[HN Gopher] The vertical farming bubble is finally popping
___________________________________________________________________
The vertical farming bubble is finally popping
Author : jeffbee
Score : 154 points
Date : 2023-02-27 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| ambientenv wrote:
| It feels, to me anyway, that until the incentives are less about
| making a (short-term and relatively immediate) profit for a
| select and limited number of people/eintities and more about the
| long term health of the planet and its inhabitants, these
| endeavours will ultimately fail. Which is possibly a shame as we
| should pursue technical solutions to our challenges, along with
| economic and behavioural. It comes down to what we value - we,
| being the human population and independent of what we are
| instructed, coerced or manipulated to value.
| tomrod wrote:
| I think the place for this would be on colonies off Earth.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 1. Secure indoor farming tech
|
| 2. Establish lunar colony
|
| 3. Import fresh moon lettuce
|
| 4. Charge restaurants $$$$ per leaf
|
| There seems to be a big gap between step 1 and 2.
| dymk wrote:
| Why did these companies start with boring stuff like lettuce? The
| article says that indoor growing like this could allow growing
| delicate plants which don't travel well - why wouldn't they start
| with that?
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| in addition to the very good sibling comment: lettuce is also a
| cold-tolerant crop that can grow well at 50F, whereas other
| popular consumer produce like tomatoes or peppers require
| minimum soil temperatures of 75-85F for optimal growth.
| Managing that optimal growing environment gets costly quick.
|
| Another important factor: lettuce grows uniformly, and the
| whole plant is harvested at once. There is no pollination
| required, no trellis-training for production vines, or fruiting
| bodies that must be plucked when ripe.
|
| Lettuce is about as straightforward as you can get in terms of
| mass production.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Because lettuces has a short growing cycle. One of the best
| cases for artificial light is that it can be used in times when
| natural light is not enough. If you have a crop like lettuces,
| that you can only grow 2x per year and now you can grow 12x per
| year in the same space it's easier to make the case than
| something like garlic that can be in the ground up to 8-9
| months. If you can only turn the 'ground' or pod over once/year
| just like normal than you're only getting the stacking, but you
| could just use shelves in a greenhouse then and skip most of
| the tech.
|
| Strawberries are another good one, you can only double your
| production in beds with a 6 month growing cycle, (granted, you
| can stagger your growing cycles in an artificial environment).
|
| An awful lot of small scale farming is about turning over the
| resources you have as fast as possible to put product on the
| market and that is the same for flat land farming and vertical
| farming.
|
| It's not unlike other kinds of startups where you aim for an
| mvp maybe even a profitable mvp before you move on to the
| complex stuff for the big customers.
|
| Lettuces is a small farming MVP regardless of the tech used for
| farming (vertical, greenhost, flatland).
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm still not clear from the article, though.
|
| Is this just a normal bubble popping, where out of 20 companies
| trying, 18 go out of business but the final 2 succeed and take
| over the market and will produce a bunch of profit over the next
| couple of decades? And if so, do we have an idea which companies?
|
| Or is the very premise economically flawed, where it turns out it
| can't be profitable ever, at least not with current energy and
| produce prices? And if so, how did these startups get their
| models so wrong -- what did we learn that couldn't be foreseen?
| rmason wrote:
| I've called out most of the vertical farming stories on HN
| because the numbers simply weren't there. The growing cost was
| simply too high even if you were growing the highest value crops
| possible to ever make a return for investors.
|
| However if in the future the price of electricity becomes almost
| free then it may be possible. I grew up in the sixties when the
| nuclear power industry promised power, 'too cheap to meter'. We
| may see it from either geothermal or fusion in the next twenty
| five years and it will be a true game changer.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > if in the future the price of electricity becomes almost free
|
| I think about this sometimes. If you could eventually throw a
| fusion reactor somewhere and build some crazy huge vertical
| farms around it, regulate their temperature with geothermal
| energy, maybe even produce your own nitrogen since the energy
| is so cheap and you're going to use a heap of the stuff, etc...
| You could probably make it cheaper, faster, and more efficient
| in the long term than regular farming. Outputs could be so
| fast, reliable, and high quality that over say, 25 years you'd
| never skip a beat due to environmental conditions (barring
| serious disasters), your automation investments would pay off
| like crazy, and your outputs would scale so much better than
| traditional farms that you'd outsell them significantly.
|
| But that's an insane requirement. At this point it's like
| saying "Imagine if we had magic, and we could use it to make a
| business that's physically impossible at the moment". Cool,
| but... Why?
| uoaei wrote:
| Are there examples of vertical farming facilities that are
| designed to use the natural sunlight when it is available? I'm
| imagining basically walls of well-placed mirrors. That would take
| care of quite a bit of the lighting costs, at least.
| mjhay wrote:
| You need a lot of area for that - incident sunlight is
| proportional to land area. To get the same amount of sunlight,
| you'd need to cover around the same square footage of land as
| there is area in the vertical farm with mirrors, and then
| cleverly redirect that back into the vertical farm - kind of
| like a solar power tower.
|
| What would be even cleverer is to just plant the crops where
| the sun falls in the first place, and just do one layer of
| crops directly in the soil already present in that location.
| This would obviate the need for the multi-story tower, mirrors,
| soil transportation, etc. A "non-vertical farm," if you will. I
| think it could be a real money spinner!
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the thing - even if your vertical wall gets sunlight,
| it's just "stealing" it from whatever is now in its shadow.
| temp12192021 wrote:
| > I'm imagining basically walls of well-placed mirrors. That
| would take care of quite a bit of the lighting costs, at least.
|
| ... or windows. We could call the building housing these green
| things "greenhouses."
| ianburrell wrote:
| Instead of mirrors, I wonder if it would make sense to have
| greenhouses with artificial lights for winter and night. The
| original vertical farming idea was farms in buildings in the
| city. It has changed to focus on premium greens year round.
|
| To solve the year round garden problem, it would be better to
| grow them in enhanced greenhouses. Then could use sunlight when
| available and LEDs the rest of the time for decrease in costs
| and increase in efficiency. There would be no improvement in
| land usage but even big cities have empty land nearby. I sort
| of think current vertical farming pivoted when original idea
| didn't work, but there is better way to do the pivot.
| Ekaros wrote:
| If you are going to use land for mirrors. Couldn't you build
| well horizontally? And it would probably be quite a bit cheaper
| option.
| ynab4 wrote:
| [dead]
| beambot wrote:
| I'm confused. This is an article purports to be about vertical
| farming, but then calls out AppHarvest -- a company building
| heavily automated (aquaponic?) traditional greenhouses.
|
| There are at least a half-dozen AppHarvest-esque greenhouse
| companies, and they almost all have positive farm economics
| (positive EBITDA). Same is true for many of the greenhouse-based
| fruit & veg outfits.
| jagtstronaut wrote:
| I majored in Ag for my bachelors and can confirm that all the
| research at the time was pointing to that this is not a good
| idea. It is many times more energy inefficient that just growing
| things in soil.
|
| Kinda like biofuels, sounds really cool, but in practice it just
| creates more waste then the alternatives.
|
| Only time this actually works and makes money is for high end
| restaurants in massive metroplexes. They are willing to pay high
| dollar for extremely fresh lettuce. At one point the containers
| company was turning a decent profit in NYC. I'm assuming it
| didn't scale like they were hoping.
