
What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture - kickout
http://thinkingagriculture.io/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-understand-about-agriculture/
======
kumarski
My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years.

I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber
engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now)

Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS,
econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd.

\- You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms

\- It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinate. More if it gets
periodically polluted at an increasing rate.

\- Large majority Agrarian populations exist because the countries are stuck
in a purgatory of <1 MWh/capita annum whereby the country doesn't have
scaleable nitrogen and steel manufacturing.

\- Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes are some of the highest satiety lowest
input to output ratio produce. High efficiency.

\- In civilizations where you are at < 1MWh/capita annum - there is not enough
electricity to produce tools for farming, steel for roads, and concrete for
building things. The end result is that the optimal decision is to have more
children to harvest more calories per an acre.

\- Property, bankruptcy, and inheritance law have an immense influence on the
farmer population of a country.

I remember telling some "ag tech" VCs my insights and offering to introduce my
father who has an immense amount of insight on the topic from having grown
things for as long as he has....My thoughts were tossed aside.

~~~
chx
> 1MWh/capita annum

Oh this is fascinating! I never thought of this but of course energy
consumption per capita is going to be an indicator of how industrialized a
country is. I briefly checked the two countries I am a citizen of (Canada,
Hungary) and counterchecked with one of the poorest countries I know of (Chad)
and the numbers are as expected: 14.6, 4.1, 0.013 (oof).

~~~
cryptonector
Now think about what it means to do with less energy.

Energy availability is wealth.

------
alisson
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE)

~~~
mathgladiator
what advice would you offer to another developer that longs to get into
agriculture?

~~~
kls
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.

~~~
paconbork
What changed after NAFTA, if you don't mind my asking?

~~~
kls
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.

------
coderintherye
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.

~~~
Justsignedup
I would like to build on top of your point:

\- 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.

~~~
xxpor
>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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Israel#Seawater_desalination)

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...](https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-
resources/science/irrigation-water-use?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-
science_center_objects)

Obviously not exactly a fair comparison for numerous reasons, but it gives a
sense of the scale we're talking about here.

~~~
credit_guy
> 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.

~~~
xxpor
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.

------
rudolph9
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.

[https://landinstitute.org/](https://landinstitute.org/)

~~~
gdubs
+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.

------
akajakaj
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.

~~~
logicNSci
Specialization sure, but science is universal.

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.

~~~
mespe
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.

------
degraafc
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.

~~~
bricej13
For a small peek watch this simple farmer dig a hole, put a seed in, and put
dirt on top:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As)

~~~
s1artibartfast
Or think that every pistachio that goes to market has been visually inspected
and individuals sorted, and has been for the last 25 years.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As)

~~~
AndrewOMartin
Did you mean to post a link to a YouTube video demonstrating that? Your link
is a dupe of the parent.

~~~
s1artibartfast
Thanks for letting me know

------
mespe
My PhD is in sustainable agriculture, and I have 18+ years experience in both
field and greenhouse ag. Ironically, unlike many here, I went from agriculture
to data science/programming.

One thing missed by a lot of the comments: Indoor systems tend to be
incredibly fragile affairs. If you've ever been in a well managed commercial
greenhouse, you will notice a ton of sanitation procedures. There are
greenhouse pests and diseases which are never an issue in the field, in large
part because there is an entire ecological system of checks and balances
working out in a field. Even in modern intensive ag fields. The truth is an
agricultural field is an amazingly complex system which we don't fully
understand (we are only starting to explore soil ecosystems and plant roots).
Vertical farms are disconnected from this, though the costs might not be
obvious. As a consultant, I watched a "trendy" aquaponics startup crash and
burn because they underestimated this.

------
rmason
With twenty years previous experience as an agronomist I can tell you that
this article is right on.

You want to know cropping ag's biggest problem? Too much data. Farmers are
collecting all sorts of data - soil samples, weather station data, aerial
infrared photos and yield monitor data to name a few. But there are few tools
that give actionable information from all that data. Actionable in prescribing
something that results in a positive ROI.

Now as an agronomist who soil sampled, walked the field multiple times every
year and sometimes even rode the combine with the farmer I was able to do that
- sometimes.

Someday it will happen but it's my opinion that AI is a long, long way from
performing that job. But I do hope I live to see it.

