[HN Gopher] Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after foundin...
___________________________________________________________________
Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-
farming business
Author : ignored
Score : 143 points
Date : 2023-04-28 05:46 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.just-food.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.just-food.com)
| shubhamjain wrote:
| 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
| narrator wrote:
| How about retooling to specialize in crops that don't need sun,
| like mushrooms?
| piva00 wrote:
| Mushrooms are very very poor in calories per volume/weight.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein
| (fungal protein)?
|
| 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.
| clearcarbon wrote:
| 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| You can't just get energy from nothing, not even with
| mushrooms.
| seunosewa wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| Minor nitpick; the title might be better as Upward Farms closes
| ten years after starting _their_ vertical farm business.
|
| As it stands the title reads a little as though Upward Farms was
| the OG progenitor of vertical farms, whereas, from the article:
|
| > The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before
| transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms.
|
| As prior art in the vertical farm game though, consider
| verticalfarms.com.au [1] in Queensland Australia that started out
| back in 2009.
|
| Also Australian based stackedfarm.com [2] is building out and
| expanding in size ATM with future plans so there's still life
| left in the domain.
|
| [1] https://verticalfarms.com.au/about-us
|
| [1a] http://player.vimeo.com/video/273235965
|
| [2] https://stackedfarm.com/
| riffraff wrote:
| of all places, how does vertical farming make sense in
| Australia? Surely there's an enormous amount of horizontal
| space that you could use?
| bombcar wrote:
| The whole "elevator pitch" idea is that you could put these
| vertical farms _inside_ the major cities.
|
| But that's not really needed unless the city is on the moon,
| and even then, you have lots of space if you just build a bit
| of transportation.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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.
| azmodeus wrote:
| I think in simpler terms these ideas are successfully applied
| in green houses
| BMc2020 wrote:
| _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.
| Guthur wrote:
| Many countries have been forced into mono culture plantation
| crops by IMF and World Bank, due BS globalisation comparative
| advantage policies.
|
| There is plenty of arable land it's just devouted to non staple
| production. And so they're stuck buying food with dollars they
| have no control over.
| Guthur wrote:
| 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 :)
| dukeyukey wrote:
| 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.
| lifeonlars wrote:
| 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.
| xtian wrote:
| 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.
| orwin wrote:
| Did you meant WTO? I don't think the IMF can force a country
| to specialize, but a 'free' market will (at least according
| to Smith).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I don't think the IMF can force a country to specialize
|
| Oh they absolutely can and did that as a result of the
| obligations that came with accepting IMF emergency loans.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > 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.
| Jsharm wrote:
| Surely they threw in the trowel?
|
| I'll see myself out...
| meigwilym wrote:
| Seed funding wasn't enough?
| cwillu wrote:
| Turns out founder bullshit is not a viable substitute for
| manure.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| The tribbles began sprouting when the founders talked about
| plant plant plans.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| [flagged]
| johndunne wrote:
| A little peppering of humour in the comments doesn't
| hurt?
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| I've heard of raddish.com before, it's supposed to be
| spicy at times.
| nprateem wrote:
| > By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key
| functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising,
| and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.
|
| I think this is MBA for they farmed animals
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Sounds more like MBAspeak for, "We farm VCs".
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >plants compete for light, and not root space
|
| Isn't this common knowledge?
|
| 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| metalspot wrote:
| > hardly any agriculture is sustainable
|
| 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.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| Farming started in Fertile Crescent thousands of years
| ago. If you visit the region today it's all but fertile.
| Sand, sand and more sand.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-
| diamo....
|
| > 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.
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| yongjik wrote:
| 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.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| 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._
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| 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.
| kiba wrote:
| 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.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| [dead]
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| >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.
| echelon wrote:
| > sustainable
|
| 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.
| hosh wrote:
| 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?
| alpinemeadow wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| abakker wrote:
| 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.
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
| abakker wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than
| fixing our problems?