| HillRat wrote:
| When I was doing consulting, we did an innovation project with
| {{HUGE_RETAILER}} and {{MAJOR_RESEARCH_UNIVERSITY}},
| researching the retailer's desire to do micro-vertical farming,
| which the university had put a bunch of research into and had a
| bunch of IP around. Only took a couple of weeks of reading the
| relevant dissertations and papers to figure out that the
| economics didn't, wouldn't, and couldn't make sense, even if
| the retailer could get a premium price on "just picked" produce
| (high-end mushrooms were the only place that cost, output, and
| price-per-pound made any sense). Absolutely shocked, not at all
| surprised that a bunch of VCs put funding into the concept.
| legitster wrote:
| Any project that "reuses" shipping containers is a big red flag
| for me. Used shipping containers are not actually particularly
| cheap and already have plenty of demand. And for the purpose of
| building or construction projects they provide next to no
| value.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Yeah. I got fascinated with tiny houses and vertical farms
| because I liked the potential modularity and
| transportability, but when you actually look into, you don't
| really need containerization (let alone actually reused
| shipping containers) at all. The houses, farms, whatever, are
| rarely transported anywhere. Instead you're left with 12
| metal posts, and an aesthetic.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Re your last point: The article focuses on lettuce, but I'd
| associated these vertical farms with microgreens. I've never
| eaten one, but my understanding was the intent is to sell
| microgreens to high end restaurants at a high price, as you
| said. Otherwise, the lighting costs (compared to the sun) would
| make these unviable.
| pwthornton wrote:
| Vertical farming or any kind of farming aimed at making the
| growing season much longer is going to largely be a play for
| high-end quality, of which I am not sure the market is nearly
| big enough to get Silicon Valley involved.
|
| High-end restaurants 100% are willing to pay for access to
| better ingredients. Some individual consumers may be as well,
| but this market isn't huge.
|
| Vertical farming would also need to be able to take on more
| than just greens.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > Vertical farming would also need to be able to take on more
| than just greens.
|
| That's the thing. It really can't. Grains are very very
| cheap, and the price efficiency drops in relation to the
| water use. (i.e. more water efficient the crop, the less
| profitable the crop is.) This has been the case with
| hydroponics for at least 40 years now.
| incrudible wrote:
| > more than just greens
|
| Two dollar strawberries are the next big step, apparently.
| abledon wrote:
| > Kinda like biofuels, sounds really cool, but in practice it
| just creates more waste then the alternatives.
|
| So Porsche e-fuels are gonna be a scam?
| ilyt wrote:
| Nope, just product for people rich enough to not care about
| fuel price to run their sportscars. Which is, well, a bit
| snobbish, but essentially no impact
|
| And, well, so far there isn't really a non-fuel-based
| solution to powering planes so any less problematic fuel than
| oil-based ones is a plus, even if it isn't "green" but maybe
| just "neutral" or "much less negative".
| basch wrote:
| It seems short sighted? Sure soil is abundant and water
| plentiful at the moment. Isn't part of the allure of perfecting
| indoor farming to be resilient to a future world hostile to
| agriculture. I would think of any big discoveries or inventions
| being worth it as a long term risk investment.
|
| This movement will resprout when society is relegated to caves
| and submarines. Maybe fiber optic light instead of solar
| panels, or maybe a panel that captures the full spectrum of
| light and converting it to a subspectrum, thereby multiplying
| the available energy.
|
| These kinds of trials would imho be better suited as large
| scale research projects ala Manhattan/Nasa type stuff than pure
| venture capital, 'recoup your investment in a decade' funded.
| smileysteve wrote:
| But Water is not plentiful; the U.S. 2nd largest reservoir is
| at its lowest level.
|
| And Soil (at least top soil) is not abundant.
|
| Even currently used land is decreased with the warn in
| Ukraine.
| htag wrote:
| We have a ton of easier to pick fruit between here and indoor
| hydroponic farming.
|
| Indoor hydroponic farms also tend to focus on non-staple
| foods. If this was about surviving we'd be studying legumes
| and grains not cruciferous vegetables. It's just easier to
| overcharge for a cabbage than a bean.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| We're close to peak population.
|
| The idea we're going to run out of water is a James Bond
| movie, not reality.
|
| Look at how productive China is compared to the US in growing
| calories. Then consider how little of China's land is fertile
| (12.6% arable vs 17.2% in the US).
|
| China produces nearly 5x as many calories on 66% the arable
| land - nearly 6.7x more productive.
|
| Then consider that India is FAR better suited for agriculture
| than the US, but is not considerably more productive.
|
| We're not running out of food or water or solar radiation in
| our lifetimes.
| GVIrish wrote:
| Sure we won't run out of water, the challenge is gonna come
| when weather patterns shift in a way that cause droughts on
| crop-bearing land or abnormal temperatures in key parts of
| the growing season. Some parts of the world may be in for
| some considerable pain in those scenarios.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Others are likely in for considerable gain.
| thfuran wrote:
| We're not going to run out of water as in "there doesn't
| exist enough water on the planet to sustain the total
| population", but we're already running out of water in the
| sense of "there are places where the ground water is not
| replenished as quickly as it is being depleted by local
| industrial and consumer usage, and reservoirs are
| critically low". That there's plenty of water 5,000 miles
| away is only so helpful.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| By spending enormous amounts on tech, construction, energy and
| labour, we can free up agricultural land, which we already have
| enormous amounts of and has no actual value 99% of the time...
| blackbear_ wrote:
| If land is not needed for agriculture then can be used for
| something else, such as, you know, housing?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The idea that agricultural land is somehow reducing the
| supply of housing runs counter to common sense. By the time
| you reach any significant agricultural land near Toronto, for
| example, you're already so far away from the city that you're
| looking at a 1 hr commute during rush hour. If you work
| remotely, you can already live in Woodstock or London,
| Ontario and housing affordability is not as much of a problem
| for you either. The reason the agricultural land is not
| converted into housing is because there's little demand for
| it - not because it's essential to food production.
| wpietri wrote:
| So you're saying that instead of vertical farming, we
| should try something like vertical housing? Big if true.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> The reason the agricultural land is not converted into
| housing is because there 's little demand for it - not
| because it's essential to food production._
|
| As an Ontario farmer located several hours from Toronto, I
| have had a seemingly endless line of people wanting to buy
| a small plot from my farmland on which to build themselves
| a home. The demand is there[1], but there is far too much
| red tape to make it happen. Furthermore, the price of food
| has been strong for the last decade or so which has sent
| the price of farmland sky high (up ~500% over the last 15
| years), making housing on those lands more expensive. I
| would suggest that the price of housing in the cities has
| gone up exactly because it has become considerably more
| expensive to build out into the farmlands compared to
| earlier decades. When sprawl is too costly, that puts more
| pressure on existing city boundaries.
|
| [1] Or at least was there. It is not clear if there is much
| lingering housing demand in Ontario as of the past few
| months. All reports I read indicate that people don't want
| to own homes anymore.
| FpUser wrote:
| Oh believe me they want. they just can not afford it. In
| the 90's I easily bought house in Toronto and I did not
| need to have high income. Now it is nigh to impossible
| for majority of working people.
| randomdata wrote:
| Housing in Toronto was affordable in the 90s because
| there was cheaper alternatives. Whether or not one
| preferred to live in Toronto is immaterial. What is
| significant is that there was an even more affordable
| choice to move to the edge of town, keeping pressure away
| from the core. Price is moderated by choice, after all.
|
| In the 90s, a 100 acre farm here would have sold for
| around $100,000. Today, the same farm would sell for
| around $3 million. That is a substantial increase to
| acquiring the land and a cost that is burdened even if
| you choose to put a home on the land. This means that
| there isn't a cheap option outside of town to provide as
| an alternative like their historically was. And, thus,
| that puts more pressure on prices within the city.
