When I first heard of the concept of things like vertical farming, or shipping container farming, or even farm bots. I thought those were a great ideas. That tech like this will solve for food problems, such as urban blight.
Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this.
It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas.
What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology.
With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools.
Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans.
You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.
The key thing people don’t realize or understand is that hardly any agriculture is sustainable, and even less is restorative. Permaculture is extremely interesting because of that.
The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.
I think nothing will work without some kind of change to the way of life. Urban living has taken people away from the land, so there is this illusion that we don’t have to participate in the ecology. Like water infrastructure, people growing up in cities expect food-on-demand … if you have the money for it.
The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't like how you're going after urban living. I can rewrite what you've written, but from an urbanist perspective regarding transportation sustainability:
Rural living has taken people away from one another, so there is an illusion that we don't have to pay the true costs of travel. People growing up in towns expect cars and on-demand access to roads and gasoline and airports... if you have the money for it.
The idea that if you want to go to a friend's house you need to walk or bike there is an alien ideas. (Kids think we travel in cars, not on foot). How simple is that, riding a bike through your neighborhood? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like hybrids and EV cars and "eco-conscious" airlines and it misses the point. When I personally walk, bike, or take the train to my destination, I am directly participating in a sustainable transit network.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-travel. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
People get attached to things, including urban living.
I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too.
Some cultures attach a lot of importance on travel, associating it with freedom, or mobility (both in the literal sense, and as a metaphor for class mobility). Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, to explore, to hike the wildernesses or enjoy different urban locale and take full advantage of the transport infrastructure. That doesn’t mean it isn’t an illusion.
I trying to point out that urban doesn't imply disconnected from ecology, jusy like rural doesn't imply connected to ecology.
Walking around my extremely dense city, I see plenty of people growing their own food in their little yards, probably more than I see back in my semirural hometown.
For a while I subscribed to a vegan food delivery service. The food is grown a few towns away and delivered daily by cyclists. There is nothing like that back in my hometown; I'd have to do HelloFresh or something.
Urban living is more sustainable than living in suburban sprawl. Spreading humans around and reducing our density isn't going to make it more sustainable.
>I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too.
Then you're just a pastoralist and likely a Malthusian, not talking about ecological sustainability at all.
It feels like the argument is upside down. Civilization scaled because increased agricultural productivity allowed a smaller number of farmers to feed the rest, freeing them up to do other things. These people also naturally congregated to cities because that enabled fast exchange of goods and ideas, i.e., it was more "scalable" than having everyone scattered throughout the country.
In the modern world, it also means that cities have lower ecological footprint. Moving people around is much more energy intensive than moving food. Makes more sense to do farming across the country and concentrate the produce onto a small place packed with people.
Not necessarily saying this is a great tradeoff for individuals (who wouldn't want a backyard with an apple tree?) but in a sense, the fact that we're picturing a backyard with an apple tree instead of backbreaking work in the rice paddies throughout summer is a testament to how brutally efficient the modern agriculture is.
Logically that would make a lot of sense, if we were to design things in such a way that products are only shipped to their local urban areas. However, the modern day system has given rise to such absurdities as fruit grown in South America being shipped to Asia for packaging, and then shipped to North America for consumption. It's not that the entire system is amazingly efficient, it's that it's simply been possible because energy has been very cheap this last century. The food system will have to adapt one way or another (and I think we will), but it will probably end up being more human-labor intensive and local.
Relating to energy, one of the coming issues we will need to solve is fertilizer supply. Modern agriculture heavily depends on natural gas (via Haber-Bosch) to juice yields alongside genetic engineering. This isn't great for long-term soil health either, we just haven't been doing it long enough to see the effects of soil depletion.
You might be interested in the book Against the Grain, which argues that people didn't naturally congregate into cities like we have thought for a while.
From the wikipedia:
> Scott then asserts that the reason why hunter-gatherer societies transformed into agro-pastoral societies was due to coercion by the state. He cites research on an archaeological site in Mesopotamia named Abu Hureyra. Scott concurs with other scholars in the field that "'[n]o hunter-gatherers occupying a productive locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons are likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly.'"
I don't think it is "urban living" so much as just modern living. While people in rural and suburban areas are more likely to have some form of exposure to locally grown produce, they still for the most part live in the same kind of economy as urban areas. I currently live in a suburb surrounded by strawberry farms, avocados, etc. And our grocery stores are just as likely to have strawberries and avocadoes from Mexico.
People in rural areas like where I grew up, might be more likely to have a garden, but most don't, and they still get most of their calories from the grocery store. I grew up on a cattle ranch and while that might give me more "connection" to my food, we still bought a lot of our beef at the grocery store because finishing and butchering a cow is expensive and time consuming and requires lots of long term freezer storage. Today's modern rural family is pretty similar to an urban one except they drive a lot farther to do anything.
One point I would add is that this mostly applies to the "1st world" IMO, because in many parts of the world there is local produce and meat and it's often part of the culture to grow your own (or at least to keep a few chickens and fruit trees). However, yes globally most urban dwellers get their food at the grocery store and really enjoy being able to purchase it for money.
humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.
there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable.
we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.
the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
Worth drawing a distinction between the farming of the past and the farming of the present. Until the agricultural revolution humans sat right up against the population ceiling- the only reason hunger wasn't the leading cause of death is that disease reliably killed us first. They left fields fallow, and when they grew too much (which they had to if they wanted to feed their families) they depleted the soil and starved. We couldn't do permanent damage because our population was partially governed by it, just like every other animal.
I don't actually disagree with you- infinite growth might not be possible but we haven't even started tapping the lightcone. Fertilizer works, negative effects can be mitigated, and honestly nothing is worth returning to the "sustainable" famine nightmare of the past.
> When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.
While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
I know there are people who see it this way and feel like this. It presumes a couple things:
- that intelligent thought (or in other belief structures, spirit, consciousness, etc) are the only thing of value worth propogating
- that by escaping the gravity well, we can also escape the problems we wrought by bad design.
We’re more likely to carry the problems forward. Our so-called “intelligent thought” have problems built into how we approach the design, so like running away from our shadows, it will come up wherever we go.
And, if we are aware of the bad design, why wouldn’t we just fix it while we’re here on this planet?
Isn’t is interesting that as a species we don’t have a way to understand where are we in our lifecycle? As a human I can understand life stages and where I am relative to other individuals. I can plan my life accordingly and of course there may be unexpected events but on average I know I have maybe 70-100 years to enjoy life.
As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy… one thing that will probably happen is that we too will cease to exist as a whole at some point. I wonder what this does to us as a group, not having that perspective.
> As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy
There are so many possible outcomes.
It can be true that humanity will peak, yet intelligence will continue to grow and expand beyond humans.
