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.
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).
> You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) grows on the sidewalk already, and often next to some wild amaranth (Amarathus Hybridus). What is the point of more efficiently producing specific crops, when there are all these underutilized nutritious plants growing without any human input (or should I say growing despite human input)? This is another problem that I see with the technification of food production in general (including the Green Revolution). Some food wants to be free, but people keep looking for whatever makes the land produce more money in the short term, not what makes it produce more nutrition, etc., because the latter does not adapt so well to the market.
the VC that use to approach us for insights would just never listen. my father literally knew the researchers that tried it in the past and failed.
it did not stop this VC from investing his LP's money in a vertical farm. although i suspect his willingness to allocate other people's money in this manner, for this particular company, had more to do with the social side of things re the founders and other investors.
Which brings up another issue, which is energy density/m2 of land. To support industrialization/high density urbanism the only fuel sources that do this are currently fossil fuels, or nuclear, but none of the renewable fuels have the energy density.
So if these countries want to increase the amount of MWh/capita, the most efficient (only?) pathway is through high-energy density fuel sources, which right now is being achieved through the use of fossil fuels. To me, this is (one of) the main reasons nuclear energy needs to be prioritized as a climate change solution.
ETA: And, now that I think about it, another way to squeeze more effectiveness from your grid is to build super energy-efficient buildings that reduces the overall and peak grid energy consumption.
So you can't grow potatoes vertically? Can you elaborate? Is it a function of physiology, i.e. calorie dense vegetables need far more leaves and supporting stems than can be practically stacked vertically?
I guess I was always under the impression that vertical and urban farming would be done for "specialty" crops like herbs or kale or something, never for high volume cash crops like potatoes or corn. I can see a benefit for these "specialty" crops because they aren't done to the same scale (maybe I'm wrong about that)
What is it about vertical farms that prevents calorically dense foods? Also, I know something like lettuce would not be dense, potatoes probably dense, but is there a cutoff/metric, e.g., calories-per-gram for this determination?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 )
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 for an example of what hyper efficient indoor farming looks like.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] kumarski|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] primroot|5 years ago|reply
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) grows on the sidewalk already, and often next to some wild amaranth (Amarathus Hybridus). What is the point of more efficiently producing specific crops, when there are all these underutilized nutritious plants growing without any human input (or should I say growing despite human input)? This is another problem that I see with the technification of food production in general (including the Green Revolution). Some food wants to be free, but people keep looking for whatever makes the land produce more money in the short term, not what makes it produce more nutrition, etc., because the latter does not adapt so well to the market.
[+] [-] porcellobanks|5 years ago|reply
the VC that use to approach us for insights would just never listen. my father literally knew the researchers that tried it in the past and failed.
it did not stop this VC from investing his LP's money in a vertical farm. although i suspect his willingness to allocate other people's money in this manner, for this particular company, had more to do with the social side of things re the founders and other investors.
[+] [-] messe|5 years ago|reply
Is this a typo? Did you mean to write a second vegetable?
[+] [-] Gatsky|5 years ago|reply
HN just keeps delivering. It is almost impossible to believe how much embedded technical knowledge is lurking here. You could colonise Mars with it.
[+] [-] saeranv|5 years ago|reply
Which brings up another issue, which is energy density/m2 of land. To support industrialization/high density urbanism the only fuel sources that do this are currently fossil fuels, or nuclear, but none of the renewable fuels have the energy density.
So if these countries want to increase the amount of MWh/capita, the most efficient (only?) pathway is through high-energy density fuel sources, which right now is being achieved through the use of fossil fuels. To me, this is (one of) the main reasons nuclear energy needs to be prioritized as a climate change solution.
ETA: And, now that I think about it, another way to squeeze more effectiveness from your grid is to build super energy-efficient buildings that reduces the overall and peak grid energy consumption.
[+] [-] mtgp1000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|5 years ago|reply
For a photo-essay about this there's the New Humanitarian article here: https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/94947/lesotho-weat...
It describes the interaction between climate change, HIV/AIDS, and poverty.
(It used to be called "Too poor to farm").
[+] [-] trophycase|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for the insights!
[+] [-] polotics|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikwidd|5 years ago|reply
How about seeds and sprouts?
[+] [-] MintelIE|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alisson|5 years ago|reply
- 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
[+] [-] alextheparrot|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] antocv|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stelonix|5 years ago|reply
I dropped out of Agroecology course in 2018 but I actively work with it or did before the pandemic at least.
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahaganapati|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newyankee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] demosito666|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|5 years ago|reply
Looking forward to the product you mentioned in another post too! :)
[+] [-] mathgladiator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhruvkar|5 years ago|reply
That syntropic agriculture video was powerful.
Any way to contact you to understand how you've made the transition?
[+] [-] cycop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisco255|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disantlor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdf21|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coderintherye|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] snarf21|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Justsignedup|5 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] rudolph9|5 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] akajakaj|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] degraafc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mespe|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] legitster|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ntbloom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cagenut|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
> 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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goldenshale|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vincehark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] d_burfoot|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
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
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?
[+] [-] hosh|5 years ago|reply
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.