| runsWphotons wrote:
| yes the famous housing crisis in rural Nebraska
| pphysch wrote:
| Finding housing 100 miles away in Farmville has never been a
| challenge. The problem is most people don't want to live 100
| miles away in Farmville and commute that distance.
| paxys wrote:
| There is unlimited land available for housing in the USA. The
| housing crisis stems from the fact that everyone wants to
| live in the same few square miles in every state. Converting
| agricultural land isn't going to fix the problem unless the
| farm is in downtown Manhattan.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. Replace part of Central Park with a skyscraper
| apartment and it'll sell out instantly.
|
| Build the exact same building in East Palestine, Ohio and
| it'll sit empty for decades.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or solar panels to well run those vertical farms... The
| energy going into food has to come from somewhere. And I
| still don't believe the equation is net positive in natural
| vs. artificial light.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Farmers are absolutely devastating to local water quality.
| Green houses should be a lot more ecologically friendly than
| current farming practices but that seems more like a side
| benefit.
| triceratops wrote:
| You could let nature reclaim that land.
| abledon wrote:
| I'm guessing AgTech in general still has a bright future? e.g.
| outside drones and farming robots?
| madsbuch wrote:
| Vertical farming makes sense when energy is cheaper than what we
| get from the sun. That will also unlock growing other crops than
| lettuce, for which energy is the biggest hurdle. The main value
| propositions are that we don't occupy land as we do with
| conventional farming and that automation is easier in a
| controlled setting.
|
| IMHO, vertical farming is a part of the next wave of
| industrialisation together with real AI, space travel for the
| masses, etc. But this requires that we fix an energy sourcing
| problem and does it without externalities.
| legitster wrote:
| > Vertical farming makes sense when energy is cheaper than what
| we get from the sun.
|
| Uhhh, is there any energy cheaper than what we get from the
| sun?
| bell-cot wrote:
| 6 months every year, at the South Pole Station.
|
| Or 12 months per year...until you run out of gullible VC's.
| goda90 wrote:
| High latitudes where there sun might disappear for months.
| For example, in Iceland, geothermal powered greenhouses are
| quite successful. Geothermal is plentiful, and it's expensive
| to ship fresh produce to such a small island nation.
| legitster wrote:
| That's fair. Although I suspect these types of ventures are
| already profitable without any tech VC money.
| madsbuch wrote:
| The word "when" indicates a future tense. This is limited, as
| you can hear from the other responses ridiculing this
| comment. However, it should probably be expected that this
| will happen in the future more broadly.
| di456 wrote:
| > Vertical farming makes sense when energy is cheaper than what
| we get from the sun
|
| that's just part of it. Closer to the poles, away from the
| equator, there isn't enough sun to have a winter growing
| season. The energy, expense of transporting produce to those
| areas is another factor. Along with the flavor and quality
| benefits of harvesting when ripe instead of optimizing for
| transportation durability and presentation.
|
| Historically the solution was canning the in-season produce and
| consuming that during winter months.
| outworlder wrote:
| One of the advantages is that you can use power sources other
| than the sun in regions where it's not plentiful. Eg.
| geothermal in Iceland during winter. Or nuclear (either
| fission or fusion).
|
| But sunlight is so cheap in general that those are really
| niche situations.
| skywhopper wrote:
| In other words, one of many pipe dreams that will never happen.
| ilyt wrote:
| More like "the dream turned out to not be really all that
| useful all things considered".
|
| Still cool on micro-scale I guess, if you don't have much
| space in your back yard some kind of vertical farming
| greenhouse could be cool.
| kristjansson wrote:
| > Vertical farming makes sense when energy is cheaper than what
| we get from the sun.
|
| While there are cases where that's the case, they're so
| marginal it's hard to square the size of the niche with
|
| > vertical farming is a part of the next wave of
| industrialisation.
|
| Sure, we can grow better food for Finns and Icelanders, it's
| hard to see a case for the constraints of those places starting
| to apply more broadly...
| petsfed wrote:
| If climate change continues at pace, we're going to see
| larger and larger migrations away from the sunniest parts of
| the earth, as those sunny spots become too hot for humans to
| live.
|
| That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but I think its up
| to it.
| legitster wrote:
| > More traditional greenhouses already grow a large percentage of
| the tomatoes eaten in the United States, for example (most come
| from Mexico and Canada). In the Netherlands, greenhouses grow
| nearly a million tons of tomatoes a year, along with other crops,
| making the country a major food exporter despite its tiny size.
|
| It boggles my mind - _the technology already exists and is
| profitable_ in the form of a hydroponic greenhouse. So what you
| paid for as an investor was a bunch of R &D research on how to
| replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs. (The fact that there
| are investor decks out there pitching that energy costs could be
| offset by investments in solar panels is laughably hilarious.).
|
| Even your average field farmer is no slouch. I was just having a
| conversation with our neighbor, an orchardist who manages over
| 200 acres of trees. He currently pays $60k a year in _just in
| SaaS fees_ to cover all of the technology on his farm. Your
| average (productive) farm is already a miracle of modern
| automation.
| paganel wrote:
| > hydroponic greenhouse.
|
| Unfortunately the tomatoes grown in there taste like, pardon my
| French, shit. Not particularly related to tech or to the
| article itself, but it deeply saddens me that we seem to have
| forgotten that food needs to be tasty, too.
| Mandatum wrote:
| If they do direct to customer that makes sense. If that's just
| SAP fees, wow.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's 300 dollars per acre in SaaS fees, and assuming it's
| standard apples, that runs out to a cent per apple _tree_
| (edit)
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| This might make sense if each additional acre added high
| costs to the SaaS service but I question that. I wonder how
| much of this $60k/yr is just rent seeking to extract as much
| value from the land as possible.
| bombcar wrote:
| You'd have to know the "value add" and what it is saving,
| which I'm sure farmers have done. But it's not the case
| that you get zero apples (or whatever) without it, but
| maybe it increases yield or prevents total crop loss.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, it' niche (you don't have _that_ many customers
| compared to normal software) that is also highly
| specialized, and that is never cheap.
|
| And it's not "a piece of software for 60k" but likely "a
| bunch of specialized pieces of software"
| credit_guy wrote:
| You probably mean one cent per apple tree, not per apple.
| bombcar wrote:
| True, it's one hundredth of a cent per apple.
| supermatt wrote:
| 30,000 apple trees per acre?