Any outcome where humanity is the utmost pinnacle of intelligence likely means that we do not stray beyond our gravity well. That earth-evolved intelligence will never reach the greater galaxy beyond. It falls far short of earth's potential.
I hope humanity is not the peak. There's so much more that lies beyond us. In a greater developmental timeline, we could be just amoebas. That's exciting to contemplate, even though we can barely fathom it.
So what if it was ? I don’t really understand this ultra-intellectual viewpoint.
A planet is just fine being a planet, we don’t need to out glasses on planets and have them reading Shakespeare to make the universe a special place ? I’m sure they will happen on its own anyway if it’s desirable.
In a similar way, an amoeba doesn’t really need intelligence, it just does what it does until it can’t do it anymore and a new one comes a long. Maybe that’s a fine thing and in some ways, it’s own form of intelligence. Doesn’t need to mess with everything and crate ecology crisis for itself.
The way we’re going, the amoebas will likely outlive us and probably any computer systems we produce. So it’s yet to be proven our intellect is really all that valuable longer term.
because fixing things costs money. Even when it saves money. Money is the catalyst that allows anything to happen, and not enough people have enough of it to turn good ideas into good designs into good products.
And flying to another planet that happens to be completely inhospitable is somehow cheaper or easier?
When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided.
There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.
That wasn't the comparison I was making. For the record, I'm all for fixing problems, but the OP asked why they were not being solved, so...yeah, money. is it a satisfying and good answer? no. Is it enough of the answer to have explanatory value, I think so.
I would assert a great deal of perceived problems are not being fixed because not everyone agrees they are problems, or agrees to what extent they are problems, or agrees on the solutions.
HN is quite a bubble, and we often form an echo chamber that strongly agrees with itself.
> Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than fixing our problems?
We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.
What? There is no reason to think humans are "a stepping stone," there are plenty of dead-ends in evolution. There's certainly no reason to think that putting biological things on Mars will in any way cause them to evolve into Mars-robust creatures. Evolution is a slow, slow, slow random walk throughout which nearly all conditions have to be nearly-perfect.
Natural selection is a metaheuristic maximizing on the landscape of fitness topology, available energy resources, etc. It relies upon biological constraints, such as existing genes, organs, and biological functions available. It cannot make fantastic leaps quickly that would require significant backtracking.
I'm not suggesting putting biological organisms anywhere. I'm suggesting that at some point in the future an AI will be able to rapidly modify its own substrate independent of biology, metabolic inputs, and genetic inheritance. That it won't be subject to information loss due to death or other physical constraints. That it will much more quickly be able to build support systems for itself to harness energy and raw materials wherever it goes.
Unless we kill ourselves in the near future, these systems will likely emerge and will likely proliferate faster than us. They're not going to be stuck on earth with us. There are abundant energy resources and building materials in the solar system and greater galaxy beyond.
Uh, no. Permaculture produces a fraction of the calories per acre of traditional monoculture agriculture. It is nothing more than an amusement for dilettantes, as is any other system that claims to significantly improve upon the ~12,000 of human experience with field-based agriculture. I'm in the process of converting a 20 acre tract of woods into a "productive" farm via a combination of aquapontics and permaculture, I just don't have any illusions that I'm doing anything other than fucking around for my own amusement.
Does the traditional monoculture acres include the acres for fertilizer, the production of all of the equipment needed, fuel, seed, equipment and fuel for transport to final location, storage, pesticides, insecticides, and water?
I agree that intensive agriculture is needed, but it's not so easy to compare the two.
It's trivial to compare the two unless you showed up to the conversation with an agenda or you're pretending issues with population density don't shit all over whatever counterfactual is being peddled by the homesteader-instagram industrial complex. One system feeds the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet, and takes most of the arable dry land surface of the planet to do so. The other produces a fraction of the food per acre, so unless you're planning on raising Atlantis you've got a serious problem to contend with.
I wonder about affordability, but I am very pro-farmbot. Far more than self-driving cars. If anything, farmbots could provide a lot of very helpful groundwork in a lower-stakes environment which the self-driving cars people could use. My only real concern is if farmbots could be cheap enough to absorb a large portion of the -cide market.
Most herbicides, for example, could be replaced by something which plucks. Insecticide money could, partially, go into bots that could pick-and-crush unwanted insects aboveground. We would still have grubs. Fungicide expenditure could be slashed: detect infection on a plant, spray it and its neighbors, maybe a few more downwind. Your bot, named He Who Walks Behind the Rows, trundles along slowly, observing each plant.
Per acre, it would have to travel roughly three and a third miles. At a half-mile-per-hour pace, thirteen hours a day, you could swing two acres a day per bot. Let's say your bot eats your production cost in half, about four hundred dollars per acre. If a bot lasts only a season, well, it has to cost under a grand to be worth it, and I haven't even touched power costs yet. So it will need to survive multiple growing seasons. I can see Overlord stations every few acres, maybe grabbing some solar power or charging up off a grid, storing it so that it can be dispersed to the bots at night. They could serve as data collection points, centimeter-level GPS correction servers, and so on, as well.
I could see the temptation to work irrigation into the bot somehow but water is heavy and I imagine something entirely separate to provide water.
I'm making a lot of assumptions, like "each plant ought to be looked at each day" and the standard thirty-inch rows, etc.
How do harvesting machines work with this mixed planting approach? Do you need to redesign existing machines completely for this novel planting scheme? Won’t it be extremely hard to harvest from one type of plant without damaging other plants that are “occupying different canopy layers”?
It takes new machines and they generally damage something, yes. Despites op's emphasis on low-tech, the people I know who do permaculture seemed like they were excited for robot arms and computer vision to be better and cheaper.
> I know who do permaculture seemed like they were excited for robot arms and computer vision to be better and cheaper.
If you need robot arms and computer vision, it sounds then like permaculture is impractical at scale necessary for replacing standard agricultural practices.
Permaculture is incredibly labor intensive. It's why usually young or retired people tend to be interested in - 2 groups with a lot of time on their hands.
People who are middle aged and raising children don't have the time necessary (or the good physical shape) to participate in permaculture on any meaningful scale beyond maybe growing some veggies for personal consumption.
Probably not, but my bigger point is that all those comments about permaculture typically completely ignore practicalities of large scale agriculture that are absolutely crucial to human flourishing.
Gardening is my hobby, and over the years I found a lot of practices that improve my yield tremendously without depending on chemical pesticides or artificial fertilizers. However, I would not dare suggesting to the professional farmers that they should follow my steps. These practices work in my garden, but they simply aren’t practical if you need to feed the entire world.
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It appears to me that Silicon Valley is unaware that there's such a thing as Food Valley. Which does exactly what you ask for.
Food Valley centers around the Dutch University of Wageningen, the pinnacle of agricultural research, teamed up with a network of innovative food companies and experts.
