
What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture, part 2 - kickout
http://thinkingagriculture.io/what-sv-doesnt-understand-about-agriculture-part-ii/
======
OldHand2018
> Auto-steer systems that leverage machinery that already exists.

That links to a company selling a retrofit system for 7500 Euro and no annual
fees. That's super cheap compared to buying a new tractor and I hope they are
successful. But...

My brother-in-law hobby farms a few hundred acres of corn and soybeans and
built an autosteering system for his 1950s tractor. The only thing he bought
new was an Arduino board to tie it all together. Everything else was used
farming equipment and his total cost was less than $1000 (USD). He's not even
a programmer, just an engineering degree from Flyover State U. He cobbled
together open source software to make it work.

The traditional farmer is very resourceful. They aren't going to allow your
company much margin if they can do even part of it themselves. Good luck to
VC-backed firms.

~~~
freeopinion
Do you mean to tell me that such a small operation just happened to have lying
around some old lidar systems?

Or does the "steer" in "auto-steer" refer to a bovine?

~~~
OldHand2018
[https://www.farmprogress.com/affordable-auto-
steer](https://www.farmprogress.com/affordable-auto-steer)

You program your desired path into the system and it uses GPS to follow the
path, using a device that turns the steering wheel as necessary.

The farmer is still required to avoid unexpected obstacles, usually by
stopping and moving the obstacle.

Farmers have been using GPS since the 1980s, long before the rest of the
general public.

------
throwawaygh
I've never been able to understand the excitement around vertical farming from
VC. I assume the primary reason for VC interest in this boondoggle is just
that sleeping at the Comfort Inn in Sedalia, MO is not nearly as fun as a
champagne black tie at the media lab.

But, during COVID, I now think there actually _is_ a strong case for large-
scale vertical farming: robustness. It's a backstop against famine in case of
long-tail events: "locusts", plagues that wipe out key crops, once-in-a-
millenia systemic flooding, a super-volcano eruption, etc.

But it's not going to be profitable. It's going to be horrendously
unprofitable. And it's not something we should be doing now; it's just
something that we should be able to quickly start doing immediately in case of
a catastrophic event, and at a scale large enough to get 1200-1500 calories to
everyone each day.

In other words, the primary customer for vertical farming is government, not
the private sector. Unless you can mass produce morels, as the author notes :)

~~~
mrtksn
No one wants to start a career in Agriculture, it only makes sense when you
are payed extremely well and currently that's the case when you can make the
bare minimum but that minimum is a lot somewhere else.

In West Europe, Agriculture is done by Eastern Europeans who can work for few
months and make some money that is uninspiring the West but life-changing in
the East. Western youth would't touch it.

In Turkey it is done by people who escaped a war or tyranny : Syrians and
Afghans. It makes sense for them because the alternative is worse but the
Turkish youth would not touch it unless it's some kind of organic avocados
hipster thing.

The Agriculture production is now cheap but unless everything gets robotised
at the same pace(or faster) with the people leaving the business or the
inequality in the world vanishes it can get real expensive real quick.

The vertical farming looks like an option before automatic drones produces us
all the produce in a sense that no one ever seen a tomato field in life.

But as the author states, farming is massively automated and the efforts are
still going on. So, maybe it's about lifestyle? Having a vertical farm in each
garden could be desirable even if not efficient.

------
reality_inspctr
Poster makes a great point about what SV doesn't get about farmers, but there
is a huge range of things farmers do get about SV that are not obvious to many
people who don't know farms or farmers very well.

I used to be CEO of a venture backed agriculture startup, and we learned
pretty quickly that the hacker mentality applies very well to supporting
farmers. Internally, we talked about providing farmers something like an SDK
for the automation tools we were selling, where they could mod it to their own
situation. In most cases, skills from soldering to metal work to carpentry
were not only realistic to expect, but complete shops with air tools, etc.
were usually present and often complete machine shops with CNC and 3d
printers.