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm going to give up Mathing it out as I'm confused now and
| it was cherries anyway
| supermatt wrote:
| Lol no worries. More realistic would be 50-200 apple, or
| 500-1000 cherry depending on rootstock, variety, and the
| density you can support.
| legitster wrote:
| Mostly cherries in this case. For him, newer trees and
| varietals, so he was expecting to get something like $10k -
| $15k per acre.
|
| It was actually impressive - for every tech product he used,
| he knew exactly how much ROI it gave him. Most recently he
| was excited about an anti-pest system he had just acquired
| that would detect certain species of bugs in a field and only
| spray when needed. $10/mo/acre and he was expecting to save
| ~$10k on pesticide + ~$30k on labor.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, farmers (the successful ones!) are really _really_
| good at tracking ROI in ways you wouldn 't expect, and they
| know what is worth it and what isn't.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And if it is, they are willing, and able, to pay. After
| all, developing solutions _for_ farmers is a good market
| frol ehat I hear. Trying to _replace_ traditional farming
| so was only ever a way to blow away VC millions.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, it's one of those markets where you really do have
| to have the numbers when the treads hit the mud, if your
| thing costs a million bucks a year but results in even a
| small amount of profit that covers the cost, they'll be
| all there. But even if it's cheap, if it doesn't have
| that ROI you ain't gonna be selling it.
|
| I feel a lot of software/Silicon Valley types do NOT
| expect that at all, given how hard it is to measure ROI
| normally.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a lot of farmers and they talk to each other.
| When something new comes out and they are not sure if
| this is an ROI a few of the farmers in the area will try
| it on a few of their fields. They will then have numbers.
|
| Running experiments is easy, all farmers do at least a
| little: it is easy to plant one bag of seed somewhere and
| then in fall compare that bag to what they plant
| elsewhere. It only slightly more difficult to do that in
| a proper controlled scientific way. The only hard part is
| there are may months between starting the experiment and
| seeing results.
|
| When something shows good results farmers tell each
| other. Not always, but they at least tell friends and
| things spread.
| ilyt wrote:
| That tech only seems to make sense if you're constrained for
| space, which literally isn't a problem to solve (yet).
|
| Water savings are the useful part, not the stacking.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Space, Water, Transportation, and small workforce.
|
| Alaska, Hawaii, Medium/Small island nations would be the
| target market for these; Where imports are expensive, the
| local soil grows no crops, and fresh water expensive.
| (especially if they are cold/dark or too hot for produce)
| bluGill wrote:
| Water savings are useful in CA. However the article makes it
| clear they were setting up all over - including in areas with
| plenty of water.
| roenxi wrote:
| > So what you paid for as an investor was a bunch of R&D
| research on how to replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs.
|
| There is currently a hot war between the two countries with the
| largest nuclear weapons stockpiles. It is conceivable that the
| 3rd largest stockpile will get involved too. It is a good idea
| to be probing at what can be achieved without reliable
| sunlight.
| crznp wrote:
| Mr President, we must not allow a grow light gap!
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Solar seems... interesting, at least, as a way to move sunlight
| from places where agriculture is nonviable for other reasons to
| places where it is viable, or to where it's cheaper. I guess
| you could even surround a relatively small "vertical farm" in
| an inhospitable environment, e.g. currently useless arid land
| in the US midwest, with a crap ton of solar panels to make that
| small volume more hospitable, including lighting, air
| conditioning, etc. Granted, it still doesn't make a ton of
| sense for a farming company to invest in it directly, you'd
| want to hire it out.
| goda90 wrote:
| > currently useless arid land in the US midwest
|
| The US midwest is far from arid(except maybe the Dakotas).
| This is probably a confusion about what "midwest" means,
| since it is kind of a confusing term when you think about it.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
|
| The real issue is the cold winters cutting into agriculture
| time, which is why there's a lot of grains and animal
| agriculture. Solar-pasture combos could power greenhouses
| that keep running through winter, but there's so much space
| that there's not much need for it to be vertical.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Fair, I guess I was just thinking "West".
| Loughla wrote:
| People who don't work with it legitimately do not understand
| the levels of automation and/or precision involved in large-
| scale (and medium scale) farms.
|
| The gentleman who rents our family farm owns or operates about
| 11k acres. He's a medium sized business. He's a family
| operation.
|
| And he precision farms to the square foot for most row-crop
| fields. Using thousands of data points from soil condition to
| weather to historical flood data to local highway traffic
| patterns. His machinery is (almost) automated. He exists as an
| emergency off switch, while the tractor and machinery farm to
| the square foot. They select seed varieties based on the data.
| Their planter can select any number of up to 20 different
| varieties based on the outputs of their soil equations, varies
| the depth, and distance of each individual seed, and plants to
| the square foot across thousands of acres. Chemical application
| is dialed in to accuracy within 6" squares. Fertilizer is
| applied so precisely that the soil generally remains unchanged
| at the end of the growing season; neither depleted or over
| fertilized.
|
| Animals - they have a breeding program for their cattle, with
| genetic testing and selection. The cattle are selected for
| specific genes. Not for traits. For genes. Actual genetics.
| They don't just breed that bull with these cows because the
| bull is taller in the back legs and the cows are heavy and
| short. They select actual genes to pass between generations,
| and specifically cultivate the genes they want to see. This
| blows my mind.
|
| And this is, again, a medium size business. HUGE agribusinesses
| take precision to a literal entirely new level. Inputs and
| outputs measured to the ounce over millions of tons produced.
| Most processes automated, with a human existing as a kill-
| switch. It's astounding.
| boringg wrote:
| To me this reads as everybody but the farmer has some skin in
| the game and is extracting their share out of the process and
| that farmers are completely locked in on vendors. I already
| know they are locked in on mech equipment, I assume the
| intelligence layer is the same thing.
|
| Threes probably an argument that it increases the amount of
| food per square acre but my cynical take is it adds more
| profit margin and to the ever increasing cost of food
| production per unit of throughput.
| legitster wrote:
| This was not the situation as I understood it based on the
| conversation with the guy.
|
| Most of the products he is paying for either a) reduce
| labor costs (like a cell based system that distributes
| pesticide) or b) reduces the risk of product loss (cherries
| being insanely delicate and sensitive to subtle changes in
| temperature and humidity).
|
| Because he is paying for the products as-a-service, he
| really doesn't care about being locked in on the equipment
| so long as they pay for themselves.
| piyh wrote:
| Yields per acre has been growing linearly for 60 years. It
| has doubled since 1975. It's largely competitive, not
| exploitive growth.
|
| https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/w
| p...
| kristjansson wrote:
| > Fertilizer is applied so precisely that the soil generally
| remains unchanged at the end of the growing season; neither
| depleted or over fertilized.
|
| That's astounding. Do they apply fertilizer throughout the
| lifecycle or just at the beginning? Does the balance hold
| counting irrigation run-off too?
| aeternum wrote:
| Many states now require normal irrigation runoff to be
| collected in a reservoir and reused. It's something like
| the first 2" of water, which covers normal irrigation and
| most rainfall.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Do you have a reference, that sounds interesting and some
| cursory searching didn't locate anything obvious.
| Loughla wrote:
| Throughout the lifecyle. There is no irrigation beyond
| natural irrigation in my part of the country. They clay
| soil is pretty good at holding onto moisture. But they do
| factor is runoff. They also use the weather cycle to their
| advantage, and do not apply near rain events.
| markdown wrote:
| > The gentleman who rents our family farm
|
| It isn't your family farm anymore. In fact it's nobody's
| family farm. It's just farmland.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What were you trying to achieve with this comment?
|
| 'our family farm' is a pretty clear indication of the
| property rights and that gives the OP every right to refer
| to it as that.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Vertical farming for for produce. It's entirely different
| from row cropping commodity crops.
| legitster wrote:
| Family farm operations astound me.
|
| The amount of things your _average_ farmer has to understand
| astounds me - finance, labor management, investing, market
| conditions, futures, contract negotiation. And then _on top
| of that_ , mastery of up-to-date farming technology.
|
| Even a modest 100 acre operation can be a multi-million
| dollar enterprise designed to eke out cents on the dollar.
| htag wrote:
| There is a massive difference between a 100 acre farm and a
| 11k acre farm.
|
| A 100 acre farm (producing generic commodity crops) won't
| have be able to afford fully modern equipment described
| higher in the comment chain. Even with mostly 20th century
| equipment you'll be surprised at the ratio of total assets
| to annual profit for a 100 acre farm. The numbers might be
| $3M-9M of assets for $100k-300k profit.