~~~
michaelscott
Out of interest, what kind of prescriptions would you hope data could make?
Are you talking about coming up with new ideas for production or further
optimisation for what already exists?

~~~
rmason
Farmers were told to collect all this data back in the early nineties at the
beginning of what was called the precision farming movement. They bought the
sensors, collected the data and they're still waiting.

They're looking for the data to point at problems that could be solved to make
them more money.

------
legitster
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”

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.

------
nostrademons
If you haven't read about the Green Revolution [1], you probably should.

Basically, this is was a series of technological developments in the early 50s
and 60s that completely revolutionized agriculture. High-yielding seed
varieties, fossil-fuel fertilizers, chemical pesticides, etc. During the Green
Revolution, the proportion of common feedstocks that are edible grew from 4-5%
to 40-50%, and the number of humans that can be supported on earth by a
typical 2000-2500 calorie diet grew from ~1-2B to 10+B. Most of the things we
hate about modern agriculture - pesticides, GMOs, monocultures, Monsanto's
dominance, the loss of small family farms, coupling between agriculture and
fossil fuel extraction - came about because of the Green Revolution. But
without it, 80% of the world population would be dead or never born.

Agriculture isn't really in need of Silicon Valley style disruption, because
it happened in the 50s. We currently produce enough food on earth for everyone
to have a 3000+ calorie daily diet, and we could increase the world population
by 50% _with current food output_ and still have enough to eat. The problems
with agriculture today mostly concern distribution and tail risks - we produce
plenty, but it's allocated inefficiently (wealthy people eat veal and foie
gras, poor people struggle to get enough basic grains) and it could be wiped
out by a blight or supply chain disruption. Silicon Valley doesn't really help
with these problems, and if anything exacerbates them.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution)

~~~
rmason
Norman Borlaug was my hero. A man most Americans never heard of did more to
help people in the twentieth century than any other person. He was more
impactful than Elon Musk without all the publicity.

------
ntbloom
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.

------
cagenut
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk)

------
ogre_codes
I find this story odd because it seems like it's over-emphasizing the large
scale/ low manual labor crops. In other words, the article is talking about
inexpensive, long shelf life crops:

> The Midwest in the United States has close to 90M acres of corn, 85M acres
> of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat.

Maybe I've got this entirely wrong, but my understanding is most vertical
farming focuses on producing highly perishable fruits and vegetables which
often still require a fair amount of manual labor and where being close to
market is a benefit.

I haven't yet seen large scale vertical gardens being commercially successful
yet, but if they do, I'm certain they won't be producing corn, wheat, or
soybeans.

------
wbazant
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.

~~~
Animats
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]

[1] [https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU](https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU)

[2] [https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ](https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ)

[3] [https://www.robovator.com/](https://www.robovator.com/)

------
goldenshale
I was blocked as a suspected bot by the wordpress site, so I'll post here...

I think this discussion requires a bit more nuance. Of course classic row
crops like corn, wheat, soy, oats, etc., are unlikely to ever make sense for
indoor crops. But that's not what any of these businesses are tackling.
Instead they are focused on high value fruits and vegetables, herbs, and fresh
greens. You only have to look at the agricultural success of the Netherlands
to see that these crops can be grown for profit at scale, indoors. During the
winter months they augment the greenhouses with light, but they are also
taking advantage of the sun as much as possible. In greenhouses you can grow
with far less water, and you can produce fresh, local food that doesn't have
to be cooled and shipped nearly as far. I'd like to see an honest comparison
that looked at a tomato and a handful of fresh cilantro being sold in NYC or
SF from a local greenhouse with augmented light versus comparable produce
shipped in from Mexico or somewhere else warm.

I think there are also many good arguments for shifting our diets away from
the commodity crops and towards more fruits and vegetables, so as the world
gets wealthier and more people seek diverse, healthy foods, we might see new
models that make increasing sense.