On a related subject, my prediction: artificially grown meat will most likely go down as a failure, because of an oversight of understanding of some basic concepts. Either that, or the quality of the meat would be extremely poor.
Keep digging and sooner or later you'll come around to accepting that your previous discoveries (like broad implementation of permaculture) can never be realized under capitalism; that capitalism is in fact the opposition to your vision.
I don't think they said it did? There are many more social systems out there than simply US-Style Capitalism and Soviet-style Communism. Something like Anarcho-primitivism is one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
Out there where? In the real world, or in someone’s imagination?
It’s like someone saying “java projects get too messy when there are hundreds of developers on them , this new language I’ve invented will be much better, trust me”
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off investing in ideas that leverage services provided by nature for free than trying to recreate complex systems that we don’t even really understand from scratch.
By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?
If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them.
E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm.
If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually nature vs vertical farm, it's flying them in vs vertical farm. Your incredulity at people not just growing things where they're easy to grow should possibly diminish when you remember that we grow them where they're good to grow and then engage a global commercial, legal and freight industry to get them to us. That combination is what vertical farms are competing against.
It is not even flying them in vs vertical farm. But vertical farm vs more traditional greenhouse solutions. Where you can do all the circulation control, but also can use natural light and don't need large concrete structures.
There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.
> a bit odd that they picked up steam first in the U.S. for this reason
My sense is that it was riding a wave of "local" and "farm to table".
If you're in a city like LA or NY where there's a lack of space AND local demand for a premium priced product that can be delivered year round AND more awareness/marketability for such products (local + sustainable), the economics are different than versus growing a commodity product in Boise, Idaho.
It's like the farmers in Asia that grow super premium fruits (Japan and Taiwan come to mind). It only makes sense in the context of a market that will pay the price premium.
I’m all for farm to table but both NY and LA don’t need farms within city limits.
All you’re saving by forcing that is a few hours of driving in a truck. If there’s an emissions concern then most farming regions are also good places for renewables like solar and wind. Electric or other carbon neutral vehicles seem like a more reasonable solution. Just a short trip outside of a city can probably get enough land for a large greenhouse if you want higher density farming with existing ag-tech and shorter transport.
For NYC, it's not even "few", it's a couple hours drive at most. Hell, you're still within the commuter rail radius and closer to the city than its main reservoir.
If it made sense, they would still be in business and thriving. I'm only offering one conjecture.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn't make the case that it makes _zero_ sense; only that they couldn't prove the use case and find the right products and market. Definitely with a more high-value product that couldn't be sourced reasonably locally or even from the US, there may be a better economic case.
And generally speaking, I don’t want my food grown where it’s the most polluted. From the middle of nowhere with minimal population density, ideally upstream of any big city, is where I want my food coming from.
(Will admit I start a garden at my mom’s in a medium sized city’s suburb, but when I run some containers on my balcony on a busy city street, the layers of dust from ??? concern me)
Maybe this will get better once we don’t have the concentration of ICE vehicles in urban centres, but until then…
>> all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud.
> By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?
The GP got a couple things wrong (e.g. nature doesn't provide free pest control), but one thing very, very right: plants need lots and lots of sunlight that we can get for free with horizontal farming. Vertical farming throws all that away, and therefore is mostly nonsense. IIRC, all it can manage is low-calories crops like lettuce. You're not getting industrial-scale, vertically-farmed potatoes without a bunch of generators powering tons of floodlights.
All over Scotland - which is kind of centred around 55°N, way further north than these guys with their vertical farms - potatoes grow like crazy. Some types do well in Ayrshire, some do well up here in Angus (yes, like Aberdeen-Angus cattle). Different types of soil work well for different plants.
You'd need literally megawatts of power to provide the same amount of light. Where are you going to get that from? Solar panels...?
In Norway, Potatoes are grown as far north as the Northernmost region of Finnmark, around 70°N, and Norway is able to produce more potatoes than are eaten by people (Norway still imports potatoes because the growing season is short).
Functioning ecosystems do provide pest control, otherwise there would not be ecosystems at all, because some pest would just destroy the entire thing. There are very well established agricultural systems that use that principle and employ it to enable commercial farming without pesticides and herbicides while retaining high productivity. Search for syntropic agriculture and New Forest Farm (Mark Shepard).
> Functioning ecosystems do provide pest control, otherwise there would not be ecosystems at all, because some pest would just destroy the entire thing.
Yeah, but a natural ecosystem isn't agriculture, and the concept of a "pest" doesn't even make sense in one. Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus. "Pests" are non-human organisms that want to take advantage that unnatural surplus for themselves.
> There are very well established agricultural systems that use that principle and employ it to enable commercial farming without pesticides and herbicides while retaining high productivity. Search for syntropic agriculture and New Forest Farm (Mark Shepard).
That's kind of off topic, but I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques. Either the "high productivity" is quite a bit less that the productivity for traditional farming, or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
> Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus.
If that is the case (and there were no other alternatives) the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted.
> I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques
Way to be skeptical without even bothering to do a Google search. Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm. Plenty of other examples around as well.
> […] or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
"Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
> the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted.
agreed
> Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm.
Yes, I've read about Mark Shepard with a lot of interest. However that's just one farm. It's yet to be seen if his methods will work elsewhere, if his claims for productivity can be substantiated, if his productivity can be duplicated, and so on. In short his work is, currently, at best a prototype.
If you're going to claim that regenerative can be as productive as conventional then you need to point to systems that are widely used and whose productivity figures are reliably gathered.
> "Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
You miss the point. It's not about the availability of labour. It's about the price of labour. It's more economically efficient to reduce labour as much as possible. I'm not claiming this is a good thing. It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
Mark Shepard's system has been reproduced/used as inspiration in many other places, I could name at least a few here in Germany from the top of my head, all of them commercially successful (tough I admittedly do not have calorie production figures for those and am not sure if they exist). But I'm not sure why the example of his farm warrants so much skepticism. He isn't in a special location, on the contrary: his soils were a corn farm previously, degraded and according to the generally accepted advice at the time unusable for Walnuts, one of his main crops. He didn't use any special technology, etc.
> It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
But farming is not a free-market enterprise in "modern" societies. It is the most subsidized and among the most regulated among all enterprises in industrialized economies. German farmers derive half their income and all their profits from government (mostly EU) subsidies. I don't know the figures for the US, but I'd bet that they are similar. Farming, by who and how farming is practiced is basically entirely defined by political priorities, which at this time are mostly still based on the technological and scientific developments of the 1930s-1970s, which have created some very well established commercial interest groups (chem-ag concerns, farmers unions, etc.).
> I could name at least a few here in Germany from the top of my head, all of them commercially successful (tough I admittedly do not have calorie production figures for those and am not sure if they exist). But I'm not sure why the example of his farm warrants so much skepticism.