~~~
reality_inspctr
OP would be glad to connect if you see this note.

twitter.com/sean_mcdonald

[https://agfundernews.com/inside-insect-
farming.html](https://agfundernews.com/inside-insect-farming.html)

~~~
kickout
Thanks, perhaps I will reach out later today (going to fields ironically
enough!)

------
raptorraver
I think that the biggest problem with agriculture today is that it's utterly
unsustainable. It is ran on fossil fuels and we need to mine minerals for the
fertilizers. But still the most worrying issue is that the modern farming is
consuming topsoil and we will run out of it in 60 years if we don't change our
methods [1].

There are interesting things going on in regenerative agriculture scene where
the main idea is to produce new topsoil and through that make farming
sustainable. Here is a nice lecture by Richard Perkins - who is one of the
most famous regenartive agriculture advocate - explaining the principles of it
in a lecture he kept in a food hackaton.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knn7ZH4Tiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knn7ZH4Tiw)

(1) [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-
farm...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farming-
agriculture-food-toxic-america)

~~~
spthorn60
The kicker for me was reading the very consumable Dirt to Soil [1], written by
a farmer who's applying regenerative ag techniques on a large scale, and very
profitably. Transitioning from input-dependent, technology-sucking
financially-overextended traditional monocropping IS POSSIBLE. This isn't just
your backyard garden anymore. Something needs to change in mainstream ag. I'm
moving onto a small farm to do something about it, in my small corner of the
world.

------
Mengkudulangsat
The amount of economy of scale in agriculture is disconcerting to me. Surely
finely-tuned, monoculture mega-farms in rigid supply chains have
disadvantages?

I was hoping with improving technology, the minimum viable size of a farm can
be brought down to something more culturally sensible. Even if existing
technology in agriculture is as good as the author claims, access remains an
issue.

Perhaps the real innovation we need right now is to make technology more
affordable.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Can you think of products where mass-production makes things less efficient?

~~~
KineticLensman
The apparent efficiency may depend on whether the manufacturers and the
immediate customers pick up all of the costs, or whether negative
externalities or other costs are picked up by third parties. E.g mass
agriculture may make food cheaper at the cost of environmental damage due to
use of pesticides, soil erosion, etc. These costs may be picked up by wider
society or just ignored.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Yeah, in the big picture that's true - lots of industries suffer from this -
but I meant from a "disrupt the market, make lots of money" frame of
reference, which is where all these things seem to start from.

------
heymijo
After reading Part I yesterday I got to thinking about SpaceX.

In his biography, Ashlee Vance describes how Musk built a knowledge base about
rocket construction after his exit from Paypal. Both the "how to" and a first
principles approach to the economics of it.

Musk knew the calculus that he could _attempt_ to build rockets for far less
than his competitors before he ever put a dime into SpaceX.

In contrast, vertical farming sounds more like the computer engineer
equivalent of "I built a thing, isn't it shiny and cool" without understanding
the industry, economics, or competitive landscape.

Vertical farming seems to be taking an ahistorical approach. With both both
vertical farmers and VCs ignoring industry knowledge [0,1]

Sticking with Musk, he took an ahistorical appraoch to Tesla's Fremont factory
with automation. He learned a very expensive and wasteful lesson that other
auto manufacturers had known for decades.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23633298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23633298)
[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634030)

~~~
syndacks
The fundamental difference between SpaceX and Farming is that the latter
actually provides direct utility to humans.

I still don't understand why we need to go to space. I know I'm going to get
roasted here for saying this. And yes, I know that "space tech improves earth
tech" \-- cool, so let's just make better earth tech in the first place.
Better farms, schools, transportation. We only have one earth.

"I built a thing, isn't it shiny and cool" \-- sweet rocket Musk, what are you
going to do with it? Study space worms? Let rich people travel in space? Build
a mars colony (lolol). That's not going to happen on any meaningful scale. Put
down the sci-fi and open your eyes. We need help, here, now.

~~~
iamstupidsimple
Why go to other countries? Europe+Africa has all the space we need.

1\. There is an unimaginable number of resources in space. Asteroid mining, if
we crack it, would make space a far better place for manufacturing.

2\. It was originally rich people flying on planes and sailing on boats. If
it's technically possible and valuable, economics will optimise the cost away.