~~~
rossdavidh
I immediately thought of the Netherlands as well. As I understand it, they
began vertical farming more crops thinking that they would be the R&D
department for world agriculture, because they could get results faster, and
then it would go into "production" in conventional farms, but were surprised
to discover that they could (in some cases) compete for the production as
well.

It makes total sense to me that this would not be the case for every crop
(probably not corn, wheat, or soy for example). But I would also be surprised
if vertical farming made sense for NO crops.

------
vincehark
The problem with industrial outdoor farming isn't the efficiency, it's the
toxic pesticide applications, the environmental pollution in air and soil
getting in the crops, and lack of nutritious crop diversity leading to
inefficient food supply chains. Growing plants with coal indoors isn't a
solution either but hyper-efficient indoor and vertical farming is getting
closer by the day and more funding needs to go into new evidence based
controlled environment farming techniques. Check out
[https://youtu.be/VIrXQo00OWc](https://youtu.be/VIrXQo00OWc) for an example of
what hyper efficient indoor farming looks like.

------
antoniuschan99
I really like this video series from Exa Cognition on Vertical Farming that
goes over many of the issues the article posts.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw)
[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.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfyPlyJfKA)

~~~
newyankee
really good videos, although an honest breakdown of costs is what will help
with the naysayers

------
d_burfoot
As a consumer, I don't care a tiny bit about making my food less expensive (by
making production more efficient). Food is already very cheap.

I care very very much about reducing the suffering of farm animals. I do not
want to become vegan (for health reasons), but the guilt I feel because of my
contribution to animal suffering is one of the worst parts of my life.

Please, please, smart young technologists out there: figure out some cool
technology to make it possible to raise farm animals efficiently while also
ensuring that they live comfortable, decent lives.

~~~
firethief
Not everything is a technical problem. No technical solution is going to make
the cheapest way to get animal parts in our fridges involve the animals living
fulfilling lives.

------
carapace
I've been thinking about this in the context of applied ecology (Permaculture,
et. al.) It's undeniable that modern mechanized mass agriculture is incredibly
efficient and already highly automated. It's kind of fantastic. (And very
challenging to compete against.)

The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and ecological ignorance.

The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that will become
endangered if we do not mitigate the severe erosion problems that stem from
single species field that are barren (re: nothing actively growing) for 30-40%
of the calendar year (in North America)."

(Imagine installing millions of acres of solar panels and just switching them
off for 1/3 of the year.)

Broadly speaking, if our agriculture destroys topsoil rather than creating it
we're gonna have a bad time.

An interesting challenge would be to automate food forests. For concreteness,
check out what these folks are doing:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance](https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance)

This is one family working on their home plot in a suburb who have converted
it into a really cool food forest with chickens and lots and lots of different
crops.

Imagine replicating this across millions of acres, without involving hundreds
of thousands of people (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but it couldn't compete
with mechanized agriculture.) What kind of automation could help with that?

~~~
mespe
Fallow fields are essential to maintaining soil health, a successful practice
going back 10k years. Additionally, some of the "barren" fields are actually
being used to alternate crop - it is a technique to grow crops with limited
natural water. Modern best-practices avoid a lot of erosion by using no-till
or low-till systems.

~~~
carapace
I read up and watched some videos in re: "syntropic agriculture" last night.
Ernst Götsch's farm produces crops all year w/o any inputs and with continuous
improvement of the soil quality.

------
hosh
Several weeks ago, I finally looked up what "permaculture" is all about, and
it blew my mind away.

It works even better than modern agricultural processes. The ideas are
inherently distributed and decentralized, and when implemented along the
ethical principles, bypasses many of the wealth inequality. It builds up
resiliency through diversity (something the tech world is only starting to
explore with Kubernetes and containers). It goes beyond mere "sustainability"
and into regenerative processes. These are very practical ideas that have had
50 years of implementation proving out those design patterns.

It requires a different way of thinking about how we grow and get our food.

My techie friends all love it when they see these ideas, and yet, the
development of permaculture design tracks the development of the personal
computer, internet, and smartphone. But it is also big blind spot. Many of the
design patterns are low-tech or no-tech (which, not depending upon a supply
chain, is much more resilient).