Because if it was that good, I'd expect to have been seeing all kind of articles about the massive revolution in agriculture. If there wasn't some kind of catch, why isn't it seeing wider adoption?
As far as what counts as "commercial success." It'd really have to be something that can compete with commodity agriculture to be a solution. If it's a "commercial success" because it's some boutique thing that can charge 10x commodity prices to make up for 5x costs by selling to self-consciously "ethical consumers" and elites by marketing its good local green permaculture vibes, then I don't think it will be anything but niche producers.
Those systems never seem to produce very many calories per acre. They're interesting as biology labs, and would probably be fine for subsistence agriculture for a small number of humans. However, we're trying to feed 8 billion people and we need the raw calorie to arable land ratio to work.
The systems I have highlighted have demonstrated commercial-grade calorie surpluses over decades. Kindly da a tiny bit of research before simply claiming the opposite.
Regenerative agriculture has also demonstrated that it can bring degraded and marginal land back into production and it uses less irrigation etc. by design, so it would be possible to expand arable land.
It's mostly non-sense in North America. In places like Japan, Korea, it makes a ton of sense. High population density, with relatively little arable land.
Japan has about half the arable land per person as the Netherlands [1] but the Netherlands is the worlds #2 food exporter [2]. Japan could probably be more or less self-sustainable in terms of food production, if they made it a political priority, even without any fancy vertical farming. In fact, they already import less foodstuffs than German, at about 1.5 times the population [3] (to be fair, Germanys central position in the EU's free trade area makes importing food a cheap thing to do).
The vast majority of humanity is living in places where basically all food can be grown locally, with some exceptions for luxury (tropical fruits in high latitudes) and seasonality (not alle produce does store well fresh, though practically all can be frozen, dried or canned in some way).
There are some extreme exceptions like the United Arab Emirates etc. but they are home to only a fraction of the world population and building a city like Dubai in a desert was probably not a great idea to begin with.
Nature does not have great pest control, which is why we spray so much chemistry that gets into our food and water.
Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
Nature does have decent pest control, but the way we do farming does basically everything to circumvent it.
If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.
If nature wouldn't have great pest control, there wouldn't be any nature. The whole point of evolution is for living things to get better at resisting pests (also avoid being eaten and mate more successfully).
Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").
> there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability
Much as I like these approaches, unfortunately mostly they are currently a long long way off the productivity of conventional agriculture by any metric (yield/area, yield/animal etc)
If you've got some specific examples of regenerative systems that out-perform conventional in terms of productivity please post some links.
Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less?
A concrete example would be New Forest Farm: about 40 hectares in Wisconsin farmed entirely without chemical fertilizers, pesticides/herbicides or external irrigation for more than two decades. The owner is arguably more commercially successful than the neighboring corn farmers and according to his data, he produces similar amounts of calories/ha with a considerably lower energy input and comparable labour requirements. He has written a couple of good books and you can find plenty of youtube videos of him (Mark Shepard).
> Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less?
Sorry, you mentioned regenerative systems as out-performing conventional.
I'm not aware of a widespread regenerative system that even has similar or slightly worse yield. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.
Again, if you've links to highly productive _widely deployed_ regenerative systems please post them.
As I've said in another comment Mark Shepard's work is very interesting, but it's an isolated case, a prototype. The trick is replicating it widely - it remains to be seen if that can be done.
>. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.
No it isn't if you are reducing your industrial input and commercial seed expenses.
The only guy on youtube I know who does regenerative agriculture has better soil quality and higher profits. Also even in scenarios where regenerative agriculture is behind, the difference comes from the fact that the soil has been depleted already and you start from less than zero. If you have been doing it for thirty years, you get higher yields than conventional agriculture.
There is a profound disconnect between what makes sense to do as a rational, long-term thinking species and neoliberal free market ideology that we should not loose track off. Monoculture farming with fossile fuel based fertilizers, cancerous chemical pesticides across vast spaces of land using fresh water in excess with zero regard for the local ecological system in any way and shipping food across the world from poor to rich countries using cheap fossile fuel powered gigantic ships IS the most profitable way to make most of the food we eat, BUT that doesn't mean it also makes the most sense to do it this way.
There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.
That ship has sailed? The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc. Techno-farming cost more, in fuel and resources.
And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'
> The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
This is a very distorted view of technological and human progress.
A huge factor in improvements in global standards of human living over the last century has been improvements in health care: hygiene, vaccination, antibiotics, basic medication, birth control and health education.
Far from being dependent on either the profit motive or global trade, they are largely public goods, have overwhelmingly been provided outside of private enterprise, and do not in the main depend on goods being transported globally.
The distribution of goods is vital to every part of that? Making it cheap enough to reach every citizen of Earth is what shipping containers have made possible.
Obviously every human activity is somehow related to 'the distribution of goods'.
Are these healthcare advancements closely related to either private enterprise or modern globalized logistics? Clearly not, as in many cases they took place without either, due to local conditions. For around half the world these advances took place before shipping containers.
Health education, hygiene and birth control generally rely on the transmission of information and ideas but not of goods. The other three have been successful, in at least some cases, as public goods, advanced outside of the private sector. In many other cases they have happened because of, not despite, local rather than globalized manufacturing and distribution.
Once a certain level of manufacturing competence is distributed throughout the world this need no longer exists. Information travels faster than freight.
Manufacturing of some goods still needs to be centralized to some degree because of the up front cost of tooling, e.g. extreme ultraviolet lithography machines and giant multi-megaton presses, among other things.
> The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc.
Its of course impossible to argue with neoliberals about this, but my entire point is that sometimes we have to step back and look at the overall picture and consider if what we are doing really makes sense. The ecological destruction in land, fresh water, the depletion of finite resources vs. renewable, the sustained poverty in developing countries for the last century combined with subsidized farming in the western world combined with a globalized liberal food market, etc.
> And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
Is it really so impossible to imagine any other measure of cost than what has been determined by the liberal market? Finite resources, the cost of the destruction of biospheres, the human toll this all has, none of this is calculated into your holy all knowing invisible hand of the market. Meanwhile people are suffering, poverty increasing, air and water become scarce resources and children starve to death all over. Whatever you imagine works so great, doesn't really for a LOT of people you never see or think about.
In the EU, commercial pork production is almost exclusively done in large-scale indoor operations with hundreds to thousands of animals in one facility. These animals represent hundreds of thousands of Euros worth of investment for their owners and there are stringent laws and regulations in place that require everything that enters these facilities to be effectively sterilized. *Still* we get huge outbreaks of some disease or other every few years that can cripple pork production in entire regions. If pork producers can't keep pathogens out of their operations, just assume no one can do so effectively.