|
| The economies of scale conspire to push farms to
| consolidation. The equipment that increases productivity
| will receive higher usage rates, so capital investments are
| more efficient. If you have anything between 80-5000 acres
| you will clearly be better off liquidating everything and
| playing the markets. It'll be less work, safer, and more
| profitable. The family farm died in the dust bowl.
| legitster wrote:
| This is only true if we are only talking commodity crops.
| But the _average_ farm in the us is still only ~400
| acres.
|
| For food crops you can still do pretty well on a 100 acre
| farm. Berries/fruits/vegetables/etc. Especially if you
| live in a community with access to distribution for said
| crops.
|
| I live in an area with a lot of food ag and it's not
| uncommon for farms of just a couple dozen acres to pay
| the bills.
| mcguire wrote:
| If the things I've seen are right, most of the smaller
| farms like this are side-gigs: the household adults have
| day jobs.
| legitster wrote:
| Sure. My parents have a couple of acres of orchard on
| their property they pay someone to professionally manage.
| If they get $5k a year from it they are pretty happy.
|
| There are also a lot of small farms that are run by
| teachers (works well with the summers off).
|
| But I think you would find that anything over 50 acres in
| an area with distribution options (either close to a
| packer for that product or urban area) CAN be a full time
| job if you know what you are doing and are willing to
| work that hard.
| phpnode wrote:
| No one is pulling $100k profit from 100 acres, that's
| basically impossible
| helij wrote:
| Of course they are. Raspberries[0].
|
| [0]https://www.canr.msu.edu/foodsystems/uploads/files/Eco
| nomics...
| bluGill wrote:
| Many of them are - because the land is long paid off
| (often been in the family for 100+ years). If you have to
| make payments (other than taxes) then you need a lot more
| land to extract a living wage.
| kickout wrote:
| Oh its possible, just not with non organic corn/soy. 100
| acres of pumpkins might clear $1M though (yes, decorative
| pumpkins)
| legitster wrote:
| Pumpkins man!
|
| I helped out a guy from church once who had just switched
| over two acres to pumpkins. He said he _netted_ 10k an
| acre that year selling them to local pumpkin patches with
| almost no work.
|
| Next year he had 20 acres.
| shagie wrote:
| As an aside, you can some browse supporting information
| at https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/
|
| For example, Wisconsin - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statis
| tics_by_State/Wisconsin/Publ...
|
| > The number of farms in the United States for 2021 is
| estimated at 2,012,050, down 6,950 farms from 2020. The
| number of farms increased in all sales classes except
| $1,000-$9,999, $100,000-$249,999, and $1,000,000 or more.
| In 2021, 51.0 percent of all farms had less than $10,000
| in sales and 81.5 percent of all farms had less than
| $100,000 in sales. In 2021, 7.4 percent of all farms had
| sales of $500,000 or more.
|
| That 51% with less than $10k sales suggests a lot of
| hobby farms.
| ilyt wrote:
| Yup, over last ~25 years my dad (on ~10 hectare/25 acre
| of land, mix of fruits/vegetables/grains) went from "well
| off" to "barely getting by", to "just sell off land for
| housing development and get a normal job".
|
| Kinda sad how the the government subsidizes farming in a
| way that basically small farmers don't have place in the
| market.
| Loughla wrote:
| You are correct.
|
| The 580 acres we rent was enough for my grandfather to
| support a family of 10. Today, I could support my family
| of 3 with that many acres if I ran a show farm near an
| urban center. But as a working farm it is unfeasible to
| support a family.
|
| It's sad. 500 acres used to be a decent sized operation.
| Now, 10k is a starting out size.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm going to slightly disagree with "it's sad" part;
| understanding it's unfortunate on local / personal scale,
| food getting cheaper is what allows all of us here at
| hacker news to do _something else_ rather than cultivate
| food as primary preoccupation of majority of population
| :- /
| triyambakam wrote:
| Are you saying that it takes more land to support the
| same number of people? If so, why?
|
| Edit: maybe I'm mixing up the meaning of support here. Do
| you mean support as in financial support through the
| farm's profit, or sustenance support, i.e. feeding the
| family from the farm?
| comfypotato wrote:
| Profit, in dollars, per acre has gone down. You need more
| acres for the same profit. Modern ag-tech is much more
| efficient.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I assume you're getting at the major corporate farms
| exerting a downward pressure on prices, which is thus
| lowering the profit per acre?
| antisthenes wrote:
| No need to reinvent the wheel:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
| comfypotato wrote:
| The biggest factor is technology. The same capital can
| produce more food. I think that's what you're talking
| about but not really sure. It's a good thing for everyone
| but the farmers. The cost of food is one of the few
| things that has significantly gone down relative to
| minimum wage in the US.
|
| Supply has gone up more than demand. Profit margins have
| gone down.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| I believe he is saying the COGS doesn't work out in favor
| of small farms against bigger ag-corps.
|
| Those bigger operations can afford to reinvest in
| technology and evolve to do more with less (people).
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| 100 acres of farmland only requires 1 Ox 100 days of a
| year!
| theshrike79 wrote:
| No matter what you think about Jeremy Clarkson as a person,
| Clarkson's Farm on Prime is a pretty eye-opening view to
| British farming.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > The company's total revenue for the first three quarters of
| last year was $10 million, but most of that was used on up to
| $7 million in severance payments when it fired two executives.
|
| Farms also don't have boards...
| steveylang wrote:
| Maybe the answer is to turn your indoor crops into juice
| packets, and charge customers $700 for a machine to squeeze the
| juice out of them.
| smileysteve wrote:
| You're missing the important part, the LEDs and Hydroponics
| theoretically reduce the inputs (80% less water is often a
| figure used) and time to market - grow lights potentially mean
| 4-5x as much grow time in the winter; but maybe < 2x in summer.
| Symmetry wrote:
| A plant's ability to make sure of sunlight saturates at about
| half the brightness of full daylight and it only absorbs light
| in half the spectrum of sunlight so if you had magical 100%
| efficient solar panels and LEDs you could roughly quadruple the
| effective area you have under cultivation if you put solar
| panels on top then four layers of growing plants. But of course
| solar panels and LEDs are very far from perfectly efficient so
| yeah, you're better off with the greenhouse until we get cheap
| fusion power or something.
| inasio wrote:
| Some of our local farms do corn mazes around Thanksgiving. You
| can see from above (done) that the mazes make Disney figures or
| cool patterns. A friend of mine showed me how they do it, it's
| basically a program that goes on the GPS in their tractor and
| controls how they plant corn over a few acres, completely
| automated.
| 7952 wrote:
| It could be quite refreshing to be in an industry where
| technology can give predictable improvement in profit. You
| increase yield by x% and that pays for the technology and
| generates a profit.