Dwarf Fortress is a lot of fun, but I have found that applying and
implementing permaculture design is a lot more challenging and rewarding.

------
_ah
Weirdly, the thing I find missing most from this discussion is _finance_.

If we take the premise that information is valuable (decrease inputs, improve
yields) and that equipment is valuable (automation), then there's a very real
return to be gained by using these valuable products. What's nuts to me is
that we would ever ask the _farmers_ to bear the risk of these products. I
mean, sure they could I suppose (better returns overall!), but it concentrates
all the risk in the worst places.

I feel like there's a much better opportunity here for a targeted financial
product. "Implement our methods with our data, and we'll skim a percentage of
your profits." Imagine if the risk of buying a new tractor was gone, because
it was provided by the company. The risk of data integration was also gone,
because it's guaranteed to work with the provided tractor. And the risk that
the data is crap is also gone, because the financing and return risk is borne
by a diverse number of institutional investors. Almost like weather / crop
insurance, but much much bigger.

For the farmer, the sale is simple: Do our thing, and you don't have to worry
about paying for stuff that may not be valuable. You might make slightly less
total profit in the good years as the price of offloading that risk.

For the investors, it's also a great story: look at these great startups!
Wouldn't you like a piece of that productivity and return?

...and maybe the startups are wrong, and the equipment doesn't work, and
everyone learns a lot while they go bankrupt. Everyone except the farmer, who
offloaded the risk.

Surely this is a thing that _someone_ is working on?!? I'm sure it's available
in bits and pieces, but a unified financing and operational solution seems
like it would be a slam dunk.

------
jfb
Why did the title get changed from the article's title ("What Silicon Valley
Doesn’t Understand About Agriculture")?

~~~
kps
Because Silicon Valley thinks nowhere else matters, and likes to pretend its
parochial local monoculture is never a problem.

------
AndrewKemendo
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.

~~~
MattGaiser
> actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't the thing that they
> are trying to innovate on.

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.

~~~
adrianN
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.

------
Brajeshwar
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.

~~~
julianeon
You seem like the right person to ask about this.

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.

~~~
pvaldes
There are lots of really expensive products that can be cultured indoors, are
perfectly legal, and aren't drugs

~~~
julianeon
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.

------
roenxi
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.

~~~
Valgrim
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.

~~~
jpindar
That's common in small town or exurban areas in the US.

------
MattGaiser
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.

~~~
krzat
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.

------
greenie_beans
I’m not “silicon valley,” but only a single programmer who has an interest in
agriculture. The author is talking about large scale farms. What about small
scale farmers? In my experience with those farmers, they don’t typically have
the access or money to afford tech. Do you not think there’s an opportunity to
create cheap tech tools—automation and robotics—for small scale farmers?

~~~
kickout
There is. But its hard to recoup any profit for the same reason you don't hear
about iPhone's/premium tech in poor countries/region. Money just isn't there.
Also, as pointed out, most farms are larger and getting larger. Small farms
and small farmers will (in general) be aggregated (according to history at
least).

~~~
greenie_beans
I don't have any data to support this, but hasn't farm consolidation already
happened? In my area, the small scale movement is only growing. That's based
on observation and no data.

Edit: I realize that a small scale farm doesn't "scale" like VC business wants
so it's not even in the conversation about venture capital. But small business
will always (hopefully) be a viable endeavor for somebody.

------
hogFeast
Look at the Netherlands. Tiny country (slightly bigger than MA), basically
underwater, and the second largest exporter of agriculture in the world.
Denmark is similar although at a far smaller scaled.

The reason the US is inefficient is because it has massive scale. Huge
country, basically no-one lives there in population density terms (tbf,
Australia is the same size and even less dense though...so not an outlier).
The future will be about doing more with less, and the US is an example of
doing less with more.

Simple. The room for innovation is still huge.

Saying vertical farming is overhyped is probably correct too. But that ignores
the fact that this is essentially what Netherlands has been doing for two
decades. Their ag research programmes have focused on minimising resource use
for a long, long time. And it does work...it is working already, and has been
for a long time. Call it overhyped or whatever but it is happening already
(the level of hype is correlated to funding or whatever...this just works).