Pigs can contract viruses from humans, which I don't think plants can. Pigs and the horrific conditions they're kept in also creates a perfect breeding ground for bacteria.
Things are a bit cleaner in vertical plant farms as long as they dont use animal biproducts in their process.
Ingress of pathogens into pig farms almost always come through contaminated clothing, tools or fodder, not some fancy human to pig contraction. Vertical/indoor farms will need a lot of human supervision and interaction, as well as water and other inputs from the outside. Making sure that all of this does not lead to contamination (which includes sterilizing the entire facility on a regular basis) is prohibitively expensive in all but the most edgiest of edge cases.
And again: why bother? Market gardens are highly space efficient and can feed hundreds of people from the space normally occupied by a suburban house plot. Locating a market garden outside an agglomeration and transporting the produce an hour or so into the city is also very practical. And of course actual staple crops are shelf stable and can thus be transported anywhere at leisure. This fancy "vertical farming" stuff makes sense on a space station and desert cities flush with petro dollars but that's about it.
I've seen a decent number of agricultural areas where the crops are covered with a vast mesh tent supported by a wood or metal framework. Lets sunlight in, keeps insects out. That seems a lot more economical than building a vertical farm in most countries.
There are edge cases where the technology developed for vertical farms seems very useful: densely-populated, small countries; space stations, and off-world colonies. But for most of Earth? Look at how much of the US is farmland, and then imagine how many expensive towers and associated infrastructure you'd need to replace it.
"PM" (powdery mildew) is a huge problem in indoor grows[1]. It's especially bad in the Marijuana industry where it completely ruins the plants' suitability for sale (potentially lethal if inhaled/smoked), but it affects many other plants as well.
Not the original commenter, but I guess they were referring to the fact that closed (indoor) grow environments universally suffer from fungal (and algal) disease problems.
A lovely example of this is the germination rooms/tanks of malting plants where Barley gets germinated over a few days (2-3) before being dried/kilned to make brewing malt: they all have an on-going battle against fungi and algae, much of which battle takes the form of fungicides/algacides, chlorine washes, strong acids, etc. and they never "win" a permanent victory.
> Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud.
Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.
Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.
Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.
We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.
There are plenty of great projects and commercial regenerative farms that have demonstrated that exploited and degraded soils can be made productive again in a matter of years with little to no external inputs in terms of fertilizer and water. The Work of Ernst Götschl (syntropic agriculture) comes to mind in tropical climates, or Mark Shepard in mid-west US.
I reckon it's not based on economic sense. Rather it's about aesthetics. It feels good to look at your vertical farm, it's a nice little hobby to maintain I'm sure, and a certain pride to eat your own produce. And so people try to rationalize this and work backwards into an explanation for why it's a logical thing to do, but really it's just about that warm fuzzy feeling of having your own vertical farm.
Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil life that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant, if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture. If fertility isn't free, who the f*ck would something like succession happen, which is the norm in nature and can turn barren land into perennial forests.
EDITED TO ADD: This is the reason why agriculture before the advent of chemical fertilizers (in the 1900s) was even possible. You'd simply rotate your crops so that they'd create a balanced nutrition profile in the soil without the need to add a lot of external fertility. Edge cases like the Nile floodplains excepted.
>> Fertility isn't "free". You pull nutrients out of the soil whenever you harvest.
> Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil live that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant,
That's inaccurate and simplistic.
_Some_ plants generate _some_ nutrients in the soil. The most common example being legumes (in symbiosis with bacteria) fixing atmospheric nitrogen into a form essential for plant life.
However all plants have complex nutrient needs. So even those that contribute something to the soil will remove other nutrients.
In the example of legumes, to simplify, if the whole plant is harvested, they will have made a net contribution of nitrogen, but the soil will still be depleted of e.g. Phosphorous and Potassium.
> if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture.
It's not a dumb approach, it can make sense. And it does not "destroy" the soil. Yes it _can_ cause leeching, soil erosion and depletion of some nutrients, but all these ill effects can be dramatically lessened by good practice.
In Europe we have soils that have been tilled intermittently for millenia and are still productive.
Again, "dumb" is not a great word to use here. Up until recently there were not realistic alternatives that would provide any kind of decent yield for many crops.
Yes, with modern tilling machinery there are now alternatives available in some situations (min-till, disc only etc) which can avoid some of the potential ill effects of tilling.
The type of intensive and regular tilling currently practiced in industrialized agriculture is part of a system that relies on the cheap availability of chemical fertilizers and pest control, which in turn were supported by the political and social developments at the time. Research and development of alternative farming systems were almost abandoned for decades and crops that took advantage of the chemical fertilization/tilling approach were prioritized to the point that we now essentially farm only a handful of different crop strains. Within this system, you are correct, no alternatives existed. But that doesn't mean that it made a lot of sense and that there weren't plenty of early warning signs that other approaches should be explored.
Cows are usually started outdoors and then finished indoors. There's no reason why farming couldn't follow a similar hybrid approach. That way you could e.g. grow tropical crops in New England, but still not have to pay for the majority of the required resources.
Explain how you create a tropical environment in New England that doesn’t require an incredible amount of resources to mimic the temperature, humidity, soil conditions, required to bear profitable products
Traditional 19th century greenhouse technology accomplishes this just fine; tropical fruits grown in temperate climates isn't wizardry. The problem is transportation of foods actually grown in the tropics has become much cheaper, so the economic niche for greenhouse grown tropical foods has narrowed considerably. And of course, using LEDs and solar panels instead of plate glass roofs makes it worse...
(Incidentally, most tropical soil is notoriously poor, so getting the soil right is one of the easier parts.)
High tunnels are very efficient. Greenhouses are very efficient. I've visited https://district.farm/ and it's clearly the future (or the present if you're in Northern Europe). When I went there they were at 1/4 of grow space that they are now.
Ready to expand? You just add more enclosures. You slowly recoup the capital cost of the structure. Might take a few years, but you will. Rinse and repeat.
The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best we can, and we don't have the capital in enough hands to make basic, boring, but efficient methods like this work at larger scale.
I call BS on their claim they cut resource usage by 95%.
Traditional greenhouses (which the one at that landing site appears to be) are extremely energy intensive. This article explains why, and describes a common, practical alternative:
(Search for locally grown food to jump to the right figure).
Note that, even if the greenhouse, transport, storage and packaging all used zero resources, the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane) is going to be more than 5% the impact of traditionally grown food.
> Traditional greenhouses (which the one at that landing site appears to be) are extremely energy intensive.
Uhh, I am not seeing anything in that article that supports that claim, other than the first sentence, which does not cite any sources.