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| > So what you paid for as an investor was a bunch of R&D
| research on how to replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs.
| (The fact that there are investor decks out there pitching that
| energy costs could be offset by investments in solar panels is
| laughably hilarious.).
|
| Some of those already existing greenhouses are using LEDs to
| augment natural sunlight. [0]
|
| So it doesn't seem too far fetched to me. The gamble wasn't to
| replace (free) sunlight with (paid) LEDs. The core idea is
| stacking farms on top each other, hoping the reduced land
| (area) requirement vs increased energy cost might pay off.
|
| Turns out land isn't that short, transportation not too
| expensive and energy not that cheap.
|
| [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/glowing-dutch-
| greenhou...
| mediaman wrote:
| What's crazy is that all these variables were known ahead of
| time.
|
| What is the cost of real estate in rural upstate New York?
| It's really not that bad! (About $10k per acre, based on a
| brief search, for land about 280 miles away from Manhattan. A
| truck could make a delivery in six hours or so.)
|
| So why spend millions in capital expenditures on fancy
| stacked farms with high tech intense lighting, in order to
| cut a few tens of thousands of dollars in real estate costs?
|
| The argument was that logistics costs were high. That's kind
| of true if you're on the east coast, and your alternative is
| importing from Mexico or California.
|
| It's not true at all if you can get produce from a
| conventional hydroponic operation six hours away by truck.
|
| Moreover, it's not like conventional hydroponic operations
| didn't exist, and this was some sort of tail risk that was
| unexpected. The conventional hydroponic operations already
| existed! They've been in business for years. All the founders
| or investors had to do was drive a few hours to go visit
| them. Or pick up the phone.
| ilyt wrote:
| > So why spend millions in capital expenditures on fancy
| stacked farms with high tech intense lighting, in order to
| cut a few tens of thousands of dollars in real estate
| costs?
|
| _and_ ongoing maintenace. I 'd imagine harvesting crops
| from flat piece of land is also cheaper than from vertical
| stack.
| [deleted]
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > They've been in business for years. All the founders or
| investors had to do was drive a few hours to go visit them.
| Or pick up the phone.
|
| The aim for venture capitalists is _necessarily_ to make
| risky, long-tail bets that have little chance of paying
| off; and that incumbents find too risky.
|
| Sure, this bubble has popped, but what success in this case
| might have looked like is grocery stores selling mass-
| produced microgreen salads (that can't be reasonably
| transported without bruising) which were grown upstairs.
|
| It's a reasonable criticism that VCs don't understand
| agriculture well enough to estimate the risk of "moonshot"
| style initiatives in that area. But criticizing them for
| "not picking up the phone and talking to existing
| operations" is kind of missing the point. _Of course_ the
| existing operators are going to say it won 't work.
| wpietri wrote:
| > But criticizing them for "not picking up the phone and
| talking to existing operations" is kind of missing the
| point. Of course the existing operators are going to say
| it won't work.
|
| This is true but irrelevant. The important part is asking
| them _why_ it won 't work and then seeing if that's
| correct. VCs are supposed to invest in _risky_ things,
| not _futile_ things.
|
| Of course, as with WeWork, there's a big gap between what
| VCs are supposed to do in terms of due diligence and what
| they actually do.
| bluGill wrote:
| VCs had so much money that they couldn't do that work.
| They have to invest all that money someplace no matter
| what, even if a moment's thought would show it was a bad
| investment because they need to show a return on
| investment, and sitting on a lot of cash isn't showing a
| return.
|
| This is one way the little guy can beat the market: you
| are allowed to sit out the market for obviously flawed
| things. Beware though, that thinking is also why many
| little guys didn't get rich on Amazon, Microsoft, Apple,
| Google, and the other big names that at one time looked
| like bad investments.
| hef19898 wrote:
| In the last decade or so, VCs have been less interested
| in finding the next Facebook or Apple or Google, but
| rather something they could _sell_ as such. So they
| always seemed to fund the same kind of founder, the same
| great kind of vision for the future. They did so long
| enough to keep the lights on until an IPO, or SPAC as of
| late. Now that this route is basically dead, they seem to
| reevaluate their portfolios differently. And that might
| actually include the non-marketing side of the due
| dilligence nobody seems to have done so far.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Sure, risk profiles in a a high-interest rate environment
| function differently from those in a "here's some money
| at ~0% interest" one. And I wouldn't be surprised by ag-
| tech being off the table for a few years in portfolios
| due to the fact that it's not well understood by many
| VCs.
| mediaman wrote:
| The _reason_ for the long-tail bets being improbable is
| important, though!
|
| If the reason is because it takes lots of capital, or
| because there are network effects (e.g., AirBnB, eBay),
| or because it's a winner takes all market, or some key
| piece of technology has to be proven out, then sure,
| shoot your shot, someone will get the bullseye and win
| the day and it'll be a cakewalk raising the next fund.
|
| But if it's improbable because nobody wants it, that's
| not the same thing.
|
| That's why a bet being improbable should not be _the_
| reason to invest in something.
|
| A VC may look at a bet and say, "sure, the win condition
| is unlikely, but lots of people will want this, so if it
| wins, it's worth billions." And maybe they write a check.
|
| But if another VC looks at a deal and says "it's not
| likely to work, and also, even in the optimistic case
| this is worse than existing solutions," then there is no
| market problem being solved. This second VC will likely
| be leaning more on their management fee than their carry
| to pay the mooring fees for their yacht.
|
| And a phone call to that farmer would have told them that
| while microgreens don't ship well over very long
| distances, they do fine in climate controlled trucks over
| a couple hundred miles. Part of a VC's job is to de-risk
| investment decisions by validating key assumptions.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I wonder what the net efficiency of operating LED lighting from
| solar power would be. The obvious advantage of traditional farms
| is that some inputs, most notably light, are free. But if you
| consider solar panel efficiency, the cost of mining raw materials
| and manufacturing panels, LEDs, and power components, I wonder
| how much worse indoor farming is. Is it 10% efficient? 50%
| efficient?
| mannerheim wrote:
| The article says five acres of solar panels for one of lettuce.
| That seems to imply a total efficiency of 20%.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| With an solar cell with an infinite number of layers the
| maximum efficiency for normal sunlight is 68.7% to go from
| light->electricity[1]. Real cells don't have infinite numbers
| of layers, so conversion efficiency is around 25% for single-
| layer monocrystalline silicon cells. Those have a maximum
| possible efficiency of 32%.
|
| Current LEDs are around 40-50% efficient. So 45% efficient LED
| * 25% efficient solar = about 12% total efficiency.
|
| [1] A. De Vos & H. Pauwels (1981). "On the Thermodynamic Limit
| of Photovoltaic Energy Conversion". Appl. Phys. 25 (2):
| 119-125. Bibcode:1981ApPhy..25..119D. doi:10.1007/BF00901283.
| S2CID 119693148.
| londons_explore wrote:
| However, you also get the uplift in efficiency from the fact
| plants prefer certain wavelengths of light, and have nearly
| no use for others (eg. green). And LED's are good at
| producing certain wavelengths of light.
|
| Not sure how to calculate that...
| [deleted]
| hommelix wrote:
| Thanks for the numbers on LED lighting. As a comparison,
| photosynthesis efficiency is about 5% [1]. One could at first
| think that 12% is better than 5%, but the plant still need to
| grow even with LED lighting.
|
| The first step in the photosynthesis is the light absorption.
| The loss there is due to the limited light absorption (range
| 400 - 700nm). So maybe this step could be improved by using
| LED lighting dialled in to the range of the plant. The rest
| of the loss chain would remain mostly the same.