~~~
newyankee
US agriculture is one of the most advanced in the world, its agricultural
incentives and economics however ... are not. Subsidy to certain crops over
others and do not even want to get into the health impact aspects.

~~~
hogFeast
Yep, I left that out and it is definitely a huge factor.

Europe definitely has the same issue with subsidies but the CAP program
actually works on the volume planted, so Netherlands gets royally screwed (and
the big inefficient producers in France/Spain and, more recently, Eastern
Europe...where there is huge corruption in CAP...get the lion's share) because
they minimise resources (and don't have many to begin with).

I understand a certain level of subsidy to boost security...but the unintended
consequences are huge.

~~~
blobbers
I think you should note this is export, not production. The Netherlands has a
very small population so they export what they grow. Clearly they're not
capable of producing anything on the scale of the USA, China etc.

------
hamzahc
A lot of the points around efficiency of traditional farming vs vertical
farming are valid points. Over time however, you would expect vertical farms
to catch up to the level of sophistication of traditional ag. The two
practices are not like for like and shouldn't be compared as such - vertical
farming is still in the 80:20 phase of development where as traditional
agriculture is now in the hyper optimisation phase after 000s of years
squeezing for incremental improvements. The primary benefits of urban vertical
farming come from things like:

\- Reduced transportation costs and emissions to people buying them due to
being located close to urban centres

\- No dependency on natural climate/weather, you can never have a bad yield!

\- No need for pesticides that can get into the water table and damage local
environments

\- Allows for high accuracy estimations of yields that can build better
forecasting models for supermarkets etc.

------
Vysero
I currently work as a developer for a company that develops a "black box" (as
we call them in the business) for the AG industry. We develop the systems the
author was referring to that provide: auto-steer/guidance, and application
control for tractors.

I am not sure if that makes my perspective unique or not, but as a general
rule of thumb I would tell anyone looking to get into the "dirt work"
(growing) of the AG business to change their minds. In fact, I would tell them
to run for the hills. Most farmers in America (aside from the huge co-ops)
operate at a loss each year, and only survive due to subsidies, at least here
in America.

That being said, if you are interested I can say for sure there is a LOT of
money to be made developing the systems I currently work on and/or contracting
yourself out to companies like mine for existing work we can not handle in
house.

------
mmargerum
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

------
danans
> Current agriculture doesn’t need an artificial energy source

I agree that vertical farms have their limits for producing certain important
products like grains, but current agriculture does require a massive
artificial input in the form of petroleum based fertilizers (via the Haber-
Bosch process) - to say nothing of large amount of diesel used to transport
agricultural products from rural growing areas to market in urban areas.

The transport could in theory be electrified, but the fertilizer can't at this
point be produced in another way. Vertical farming can use far less fertilizer
due to its precision. Again, not that it doesn't have downsides. For example,
if vertical farms are powered by fossil fuels, they could be even less
efficient and more carbon intensive than traditional agriculture.

~~~
philipkglass
The energetically expensive input to the Haber-Bosch process is hydrogen. At
present hydrogen is predominantly manufactured by steam reforming of fossil
fuels, which produces CO2 as a byproduct. Hydrogen can also be produced
cleanly by water electrolysis powered with clean electricity.

I actually think that Haber-Bosch plants will predominantly use clean
electrolytic hydrogen before farm machinery becomes predominantly electric.
Farm machinery has a very slow replacement cycle. Some of my farming relatives
are still running diesel powered machines built in the 1930s.

------
thorwasdfasdf
What this article doesn't understand is that some people like myself would
like to have fresh vegetables that are bred for nutrition and taste, not
something that's been bred for maximum shelf life.

From big Agg, When those big optimized over fertilized tasteless tomatoes
arrive, I'm not excited.

But, those local farmers markets sometimes come up with superior tasting
products. I once tasted an early girl tomato from a local farmers market and
it tasted like nothing else.

some people want quality of quantity.

Besides when it comes to freesh produce there's not much choice right now. I
mean, we have gazillion different varieties of frozen stuff in the freezers,
but only 1 kind of cucumber to choose from,etc.

------
bb2018
This article compares growing food like wheat locally and rightfully points
out how insane that would be in terms of land required. Growing some
specialized foods locally is what others have suggested but I still find this
extremely misguided.

First, as a citizen of a large city, if we are going to give valuable land to
a large building is it really beneficial to make it a farm? Making space for
housing (whether affordable or regular apartments) seems more appropriate for
most cities.

Second, as a consumer, would I really prefer the building crop to a the crop
of a farm about an hour or two away from the city? Probably not (and
especially not if tower fruit is more expensive).