That article appears to be discussing ways to maximize greenhouse performance in winter, on the premise that glass is a poor insulator. But no where does it discuss energy consumption of modern greenhouses. My understanding is that they do not use climate control at all, except maybe some fans for air circulation. So sure, put some walls on your greenhouse for better heat retention. But making something more efficient, that already uses nearly zero energy might not be the best use of resources.
Climate control is only one aspect of energy usage. Another is light. Flying over the Netherlands at night is spectacular, in some parts it looks like they've just flooded entire regions with grow lights. I think I've read that many use heating as well, though I have no data on that and I don't think it is very common outside the Netherlands.
If you look at https://district.farm/ as was citied in the root comment, you'll see they aren't using lights or heaters. California doesn't require those.
The energy usage and output of greenhouses varies significantly by seasons and region. You really need to do direct comparisons for individual bits of land instead of broad statements. It's probably worth the light and heat costs if a country cannot grow enough vegetables for it's population without it. The US doesn't have that issue, because we have lots of growing space with long growing seasons.
>the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane)
The last time I tried to advocate for replacing landfills with incinerators on HN, someone came along to insist that methane recapture from landfills was possible and preferable (methane is useful, if you can confine it). I haven't had time to study that further, but managing food waste — aside from the actual lack of food it causes — is a solvable problem one way or another, and doesn't have to generate methane.
Food is thrown away because grocery stores want to sell uniform looking produce with no blemishes, and consumers came to expect that. That is the largest reason they get sent to the landfill, with growers have been sending it there before they get shipped.
There is a lot of waste going on here because:
- Consumers turn their noses on perfectly edible food that looks ugly. (There are volunteer organizations that intercepts such food at the landfill sites, and as food prices goes up, they have become more popular)
- Consumers living in the city typically don’t have chickens, pigs, goats, or rabbits, that will happily eat any of leftovers that haven’t rotted
- Consumers typically don’t have vermicomposting, black soldier fly composting, or even just regular composting, so unless the municipality has an industrial composting site, it goes into the landfill.
I think people get too obsessed over carbon dioxide and methane metrics, and become narrow minded about such solutions … because atmospheric carbon dioxide is an easy metric to carry a call for action. It’s like that comfortable illusion I used to have that, if I put in the effort to recycle, I am doing my part. That’s all wishful thinking.
Take landfills. The problem with putting food waste into landfills is not an increase in methane (and atmospheric methane isn’t as big of a deal as say, soil depletion, soil temperature, oceanic acidification). Landfills trap the methanes produced by decomposing food waste. They need some kind of vent or capture, or the landfill will eventually explode from the accumulated methane.
But more importantly, the biggest issue is that the trapped methane in landfills is no longer bioavailable, and participating in the ecologies in the carbon cycle.
Blemished, non-uniform product is turned into more processed food products or animal feed. Tomato soup isn’t made from the prettiest tomatoes. Blemished apples become applesauce. Tropicana puts a picture of a beautiful orange on the bottle, but they don’t care about what the ones going into the juicer look like. Consumer preferences for nice looking fruits and vegetables have little to no impact on overall food waste.
>Food loss occurs for many reasons, with some types of loss—such as spoilage—occurring at every stage of the production and supply chain. Between the farm gate and retail stages, food loss can arise from problems during drying, milling, transporting, or processing that expose food to damage by insects, rodents, birds, molds, and bacteria. At the retail level, equipment malfunction (such as faulty cold storage), over-ordering, and culling of blemished produce can result in food loss. Consumers also contribute to food loss when they buy or cook more than they need and choose to throw out the extras (See Buzby et al (2014)).
This mentions a lot of different causes of food waste, and appearance ranks as a small factor. It certainly doesn't support your assertion that the appearance of produce is a primary cause of food waste.
> Food is thrown away because grocery stores want to sell uniform looking produce with no blemishes, and consumers came to expect that.
In Europe, it's not the stores, and it's not the public either, it's EU regulations. I still remember the small, irregular, tasty fruit and veg from before - and how it disappeared almost overnight after joining the EU.
>But more importantly, the biggest issue is that the trapped methane in landfills is no longer bioavailable, and participating in the ecologies in the carbon cycle.
This fundamentally misunderstands what the carbon cycle is. The amount of carbon in the carbon cycle has dramatically increased since the Industrial Revolution, and the quantity of carbon locked into landfills is not significant compared to the absorption of carbon by rock weathering. The carbon cycle per se is certainly not under threat from present human activities, although the Earth will slowly absorb carbon dioxide over the next billion years until it becomes uninhabitable, according to current projections.
Furthermore, methane, an inert gas with low solubility, is not trapped in landfills. The capture scheme I described would eventually convert it to carbon dioxide and possibly store that carbon dioxide, but regardless, it's a very small amount of carbon compared to other emissions sources.
>and atmospheric methane isn’t as big of a deal as say, soil depletion, soil temperature, oceanic acidification
None of these problems are seriously related to food waste management. You might as well insist that methane emissions are not as important as nuclear war.
>The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best we can
This is true on multiple levels of the word use. From the practice of monocrops to only keeping the ground fertile through the use of chemicals, I'm amazed that we haven't had more problems.
It’s not always about efficiency. Sometimes, it is about resilience, anti-fragility, and food source locality. And maximizing efficiency tends to lead to trade off in those other areas.
We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup.
We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.
> they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves.
I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)
> I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ?
My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:
> Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.
A lot of it is also that the tech/VC way of things is to try to build everything yourself, and to assume the mechanics of the problem is easy and doesn't require a lot of domain knowledge. Whereas the software required to orchestrate all of these systems and provide insight is complex and needs a lot of software. I think it's a classic case of misunderstanding how complicated everything is and assuming that because you have been given a bunch of VC money that it's somehow a mandate to build everything yourself. It's what happens most of the time when a "tech" company interacts with the physical world. Like how my Nest thermostat always learns to do the opposite of what I want at any point in time.
They've told their investors that everybody else does it wrong, to deliberately divorce their own valuation from reality. They don't want to be valued like a regular greenhouse company, they want to be valued as a cutting edge company with huge unbounded potential. Turning around and using COTS solutions undermines that narrative.
It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.
> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.
Literally just got fired from a company that was just like that. Had a great idea, but wanted to build everything themselves vs just pieces of system that could differentiate us. Add onto that a weak business plan plus trying to compete with others in the greens space and it didn’t go very far. A lot of fun to work on though!
I follow this segment closely because, among other things, we develop technology and software for the industry and have multiple installations. As a result of this, I have spent time working at these farms, some spanning over 20,000 square meters, and have a reasonable understanding of the challenges involved.
My impression has always been that too many of these entities end-up building what I call "monuments to computer science and technology", rather than farms. The last paragraph in the article is, to me, a typical sign of this issue:
“What Upward Farms calls Ecological Intelligence is a proprietary microbiome technology that introduces a biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel. By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.”
Right.