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| ethanbond wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| kiba wrote:
| Too many people make it a dichotomy between staying here
| and colonizing. Why not both?
| Alupis wrote:
| Colonize Mars all you want - but Mars dies when Earth
| dies; they are both tied to the same sun and will suffer
| similar fates.
| dpflan wrote:
| Check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34963057
| From a previous article discussion on the vertical farming
| bubble popping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34959649
|
| """ 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.
|
| ... Here is a link:
| https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm
|
| """
| xyzzyz wrote:
| 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"?
| monetus wrote:
| 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.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > 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.
| antisthenes wrote:
| 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.
| peteradio wrote:
| We already use computer vision to sort tomatoes at scale,
| I'm not sure if requiring computer vision precludes a
| successful automation.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| 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.
| whitemary wrote:
| 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.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Centralized state control has no obligation to the
| environment either.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| 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
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I see the word "abolition" in the first sentence of that
| article.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Did you finish the sentence and get to "abandonment of
| large-scale organization"? The state isn't the one
| abolishing things in that system.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| If you don't want to use the phrase "the state," that's
| fine.
|
| Whatever powerful entity that determines the laws has no
| obligation to the environment.
| namdnay wrote:
| 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"
| asdfman123 wrote:
| If you just give my group absolute power, everything will
| improve.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| 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.
| greenonions wrote:
| 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.
| davehcker wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > 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)
| EntrePrescott wrote:
| > 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.
| davehcker wrote:
| We need to update the FAQ. Now we offer a fixed
| subscription pricing model.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| George83728 wrote:
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| This sounds like an interesting intro, but tell us more!
|
| What exactly do you offer / sell / solve?
|
| How are you different from "VC-backed vertical indoor farming
| companies"?
|
| It's unclear from your message.
| davehcker wrote:
| > What exactly do you offer / sell / solve?
|
| 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.
| ImPleadThe5th wrote:
| This is super interesting to me! Super cool balance between
| sustainability, biology, and tech.
|
| Not to Shill, but are you planning on hiring anytime soon?
| davehcker wrote:
| Thanks. My email address is in my HN bio.
| robomartin wrote:
| 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| 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.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| 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
| George83728 wrote:
| 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.)
| svnt wrote:
| Hear me out, first you get some cows...
| UpToTheSky wrote:
| Going by that logic, no technological progress would take place
| at all.
| datpiff wrote:
| Progress is part keeping-the-things-that-work, part dropping-
| the-things-that-don't
| szundi wrote:
| And adding new ones
| pif wrote:
| > sun light for crying out loud.
|
| Spot on! Plants without solar lights are for labs, not for
| food.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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").
| biorach wrote:
| > 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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).
| biorach wrote:
| > 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| logi2mus wrote:
| Yes so true, I guess there is more money in autonomous robots
| for additional control like weed suppression!
| tagami wrote:
| Fertility isn't "free". You pull nutrients out of the soil
| whenever you harvest.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| biorach wrote:
| >> 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| It is dump enough that it is now actively discouraged by
| German ag-extension services, if an alternative soil
| preparation/seeding method is available.
| biorach wrote:
| 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| >> 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.
| [deleted]
| AYBABTME wrote:
| 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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).
|
| [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.P
| C?locat... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-
| edge/0712/top-agricul... [3]
| https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/foodstuffs
| tfourb wrote:
| 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).
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| Actually we are trying to feed 8 billion people, 21
| billion chicken, 1.4 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep,
| etc: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/livestock-counts
|
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This isn't the gotcha you seem to think. You're still
| talking about significant inputs of land and human labor
| for lower calorie outputs.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| > 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
| ;-)
|
| [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?l
| ocation...
| biorach wrote:
| > 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.).
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| All over Scotland - which is kind of centred around 55degN,
| 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...?
| vidarh wrote:
| In Norway, Potatoes are grown as far north as the
| Northernmost region of Finnmark, around 70degN, and
| Norway is able to produce more potatoes than are eaten by
| people (Norway still imports potatoes because the growing
| season is short).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Where are you going to get that from? Solar panels...?
|
| The usual answer is: nuclear power that is too cheap to
| meter. Still waiting for it...
| jackmott wrote:
| [dead]
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I've always thought it a bit odd that they picked up steam
| first in the U.S. for this reason.
|
| The economic case is vastly more sensible in Singapore or
| some other city-state.
| [deleted]
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > 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.
| mikeryan wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > NY and LA don't need farms within city limits.
|
| 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...