~~~
mrep
Most of the US is does not have high land prices because they are not space
constrained; it's basically just the west coast [0].

[0]: [https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-
prices/](https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/)

------
Ericson2314
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.

\------

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.

~~~
Ericson2314
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.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites)

~~~
Ericson2314
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.

------
pnathan
I used to work at Climate. Always fun seeing ag tech come up in articles. The
wealth of knowledge available to farmers in the US, as the article points out,
is staggering. We're very efficient here on the production end of things.

------
aj7
Go to YouTube and search “operate a combine” if this is new to you.

Our farmers are computer literate.

------
worik
No, this is untrue.

I cannot speak to "Vertical Farming" and silicon valley types, but I live in
the heart of a modern agriculture zone. It is catastrophic.

The environmental devastation is breath taking. Yes there is a lot of
industrialisation, but of the wrong things and at a very high, and completely
externalised, price. Instead of innovating farmers are using technology to do
what they have always done, just more of it.

The enormous cash flows generated (but not profits, land prices take care of
that) have corrupted the political system and farmers use their power to fight
off any innovation that would reverse this catastrophe.

------
microdrum
One of the exceptions:

[https://www.waterbit.com/](https://www.waterbit.com/)

Takes advantage of current massive farm scale and extant automation, simply
increasing yield by adding precision to watering.

------
Valgrim
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.

~~~
cyberbanjo
You've probably eaten more corn than you know.

1:Corn has made its way into everything: a Washington Post article

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how-c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how-
corn-made-its-way-into-just-about-everything-we-eat/)

~~~
Valgrim
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.

------
gdubs
What I want: an autonomous, EV brush mower to take care of the scarily steep
slopes of our native upland prairie restoration project.

~~~
adammunich
You mean... Goats?

~~~
gdubs
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.

~~~
adammunich
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.

~~~
gdubs
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.

------
valboa
My response was too long, so I put it in my blog. [https://www.yorch.co/what-
i-think-about-food-production-and-...](https://www.yorch.co/what-i-think-
about-food-production-and-distribution-chains-inefficiency-a-response/)

I think the author has great points, but is not the full picture.

------
jacknews
"90M acres of corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat. Brazil has
as much, and usually more, soybean acreage grown every year in their
breadbasket "

We need to drastically reduce agricultural land-use.

That's what indoor farming will be good for, and especially synthetic foods,
beyond meat, etc.

------
austincheney
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.

------
skybrian
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.

------
masona
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.

------
seph-reed
I always thought vertical farming was about developing strategies that will be
essential in space under the guise of figuring out how to make cities less
dependent on external resources.

------
crb002
Robotic weeding and tile lines with irrigation control are startup worthy. The
former Bosch is heavily invested, the latter a VC will gobble up AgriDrain.

------
AtlasBarfed
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.

~~~
chrisco255
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.

~~~
solomonb
We haven't been farming as we do today for 10,000 years. The green revolution
was exactly that, a fundamental revolution in the way to grow crops.

You can't be farming sustainably if you are depleting the soil. Preserving
soil health is a fundamental aspect of sustainable agriculture..