Maybe this is just marketing/fund-raising language. I get it. There's stupid money out there that will throw dollars at anything that sounds like it is aligned with trends. Maybe they should have added "GPT" to that paragraph.
I know indoor farms that are doing well. It's challenging, yes, most businesses are. Upward Farms decided to raise fish and plants. Yeah, good luck. That's likely where some of the "infinite challenges" they refer to came from.
Yes, technology is an absolute requirement for indoor farming. The key is to not make it about technology for technology's sake. Don't introduce a backhoe for a job that can be done with a shovel.
The farm business equation isn't, at a basic level, terribly complex. You are no building a data center. If you do, you will eventually be plowed-over when you fail.
Most, if not all, companies involved in the sector are unprofitable in what is still a relatively nascent industry requiring scale and investment to remain viable and compete with traditionally grown crops.
Many countries think food security is national security, so it will continue even if it requires government subsidy.
It's not that they're "forced" too, it's that farmers in those countries want to make money, to invest in the future. And the way to make money is to grow cash crops and sell them on the world market, not grow barely-profitable staples. Their governments can and do provide subsidies to make growing staples profitable, but that's on the individual countries.
The strings attached to IMF/World Bank loans, known as structural adjustments, do typically include ending agricultural subsidies. The US and collective West notably do not subject themselves to the same policy. Coupled with structural adjustments which mandate market liberalization, this means farmers in developing countries have to compete against heavily subsidized food staples from the collective West. The end result of this is well understood.
The men came with axes and clubs. They cut the trees down and dragged them to the fire. The fire roared and crackled, and the smoke rolled up into the sky. The Joad family watched in horror as the orange grove was destroyed.
"Why are they doing this?" Tom asked.
"They're destroying the groves to keep prices high," Pa said. "They don't care about the trees or the people who work here. All they care about is money."
--The Grapes of Wrath
edit: this is the quote I was looking for at first
"...Did you ever hear of the Farmers’ Association?”
“Why, sure.”
“Well, I belong to it. We had a meeting last night. Now,
do you know who runs the Farmers’ Association? I’ll tell
you. The Bank of the West. That bank owns most of this
valley, and it’s got paper on everything it don’t own. So last night the member from the bank told me, he said, ‘You’re
paying thirty cents an hour. You’d better cut it down to
twenty-five.’ I said, ‘I’ve got good men. They’re worth
thirty.’ And he says, ‘It isn’t that,’ he says. ‘The wage is
twenty-five now. If you pay thirty, it’ll only cause unrest.
And by the way,’ he says, ‘you going to need the usual
amount for a crop loan next year?’ ” Thomas stopped. His
breath was panting through his lips. “You see? The rate is
twenty-five cents— and like it.”
“We done good work,” Timothy said helplessly.
“Ain’t you got it yet? Mr. Bank hires two thousand men
an’ I hire three. I’ve got paper to meet. Now if you can figure some way out, by Christ, I’ll take it! They got me.
What is the content of the claim that farmers want to make money "to invest in the future"?
Surely in many cases neither farmers producing cash crops nor the countries they are based in are able to 'invest in the future', but rather are trapped by past debts and limited options.
It strange how the time of day so drastically effects the votes on these comments. They are positive when it aligns with the global east, but then swings negative once the time of day reaches the global west, like clock work :)
No mentions in this thread of biodiversity loss[1], which I've always considered one of the main reasons for vertical farming. We are (and have been) destroying immense swathes of land to make more room for human activities, killing numerous species to their extinction[2] in the process. This increased human land use includes farming.
Now, there are of course other solutions such as reducing meat consumption. I think those should be applied as well. However, the theory of vertical farming is simple: with land area A, you actually get the output of A multiplied by the number of floors, saving the number of floor minus one times A land elsewhere.
Maybe we should tax the externalities, i.e. land use, more, in the same way we tax carbon emissions (at least here in EU). With the externalities properly taken into account, vertical farming could prove to be more economically viable when compared against the highly-tuned competition. Of course, food prices would become higher, but maybe that's required in order to avoid doom.
> By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.
Let me know when truly calorie-dense foods like potatoes, corn, and wheat are finally profitable to grow indoors. All I see thus far is lots of LED-fed salad.
Vertical farming (defined as the inefficient use of indoor farming, versus greenhouses which are an efficient use of indoor farming) is not a good replacement for most sorts of food production. It's a potentially competitive way of producing the most delicate and high-value items as close to the customer as possible.
It could make it possible to sell some foods, like apricots, in the city which are otherwise impossible to ship because they have to be picked soft.
Often though, there is roof space available where high-value crops could currently be grown efficiently in greenhouses and it's not being looked at because of the VC focus on tech and growth.
It would be interesting to see the EROI on these vertical farms. My guess is that dozens of calories (mostly originating from fossil fuels) go into every food calorie produced. If you want to convert petroleum to food, there are far more efficient ways to do it.
A ratio of fuel calories to food calories isn't that useful a metric unless you have similar numbers for all the conventional methods of producing food at scale.
It's not like 1 is a goal: we can't eat fossil fuels (or solar energy), and we know that eating either plants or animals is never going to yield all the energy they absorbed during their lives.
There are similar numbers for conventional farming, and historical estimates too. There's a whole field of study on the EROI of agriculture. And yes,
for all of human agriculture until roughly the industrial revolution, the EROI was over 1. By definition. 1 unit of labor + sun better equal at least 1 unit of food! When solar energy is the only external input and all mammalian labor provides the rest (which must be fed by the same crops that you're trying to grow), if you got less crop calories than it took to run the farm, you and your livestock would be dead.
Since the choice is not between these new types of farming and pre-industrial-revolution agriculture, that comparison doesn't matter much..
And even pre-industrial agriculture had specific elements which had a yield of less than 1 by this metric, in order to make specific things that humans wanted to eat. Since most humans don't like a diet of grass and oats, the huge excess calorie yield from those crops could subsidize low-yield farming of vegetables, meat and other delicacies.
Shame to hear this actually, even though ideas like "using solar panels to generate power for growing crops" sounds silly, the idea of isolating the farming business to a controlled environment w.r.t insects/pesticides/etc..., as well as grow more in less land area, sounds so attractive. Plus, those who want to live long term in space stations will need some tech like this.
Australia has million acre pastoral farms .. and there is still a price point for dense bulk market garden produce fresh every month source adjacent to the major urban centres to minimise transportation costs .. as there is across the globe which itself is a market for Australian technology.
The two links I provided above are eating their own dogfood to be sure but they are less in the business of growing food and more in the R&D business of designing, building, and onselling | leasing proven solutions.
Both (to the best of my knowledge) are already embedded within large conventional farming areas | businesses - these are growth innovation sub business ventures.
