerful.
Any way to contact you to understand how you've made the transition?
Looking forward to the product you mentioned in another post too! :)
Vertical farming is as important as solar is to the future sustainability of the human race.
You can't be farming sustainably if you are depleting the soil. Preserving soil health is a fundamental aspect of sustainable agriculture..
I'm not actually "rural", but I have chickens. (One of which is 10 years old!) There is such a thing as a "judas goat"; or "judas chicken". I've been through three generations of chickens now. The first generation ended up a quarter mile away on Pete's garden (he wasn't that upset). It doesn't happen any more.
>These types of programs represent an already existing framework of farmers ‘paying’ for this type of knowledge. This model has proven scalable, even more so with the internet and social media making information readily available. Note this doesn’t prevent bad information from being shared, but since savvy farmers will try and eventually ignore unprofitable methods, one can assume this is an efficient system.
No. It is one of the most wasteful systems I've ever seen. Take one look at the reports they put out to justify their existence and you'll see that it is filled with ridiculous math, where ROI is based on outputs instead of outcomes. The data being collected is junk, all the vendors are super-insidery and collaboration is a political minefield at best. There's so much room for improvement you could throw a dart at any of the checkoff 5-year ROI reports and blindly hit an area to innovate on.
Where ag industry is less efficient is in material usage like fertilizer, water, and waste products. For example it takes about 18 gallons of water to produce one avocado fruit and there are concerns about a future shortage of phosphorus. Then there are also the environmental footprints as well.
For what it’s worth the loss of resource efficiency inversely drives land use efficiency. When resource inputs/outputs are a concern land use is compressed to consolidate management concerns while land use concerns relax when resources are more abundant.
One segment that really seems to nail resource efficiency, at least in North America, is commercial lumber but then they operate on long time horizon unlike edibles.
I hope to run a droid farm in 10 years like uncle Owen Lars. I just don't want to be charred at the end :D