~~~
bendergarcia
People were traveling on boats already and traveling on boats wasn't as
hazardous as sending people on a controlled exploding vehicle. Plus on earth,
existing tech in europe/africa was going to work in most places of discovery
on earth. Everything in space will have to be re-invented, without the
thousands of years of iteration (like ag). Have people really even figured out
how to farm on Mars? No because no one has farmed on mars. And farming on
mars, that tech may likely not be useable on earth, because we've spent the
last thousands of years optimizing for our planet. Utilizing the soil the sun
and existing manufacturing. We'll build tech for mars, and then what next?
What is the next uninhabitable planet we'll visit and rebuild entire
infrastructure, while abbandoning the 1 good planet we have. I don't disagree
that space travel is important and finding planets is important, but i think
those things pale in comparison to the problems of our only guaranteed
hospitable planet.

edit: I think pushing limits of human achievement is important, but understand
that we haven't even solved stupid obvious problems like feeding every child
in this world. Think about that. There are hundreds of millions of children
who don't eat. You want to talk about scale and talk about solving problems,
think about all the minds that could be the geniuses that get us to mars.
There is so much lost potential just because of malnourishment. Yes going to
space will get us better manufacturing, but the potential of having entire
generations that are well fed and thinking optimally, we could be squandering
countless einsteins, simply because we are spending money trying to get to
mars. I think that's what gets me about the way we spend money. Human output
is random, and the people who change the world, it is random where they are
born and so is their upbringing. We should be taking care of every single new
born that enters this world because one of them, could change the world in
unimaginable ways. Sorry I don't htink you asked for this comment, but your
comment about why people traveled to new countries just sparked a thought
dump. Sorry :)

------
dsalzman
[https://www.planttape.com/](https://www.planttape.com/) mentioned in the
article is so cool. I wonder if they were inspired by pick and place machines
with electronic parts on reels.

~~~
mikro2nd
There have been similar systems for seed-sowing for decades. This is the first
system I've seen anything like it for seedling transplanting, but the concept
is not so far different from the seed-tapes that horticulture has used for
quite a long time, so I'd be more inclined to think the inspiration came from
closer by than electronics.

~~~
kickout
Correct, its a horticulture driven innovation (makes it more cool IMO).

------
abetusk
Presumably the submitter of this link is also the author?

Do you have any suggestions on what areas _are_ good for innovation?

I also find myself at a complete loss for what technologies are actually out
there, how they're used and what a typical farm looks like and how it
operates. Even the data of "90M acres of corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M
acres of wheat" is complete news to me.

What are some sources to get at this data, to get a feel for what this system
looks like?

I know that the "global village construction set" [1] was marketed as trying
trying to solve some of these issues but I'm not sure it really developed into
anything actionable.

Keep up the good work, I'd like to see more writing. Do you have any
suggestions on other blogs that talk about similar subject matter?

[1]
[https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/)

~~~
kickout
Umm...start with USDA NASS for agriculture statistics in the US.
agfundernews.com for the startup scene. Just reseach in general. Deep
Learning, Nanotechnology, Drones (UAVs), genetic engineering all have a home
in agriculture. I'd be happy to PM you more resources.

~~~
brootstrap
Yeah USDA NASS is the spot for your ag statistics. even then NASS is not 100%
accurate but pretty solid. Drones, meh. nobody wants pictures of their farm
bud. What do you do with pictures of your farm? Nothing. I've been working
with farmers for 6+ years and only a handful of them like the drones mostly
because it's a fun toy. Sure tell me that you can get AI imagery and machine
learning non-sense from your farm pictures.