|
| Doing the math with the wikipedia numbers
| Plant growing in open field ===========================
| 0.53*0.7*0.76*0.32*0.6 = 0.05413632 ==> 5.4%
| Plant growing with LED lighting
| =============================== Considering 100 % LED
| light absorption by the plant (which is an exaggerated
| hypothesis) and the 12% LED lighting efficiency
| 0.12*1.0*0.7*0.76*0.32*0.6 = 0.01225728 ==> 1.2%
| efficiency
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
| toss1 wrote:
| I wonder about using partial LEDs and also solar concentraters
| and fiber-optic light pipes. Design the building deliberately
| with a curved-window face like the building that melts cars
| [0], but capture and redirect the sunlight. Might even be
| better to use a mirror+pipe system than fiber optics often used
| in lightpipes. Done well, should cut the electricity bill
| massively
|
| But, from the article, it seems like the biggest bill to be cut
| is the 7-figure executive salaries. They are obviously not
| worth it.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679
| outworlder wrote:
| I thought about fiber optics too. The thing is, the square
| cube law hits vertical farms(it's even worse when they only
| collect sunlight at their roof). There's some wasted energy
| in standard farms (the spaces between plants) so I guess it's
| not as clear cut. But as soon as you start to stack layers it
| starts to become a problem.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Having spent some of my time in high school (in Nebraska) working
| in a greenhouse, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out the
| value proposition for most of these companies. I kind of wonder
| if this was all motivated by that movie "The Martian" where Matt
| Damon was growing potatoes on Mars with hydrazine.
| ausbah wrote:
| "In theory, there are enormous benefits to indoor farms. They
| often use 90% less water than traditional farms; right now,
| most lettuce in the country is grown in drought-stricken
| California and Arizona. Growing inside can avoid outbreaks of
| E. coli and diseases like a plant virus that recently
| devastated lettuce grown in California's Salinas Valley,
| pushing up prices. Indoor farming also eliminates pesticides
| and reduces fertilizer and keeps it out of rivers. Lettuce
| grown near Boston or New York City can avoid traveling
| thousands of miles from Western fields, saving gas and staying
| fresh longer. It's possible to grow delicate, flavorful foods
| that otherwise wouldn't survive a long trip through the supply
| chain. And as climate change makes extreme heat, drought, and
| flooding more likely, growing inside could become a necessity
| for some crops."
| dpflan wrote:
| The Netherlands is mentioned once with a link another article. If
| its greenhouse technology is so good, were there any viable
| innovations building upon their success? There seems to be a lot
| of informed, quality discussion by HNers, are any knowledge of
| the Netherlands situation?
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| Interviewed a couple of years ago at a vertical farming startup.
| All the usual talk about making the world a better place through
| technology (and machine learning for some reason). I asked where
| the electricity came from, turns out they were literally burning
| coal to grow some salad not very efficiently.
|
| Hydroponic farms have been studied for decades, they are super
| optimized but they have their limits as well - see the 10 GBP
| bell peppers in supermarkets today. I would really like to know
| how the numbers look like when comparing traditional hydroponic
| with these hyper-local vertical farms.
| mc32 wrote:
| Multi-story vertical farming doesn't make much sense unless we're
| living underground after a thermonuclear exchange of some sort
| with wide implications.
|
| What may make sense is enabling farming of locally out of season
| crops from "annuals". This already happens but it's not as cost
| competitive as importing from far-away (hemisphere away). Working
| on that makes more sense than trying to farm on multi-floor
| indoor facilities.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also, if transport is really the big concern, shouldn't we work
| on optimizing that? Multiple solutions, from automation, to
| electric vehicles in many ways or even trains. It is not like
| the cargo is that time sensitive and distances that big.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The market already solved this for the high value goods -
| marijuana and tomatoes, which are grown in green houses.
| mc32 wrote:
| There are other things which make sense in greenhouses beside
| high value crops like MJ. Tomatoes as you mentioned, but also
| other fruits and vegetable that would taste better if they
| were bought close to the day they were picked.
|
| However, instead of trying for vertical though could have
| worked on improving how to grow things in greenhouses at
| higher latitudes more economically efficiently and maybe
| expanding the available crops through specialization.
| Oxidation wrote:
| That's pretty glib, because when they built large
| greenhouses, people probably said "the market already solved
| this for high value goods like tomatoes: buy them from Italy
| and use a fast clipper to get them here in time".
|
| Vertical farms probably indeed don't work out in the current
| day where we have sunlight, enough land to use it, and
| transport. Probably most careful analysis would have shown
| that, but, for things where the analysis has wide-enough
| error bars, when money is cheap enough, "the market" shows
| things don't work by incinerating gobs of investor cash and
| falling over. In the cheap-money era we just had, it was
| apparently a worthwhile gamble for some.
|
| And if you're worth billions and get suckered by a chancer
| with a flashy pitch deck to invest in something that could
| have trivially been shown to be economically doomed by some
| random internet-commenter grousing, then honestly you
| deserved to lose the money.
| bluGill wrote:
| The people building green houses did a real market analysis
| and saw that the glib analysis was wrong for their city -
| that is they could find a niche where they could sell for a
| profit. Many of them also started small to verify the niche
| really existed - selling a few from their backyard
| greenhouse, and when demand was proven to exist expanded.
| Oxidation wrote:
| Perhaps, but if you told me a vertical farm only worked
| at a scale above _X_ thousands of square metres due to
| economies of scale, I 'd find that quite plausible. So I
| can see why an investor might not wonder too hard why the
| scale is so large. On the other side, the dream-sellers
| have only until the writing on the wall becomes legible
| to extract the cash, so they can't mess around doing the
| HP garage thing for a decade.
|
| Given the actual consistent result, it's still probably
| on the investors for being credulous marks with a case of
| techno-FOMO and high on their own supply, but I don't
| think it's always been _necessarily_ so simple on the
| face of it to be debunked by a bunch of grouchy Internet
| contrarians in 31 seconds (though probably, again based
| on the result, was always debunkable by decent
| independent due-diligence).
|
| After all, it's not hard to imagine a world where SpaceX
| is a smoking crater in 2015 and we're all going "well
| _obviously_ you couldn 't have landed a rocket, what did
| they think would happen?!". Another example: the jury's
| still out on if Uber's long bet on a pivot into self
| driving taxis can pay off before they bleed out, and you
| can find plenty of "obviously..." analyses saying they'd
| be dead or that they'd be the only transport in town by
| 2020. Neither of those could start in a niche, they were
| all-or-nothing.
|
| It's not unthinkable, to me at least from the outside,
| that vertical farming had a chance of being a capital-
| intensive, high-barrier, high-payoff industry. In that
| I'd be surprised by it about as much as I was by SpaceX's
| technical payoff about 7 years ago: "huh, so that _does_
| work, crazy ".
|
| And all that said, if you're an investor who would rather
| gamble the money than spend a fraction of the promised
| returns on due diligence, then thanks for the trickle-
| down, I suppose. And probably just as well farming isn't
| about to end up in the hands of Farming Uber even faster
| than it already is becoming.
| Depurator wrote:
| In the emergence of new sectors backed by technology focused
| venture capital this scenario is to be expected though.
|
| Often these bubbles are depicted as hype cycles, where you have
| inflated expectations of a particular technology, which show
| disappointing real world performance leading to a dip in
| confidence where ultimately a long term productive solution
| emerges.
|
| Another way to think about this process is to take an
| evolutionary approach to technolgy development. Initially there's
| a lot variation of various firms trying to solve a particular
| problem, each with their own solution based on more or less novel
| technology. The issue is the selection phase where the technolgy
| competes in the real world and compete not only against other
| technological solutions but in a sociotechnical system including
| e.g. regional institutions such as local culture, regulations,
| politics, markets that are often aligned with the existing
| industry. Ultimately one or a few solutions are retained and
| integrated into our collective infrastructure and provide a
| consistant solution to the original problem, and in a
| capitalistic model - profitable returns.