I had an idea for "Vertical farming" years ago. And when I started seeing it in the headlines I thought finally someone has executed the idea of using parking garage like structures and mirrors to direct the free sunlight to the different levels to grow food in vertical structures.
And then I met a man, on my smoke break on the Johns Hopkins University Campus who said: "If there is something being given away for free, there is a man in line waiting to sell it to you"
> But I always wondered why stuff that literally grows on trees isn't cheap and abundant.
American grocery stores sell bananas grown outside on trees for literal pennies each. Dirt cheap tropical fruit, arguably the CIA's finest contribution to American society..
Anyway, mirrors. Mirrors don't multiply light, they only bounce it. 1 square meter of mirror can only bounce a square meter of sunlight. If you have a 5 level parking garage, each level 1000 square meters, then you need 5000 square meters of mirror. What did any of this accomplish, vs simply building a single layer regular old greenhouse? Remember that most surface areas of most countries is not urban so in most cases there's no reason to grow food in urban areas.
> But I always wondered why stuff that literally grows on trees isn't cheap and abundant
It is!
Around here it's apples. Everyone with a few apple trees has far more fruit than they can eat in the fall and they're begging to give them away. I'm lucky in that most of ours are in horse pasture and the horses just eat them when they fall (cue horses drunk on naturally fermented cider!).
I'm told it's a similar situation with lemons in LA: they just rot on the ground. Again, I imagine similar happening in Georgia with peaches. Lather, rinse, repeat for whatever fruit is common anywhere else in the country.
Extend this to stores. Local fruit "that literally grows on trees" is usually the cheapest fruit you can find. Other than the bananas at $0.54/lb. The economics of those just blow my mind. Cheaper than potatoes but travelled 5x as far.
Here is the interesting problem that vertical farms never ever tackled...
The amount of actual sunlight that drives the typical tree is more than the amount you can estimate via just a math calculation of the surface volume of the leaves. How does natural sunlight and leaf combination allow this to happen and not non-natural light?
Or in short words the non-natural light the vertical growers were using has more than one problem...
I wonder what if we use more effective wave guides(tubes) to capture the wanted wavelengths:
Does anyone know if re-purposing large office buildings for farming is feasible? I've been thinking about this because of the possible down turn in commercial real-estate values.
The pessimism here is just unwarranted. Vertical farming will transform the world by freeing up hundreds of thousands of acres of land. It will move farming closer to consumption cutting the logistics costs and wastage. It's hard to overstate the how much the positive impact on the environment will be. On the top of that, it will make all regions of the world much more self-sufficient than they currently are.
Sure, it's a little impractical right now chiefly because it's hard to match the free energy of the sun. But someday, we will solve it. It's one of those ideas which will be inevitable once energy becomes cheap and abundant
It will be more efficient for plants to capture free energy from the sun directly than to convert it into electricity, transmit that over a long distance, possibly store it for a while, and then convert it back to light before plants capture it, for a very long time. The energy losses by solar panels and led lights are very significant.
Mushrooms turn inedible things like wood chips into food without sunlight. It's a net win in that sense. You don't need the land space for the trees + the mushrooms and mushrooms can grow in the dark.
I don't know much about it but it's intrigued me for a while. Apparently the only commercial product ("Quorn") is made in a fermentation vat with glucose syrup and Fusarium venenatum spores.
But the nutrition content is interesting: 42% protein by mass yet still has fiber and other nutrients. It's also supposed to be highly satiating.
Unfortunately, Quorn is shipped from the UK and they don't let me buy just one $10 box of it where I live.
As someone in the UK this is kinda strange to read someone wanting to try quorn like I've been wanting to try the impossible burger.
Honestly Quorn is not a great meat replacement for anything other than mince, or maybe foods that are so processed all you can taste are the additives.
A self-contained solar powered cargo-container-sized box that can create calories with minimal top-ups of material might make some marginal areas habitable.
This is the technology that's absolutely needed for off-Earth agriculture.
We take so many things for granted, like air and sunlight. I think the Biosphere 2 project was the only one that tried to figure out just what we need to support life in a closed system. It was horribly expensive and it looks to be horribly inefficient - 8 people to make the food and oxygen, and 3.14 acres of land. What we do currently for the space station is to ship them 1000 pounds of stuff every month per person.
> We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex
It breaks the laws of physics, which a smart child can work out.
Sure you can make food for the rich, but do the rich care enough to pay for the vertical-farming surcharge. Is it the type of signaling they pay for?
The 26 story Chinese pig farm however works because they haven't filled their universities with imposters who can't do science and fatting animals vertically using energy harvested from horizontal farms is not insane.
I respect that you have your own interpretation. I think you might have either misunderstood what the person above was trying to say, or maybe you may not consume much US conservative media.
Rural America leans toward conservative values, and from their point of view, the things conservative Americans would call "fascist" in today's political climate are things like:
- restrictions on gun rights
- institutions being required to cater marginalized social groups that they do not see as relevant to their communities
- required separations of church and state
- some contemporary public health requirements
- policies that disadvantage status-quo rural employers
I don't think anyone should care what they call "fascist". What I call fascist I call that due to my history education on the topic, which seems to coincide with the widely accepted definition from political science. This does not hold true for the things you describe.
Funnily enough, it's also widely accepted that fascist movements work hard to blur the meaning of words they don't like to be called.
Ah that's the disconnect. The comment you replied to above [0] was asking for clarification about what the parent commenter intended with the use of the word. We're aware that the word has established academic meanings, and that the person above was (almost certainly) not using it that way, but in a politically charged hyperbolic sense.
> The comment you replied to above [0] was asking for clarification about what the parent commenter intended with the use of the word.
Yes, and I was explicitly explaining my interpretation of what he meant. I didn't think I'd have to analyze this, but sure, here we go. The parent of the comment you linked wrote:
> At the rate the politics in rural America are being strangled by fascism, cities may have an imperative to deprive them of their subsidized agriculture. Especially if fuel costs continue to rise against electric generators.
They are saying that fascism is strangling rural America. This will both refer to fully rural areas, but also rural states (overwhelmingly red). He's proposing that the cities should deprive them of their subsidized agriculture, referring both to cities themselves, but also the states that are mostly influenced by cities (blue states).
This means that one answer to his question (what is meant by fascism strangling rural America) is the same as "what fascist actions are republicans taking in rural America", which I described in my comment.
My non-American interpretation of the use of fascism in this sense is "any politics I disagree with".
>cities may have an imperative to deprive them of their subsidized agriculture
They are subsidized to provide agricultural products to the cities. Do you think rural America requires subsidies to provide for their own, if the population centres said we will no longer purchase food from you? They are small communities with lots of land.
Fascism has a simple definition that can be found in dictionaries.
“Fascism is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen.”
Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this.
It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas.
What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology.
With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools.
Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans.
You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.