The only thing i agree with you on is genetic engineering. And that is not
startup space really. That is like giant bio-tech companies breeding corn
seeds in a lab. You need a phD for that shit you dont just build a startup
that 'disrupts' seed genetics.

~~~
kickout
Free idea: There is MASSIVE distrust in the NASS right now in the farming
community to the point of the data becoming questionable. It'd be nice if
place like Indigo Ag (which acquired TellusLabs I believe) could
assist/takeover some of the things remote sensing or satellites can do (like
planted acres) so that USDA NASS doesn't need to rely on unpopular and time
consuming surveys

~~~
burger_moon
Where can I find the communities that are upset/distrust NASS? Is this on
twitter/forums/fb? I'd like to take a deeper look into the problems they're
discussing but I'm an outsider, not sure where to begin looking.

~~~
bluGill
One problem is that farmers often consider it a secret they don't want to
share. For good reason, if you know how much crops will produce next fall you
can go to commody markets and make a lot of money. That money comes out of the
farmers potential profit in some cases as they are playing the other side of
the trade and so the less you know compared to them, the better the deal they
can get.

Farmers know what is in their fields, but prices are affected by fields on
other continents which the farmer doesn't know. Any information the farmer can
get but you cannot is to his advantage. (this applies to all farmers, they
need to know what happens in Ukraine, Brazil, Australia... But they need you
to not know)

------
rhacker
I want to see the end of skim the top businesses that come out of SV. They
pretty much set up a database, a front end and expect everyone to pay them a
percentage of a business that already works. But because they capture a young
crowd, it eventually takes over. I hope Ag is resistant to that.

I'd rather see SV help the industry keep its jobs and just create new
machines. Like the drone that picks weeds (or just makes a map of all weeds in
the field for someone to go pick). Perhaps a drone that scoops up bugs via
vacuum attachment.

Whatever it is, I'm kinda just sick of SV starts that want to skim the top of
some existing process.

------
loourr
[https://farmersfriendllc.com/](https://farmersfriendllc.com/) good example of
a thriving company in the space, though smaller scale and no VC funding

------
dang
The earlier thread is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630201).

------
mabbo
Anyone have an alternative link? My company relies on Cisco's reputation
system[0] to decide if a domain should be blocked. Oddly,
thinkingagriculture.io is "untrusted | poor".

[0]
[https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?searc...](https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?search=http%3A%2F%2Fthinkingagriculture.io)

~~~
kickout
Sorry, brand new blog. Probably some security issue I lack knowledge of

~~~
willcipriano
This will happen anytime you put something new online. It's basically a
whitelist and they wait until they see a few hits before you get added.

------
carapace
Modern mechanized agriculture is incredibly efficient and productive, but it
degrades soil health over time and loses topsoil.

There are methods that increase soil and fertility over time (Permaculture,
Syntropic farming, regenerative agriculture) but they are typically relatively
labor intensive. China and India have made great strides in recent times.

India's Water Revolution #2: The Biggest Permaculture Project on Earth! with
the Paani Foundation
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMnbeW3F8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMnbeW3F8A)

India's Water Revolution #3: From Poverty to Permaculture with DRCSC
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtHuIlfyJao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtHuIlfyJao)

Regreening the desert with John D. Liu
[https://youtu.be/IDgDWbQtlKI?t=82](https://youtu.be/IDgDWbQtlKI?t=82)

> It all started in 1995 when Liu filmed the Loess-plateau in China. He
> witnessed a local population who turned an area of almost the same size as
> The Netherlands from a dry, exhausted wasteland into one green oasis. This
> experience changed his life.

To me it seems that the two main areas to focus on to make a real contribution
are:

1) Make modern agriculture ecologically harmonious.

2) Make ecologically harmonious agriculture more automated.

Obviously these converge.

(My feeling is that we would be happier with lots of little farms rather than
a few large ones, but I'm not interested in debating that particular point. I
care about ecological harmony. Future generations can work out the economic
forms provided we don't crash the system before then.)

------
WJW
That plant tape tech he links to at the end is incredible.