------
jonnypotty
I was just expecting a page with the word 'anything'

~~~
kickout
They know there is money to be made :)

------
hootbootscoot
I thought that this was a great & succinct article.

------
m3047
I bookmarked that site, I hope they keep posting.

------
aaron695
Vertical farming is performance art.

Just like Organic and Permaculture and many of those growing ideas.

That's ok, so are most cafes and many things in society.

But if you call it agriculture you are not getting it.

------
Ms34me
According to the author, "hyper efficient" is throwing 40+% of the food in the
trash, while slowly increasing prices YoY.

Yeah right

------
jillesvangurp
What's referred to as "modern farming" is in fact kind of grossly inefficient,
destructive, and hopelessly dependent on subsidies as well as a handful of
companies supply pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals needed to squeeze
some life out of a dying and eroding soil. We "perfected" that over the last
century or so and it's used to mass produce only a comparatively small number
of staples. I grew up in an era that was probably peak industrial scale
farming (i.e. the seventies and eighties last century). A lot of stuff you
find in a supermarket today was simply unknown or considered exotic at best.
Bread came in two varieties: brown and white. The flour came from a factory. A
lot of the stuff you put on top came out of a tube or a jar. James May (from
Top Gear fame) has a hilarious Youtube channel called food tribe where he
satirically highlights some seventies era sandwich recipes.

This type of farming scales only at the cost of variety, quality, the
environment, and our health. Contrary to self serving studies, having less
pesticides in your food intake is probably good for you. Also, less corn syrup
in your life is definitely a good thing. And more variety in your diet is
probably not a bad idea either. In a nut shell "modern farming" is a great way
of feeding the poor and a core reason why obesity and poverty is a common
combination in modern economies. All the cheap food is great at keeping you
alive but not necessarily optimal for a long lifetime.

The promise of actual modern farming is vastly more efficient use of resources
(water, energy, chemicals, the environment), more variety, better freshness,
nutritional value, cost, being able to grow it closer to the place of
consumption, etc. It has nice side effects like being less taxing on the
landscape and environment and generally being associated with things that give
people warm fuzzy feelings, which they tend to attribute some $ value to. I
other words, modern farming is what modern farmers want to do because that's
where the money is.

If you look at the value chain in farming, it's clearly a very tiered market.
At the very bottom you have the basically inedible stuff that is destined for
animal fodder and industrial processing. It's by definition low margin and
high volume. Farming practices in this space tend to be very destructive. It's
cheap only because the epic cost of cleaning up the mess is not factored in
(that's for the next generation to worry about).

One level up you have the stuff we actually can eat that is mass produced at
razor thin margins for the industrial production of food. It's the bottom of a
value chain where most of the money is made by industries using the produce as
the input for their food products.

Then we get more into niche farming where quality of production, production
process, and the produce is the key goal. This is the stuff consumers pay
extra for to get because it tastes good or makes them feel good. Whether it's
organically produced spelt flour hand ground by some bearded hipster or some
japanese beer fed and massaged Kobe beef; this is high value, high margin,
produce. Any farmer with a clue wants to be here because that's where the
money is. High margins and everybody thinks your cool. The only problem is
that it doesn't quite scale to feeding the planet. But nevertheless this
sector has exploded in the last few decades.

And then you have actual high tech modern farming which does the former but in
a smarter way such as to maximize quality and yield while minimizing cost.
Vertical farming fits in here because it gets you fresh stuff pretty much
straight from the farm into your shopping basket. The reason it's currently
applied mainly at the top end of the market is simply because that's where the
money is right now. But there's no reason for this stuff not to eventually
gobble up the rest of the market. There's probably a lot of stuff that will
fail to scale or to deliver but inevitably some it will work pretty much as
advertised.

In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving themselves with shaving
of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny margin on producing glorified pig food.
There are no 10x returns doing that. It's a race to the bottom. Selling fresh
basil to city dwelling hipsters on the other hand is a thing short term but
hardly the end goal.

~~~
tankdoan
> In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving themselves with shaving
> of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny margin on producing glorified pig
> food. There are no 10x returns doing that. It's a race to the bottom.

Full disclosure, current employee. Farmers Business Network (fbn.com) is in SV
operating in this space. Farmers take on huge amounts of risk, and we're
helping them better their bottom lines. We try to make them more efficient
(you can spray less of X here), save the money on their inputs, and help them
find better prices when they go to market.

------
speeder
I do have an interest in vertical farming.

But 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.

------
indigo62018
In these days, whenever I hear a news that Google launches some services, I
always ask myself this question - when this service will be abandoned?

I can't imagine what would happened on their stock price if they didn't
acquire YOUTUBE.