| steponlego wrote:
| It was a stupid idea in the first place. In fact it's so mind-
| bendingly stupid that the classice British comedy show Brass Eye
| parodied it like 30 years ago.
| physicsguy wrote:
| It's not that complicated, you can only easily grow calorie low
| food like lettuce in these conditions, and when energy prices
| rise it is no longer cost effective.
| outworlder wrote:
| I wonder if those startups would have better luck by focusing on
| research and getting a contract from NASA or similar. On Earth
| vertical farms only make sense in very specific niches.
|
| But, if you are not on Earth, then it becomes more interesting.
|
| Research grants wouldn't rise to the crazy VC valuations though.
| Maybe that's why they don't bother.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Former AppHarvest employee (by acquisition). That place was an
| unqualified fuckshow. Not surprising they're being sued for
| fraud.
|
| _"There are many reasons why they're doing it, but one of the
| reasons is because they know that Silicon Valley investors won't
| invest in a farm, but they'll invest in a tech company," says
| Henry Gordon-Smith, founder of Agritecture, a firm that consults
| on urban farming projects. "In reality, these companies overspend
| on R &D by crazy amounts, and then say, 'Oh, shit, that didn't
| work.'"_
|
| This could have been taken from internal communications almost
| verbatim. The CEO straight up cited my former employer's
| acquisition was significantly motivated to position AppHarvest as
| a tech company, rather than an ag company, for the purpose of
| propping up the valuation.
| uberman wrote:
| " _how did investors think that they could find Silicon Valley-
| style returns in . . . lettuce?_ "
|
| That made me laugh
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Just like how they thought they could find returns in Juicero.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Reminds me of East of Eden.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| For some reason that part of the story crosses my mind every
| now and then. The factor of ingenuity requiring appropriate
| timing, how misfortunate can make otherwise good ideas seem
| terrible, how things which once seemed bizarre are
| commonplace today, etc. I really enjoyed that book.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Not without proper carbon taxing and land use taxing.
|
| In a sane world, if vertical farming got even close to
| traditional farming without taxing in soil destruction, water
| table destruction, pesticide impacts, and habitat removal from
| nature, we'd transition rapidly to vertical farming.
|
| Politics is not reality. Neither is economics.
| Ekaros wrote:
| How do you supply enough power to vertical farms without
| those same externalities? And then how green is it to build
| and run them? Considering all the equipment, infra and
| inputs. It is not like that stuff magically comes from thin
| air with vertical farming.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Renewables, but then you might as well farm on farmland and
| haul to urban areas with electric trucks.
|
| Vertical farms are another solution looking for a problem
| (unless you're truly land constrained, like the Maldives)
| pwthornton wrote:
| The biggest argument for vertical farms is that you'd be
| able to bring high-quality year around produce to more
| places. We do have most produce year around, but the
| quality of it varies wildly depending on the time of
| year. Most produce shipped from California and Mexico
| during growing off seasons is quite subpar.
|
| But this is an argument for quality, of which people
| would have to be willing to pay a premium for. I could
| see high-end restaurants and others wiling to pay for
| this.
|
| Greenhouses already extend the growing season. This would
| ideally be able to do that further.
| vanattab wrote:
| I mean traditional farming and photosynthesis from the
| sun is the original form of renewable solar power we have
| had since the birth of civilization.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| True! But you can do some fun acts like using heat pumps
| in certain climates (the Netherlands, for example) to
| extend growing seasons or create them (if they don't
| exist) all year long.
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holla
| nd-...
| Vecr wrote:
| Nuclear power. I don't think there's any other alternative
| if you really wanted to grow anything other than "green
| water" (i.e. leafs like lettuce) for large portions of the
| planet.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Many of the inputs are reduced; You use the natural gas to
| make energy for LEDs to decrease your time to market by
| increasing sun. By circulating the water you save 80% of
| it.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| what if I told you that to be actually sustainable at
| current population levels long term, we'd need to surrender
| 70% or more of currently used pastureland and farmland?
|
| Oh wait, we aren't going to stay at current population
| levels. Still at least have, what, another 4-5 billion
| people to crank out before we allegedly plateau?
|
| Wind power doesn't take up a lot of space, especially
| offshore. Solar? There's this thing called a desert.
|
| People, we are in the midst of a mass extinction. We NEED
| that land for biodiversity. Mass extinctions occurred over
| long periods of time that enabled evolutionary adapatation
| to some degree. We're doing ours over the span of a
| thousand years. Most mass extinctions at least get to
| "experiment" will all Earth's land surface to find new
| adapted animals. We've taken a huge portion of the world's
| biodiverse and fertile lands and industrialized them.
|
| Otherwise, yeah, we'll have vertical farms... in space,
| because we won't be on earth.
|
| I guess you think solutions to traditional farming, which
| is unsustainable, will come out of THIN AIR.
| ulber wrote:
| Maybe we don't, but we should let market forces sort it out
| by doing our best to tax the externalities of power
| generation too.
| ilyt wrote:
| That's suggesting vertical farming is desirable outcome where
| it really isn't under most constraints. "Just" moving to
| hydroponics gives you most of the benefits (less
| pesticide/water usage, higher yield per area) and with birth
| rates stagnating "just" converting some of current fields
| would free up the area for mode wild nature.
| Hypocritelefty wrote:
| [dead]
| ilamont wrote:
| Greater fool theory at work until the music stops. A story as
| old as the concept of investing.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Not surprised but this also misses some of the big wins of
| vertical farms - big increases in sustainability. Money is not
| everything - and if it can be profitable (even if it is less
| profitable than outside) it could potentially still make sense.
|
| Realistically though I think this will not see bigger use until
| we actually get fusion power working and/or it becomes more
| useful on places like the Moon or in environments where there is
| far less natural sunlight (like very northern latitudes)
| julienchastang wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but I saw this video [0] about a retired
| postal worker in Nebraska who grows citrus fruit in an
| ingeniously designed greenhouse heated with geothermal. (Not
| magma geothermal, but earth tubes geothermal that treats the
| ground as an infinite thermodynamic reservoir. Works in the same
| way as a refrigerator.) Can anyone here comment on if this could
| be done at scale? Could the economics be feasible?
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_3_gsgsnk
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I recall that video. I wonder how the math compares of their
| costs during the summer, vs the cost of transportation.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Sure, you need to avoid frost in the greenhouse; which there is
| an insulation factor from the walls and glass; and that's only
| 37 degree f; a lot less than human habitable spaces.
|
| Does it scale? Profitably, no, because transportation of
| oranges from California and Florida to Nebraska is currently
| quick and cheap.
| julienchastang wrote:
| The issue of temperature control is covered extensively in
| the video as are some economic concerns (he sells oranges at
| NE farmer's markets!). What I wonder is if this could be a
| viable business. Land and possibly water could be cheap in
| that part of the country. Energy costs are negligible due to
| the design. Of course, there would have to be a big upfront
| capital expenditure and some time to get something like this
| going.
| miguelazo wrote:
| Anyone know how to get in on that AppHarvest fraud lawsuit?
| college_physics wrote:
| All bubbles have something wasteful about them as they do not
| represent calculated risk-taking but rather a suspension of
| healthy skepticism that is driven by informational echo chambers,
| ultra-cheap money and other such degenerate macro phenomena. This
| leads to more widespread failures than what is warranted for a
| given quantum of risk because they are all copycat failures.
|
| It will be interesting to see which of the countless tech-related
| bubbles of the last decade will grow roots. Vertical farming is
| not the worst offender, hopefully something has been learned in
| the process.
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