~~~
mvidal01
That idea has been around for a while. I'm aware of similar tools for small
farms.

(0) [https://www.johnnyseeds.com/tools-
supplies/transplanters/pap...](https://www.johnnyseeds.com/tools-
supplies/transplanters/paperpot-transplanter-7601.html) (1)
[https://paperpot.co/](https://paperpot.co/)

------
jmheflin
Your statement that 'Vertical farming for non-vegetables (or fruits) is likely
dead-on-pitch.' is true with current technology. But there have been
significant developments in this space in the last few years. See this work
done by Zach Lippman at CSHL.
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31873217/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31873217/)
Early flowering, dwarf varieties such as those described along with renewable
energy (thinking of electricity rates going negative in Germany recently) may
significantly shift the economic viability of growing fruits indoors.

------
enriquto
Really nothing to say about this article... but the "ag" abbreviation is
strangely disturbing. Do people pronounce that in speech? If so, how?

~~~
derwiki
What makes you say it’s disturbing? Having grown up near several Ag colleges,
I never questioned it.

~~~
enriquto
I cannot avoid reading it as silver (the chemical element), especially when
the first letter is uppercase. I had a hard time understanding some sentences
of the article due to that. My mind just refuses to parse "ag" as
"agriculture". It's just that I'm not used to it.

EDIT: In your case, I cannot help to think about your colleges as very shiny,
kitsch buildings.

------
mdorazio
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SV tends not to understand most of
the non-tech markets it aims to disrupt, and instead gets occasional success
by either completely ignoring/sidestepping regulations and protections (ex.
Airbnb for short-term rentals) or by throwing so much investor money at
undercutting incumbents that the natural market dynamics are temporarily
skewed (ex. WeWork for office leasing). Innovation in most industries tends to
come from people with deep expertise and team skillsets that extend far beyond
software.

~~~
dfee
Your comment helped me realize my alternate opinion - what I think is healthy
about the SV ecosystem.

Changing the term, "natural market dynamics" to "regulatory captured markets",
we get:

> or by throwing so much investor money at undercutting incumbents that the
> [regulatory captured markets] are temporarily skewed

And, taking my sibling comment from @simonkafan, let's change his term "well-
functioning industry" to "regulatory captured industry":

> I feel that SC startups are like a horde of locusts flying over a
> [regulatory captured industry], pretending to improve it positively but all
> they do is destroy the competition

Consider, for a second, Uber and Lyft. Was the taxi industry well functioning?
Did it have natural market dynamics? Definitely, assuming you acknowledge the
predicate that the industry players are effectively cartels who control
regulations.

~~~
devalgo
Also consider that Uber is unprofitable, has no real path to profitability,
pays its drivers poorly and overcharges users. How is that healthy? It
seemingly has failed in every possible way as a business yet people
continuously prop it up as something to be envied or respected.

~~~
ajmurmann
One thing that is so often left out of this conversation is that Uber was
making a profit in rides when they only had the black car service and Lyft
hadn't entered the market yet with regular people driving their private cars.
It's hard to tell how much of this is inherently unprofitable as opposed to
different companies trying to price each other out of the market.

This makes me wonder what even would be a natural or desired state of any
market like this. I don't want companies to have agreements on bottom prices
they aren't gonna go under. At the same time this dynamic clearly is fueled by
the desire and promise to turn a profit once the competitor is gone. We don't
want to set a monopoly in any market. On the other hand why aren't we seeing
this in older industries? Why aren't airlines trying to drive each other out
of business on price?

~~~
prewett
If Lyft _can_ enter the market easily, then the market is a commodity market.
A commodity market has very few returns. In fact, you can predict that it is a
commodity market because of the existence of taxi monopolies. There is no
barrier to entry to the taxi market: just get a car. Since there's no natural
barrier to entry, they had to create a regulatory barrier to get
profitability. Uber making a profit pre-Lyft is indicative of nothing; they
are in a commodity market, so their returns will be low single-digits.