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| 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.
|
| It reminds me of this couple growing yuzu lemon in NJ and
| selling 5-10x the price to Michelin restaurants in the
| area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwTc5929U5g
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The odd thing is I haven't heard a single one of these
| startups target the luxury market. What you say makes a
| lot of sense.
| szundi wrote:
| This is a misinterpretation of the parent comment. He states
| a lot of these services are free outdoors.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Irrigation; the Colorado River Basin and California River
| basins would like a word, irrigation is not free.
|
| The US also also have a number of places where the soil has
| given way because of poor farming practices.
|
| Also, the dust bowl.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| weberer wrote:
| >pest control
|
| The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer
| need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.
| blincoln wrote:
| 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.
| luma wrote:
| These are not clean rooms and invasive pests absolutely do
| make their way in and then have to be dealt with.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Usually soilless solves a lot of these issues. While the
| pests have lots to munch on, they don't have their usual
| places to lay eggs.
|
| Same for fungi: it's usually brought, or becomes endemic,
| in with the soil.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| 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.
| biorach wrote:
| It's still a highly intensive monoculture in an enclosed
| space - it's still going to be very prone to devastating
| disease outbreaks.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| and spending all your savings on fungicide instead.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Tell me more.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| 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.
|
| _The answer, my friend, is blowin ' in the wind..._
| AlexandrB wrote:
| "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.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powdery_mildew
| lyu07282 wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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'
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > 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.
| lifeonlars wrote:
| > 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| svnt wrote:
| Once a certain level of manufacturing competence is
| distributed throughout the world this need no longer
| exists. Information travels faster than freight.
| smolder wrote:
| 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.
| lifeonlars wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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 Gotschl (syntropic
| agriculture) comes to mind in tropical climates, or Mark
| Shepard in mid-west US.
| mdf wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
| netbioserror wrote:
| 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.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| Only the marketers are saying it's a panacea.
|
| 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.
| perrygeo wrote:
| 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.
| lifeonlars wrote:
| 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.
| shusson wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Neuroscience, architecture.
|
| No farmers. At least the marketing dude sold food before.
|
| "How hard can it be?"
| efields wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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.
| xjlin0 wrote:
| > The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best
| we can
|
| Hmmm, really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
| hedora wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-gree...
|
| Also, people ridiculously overestimate the percentage of food's
| carbon footprint that comes food transportation:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...
|
| (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.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| > 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| gtop3 wrote:
| 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.
| justincormack wrote:
| Netherlands uses gas heating often, to heat and increase
| co2 levels.
| scythe wrote:
| >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.
|
| Now, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizers...
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| neild wrote:
| 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.
| hosh wrote:
| That is presuming that the supply of blemished foods gets
| completely used up by food processors, and that's not
| true.
|
| https://www.usda.gov/foodlossandwaste/faqs
| scythe wrote:
| >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.
| atlantic wrote:
| > 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >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.
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| +1 All of what you mentioned are a form of efficiency
| observed over long enough timelines
| cyanydeez 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.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Yeah, this is the quiet part that nobody wants to say out
| loud.
|
| There are two groups of people who go big on vertical and
| indoor farming. The first is people who wanna grow drugs and
| perhaps some other super high dollar, super labor intensive
| things.
|
| The second seemingly smaller group is people who want to
| institute policy that would greatly disrupt the rural to
| urban movement of food and goods in general and want to ease
| the pain of that.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I find myself extremely doubtful that the second group
| actually exists in any numbers big enough to matter for
| anything.
| delecti wrote:
| I think you're probably right, but at the same time, I'm
| finding myself a member of that second group now that
| it's been framed that way.
| barney54 wrote:
| "Strangled by fascism?" Care to elaborate what you mean?
| Timon3 wrote:
| >Care to elaborate what you mean?
|
| My non-American interpretation of the use of fascism in
| this sense is relating to:
|
| - taking away rights (e.g. abortion, and please don't argue
| technicalities)
|
| - banning medical intervention which provably increases
| quality of life and decreases likelihood of self-harm
|
| - suppressing dissident literature (e.g. recent "temporary"
| bans of books on Rosa Parks)
|
| - lowering the threshold of the death penalty
|
| - trying to introduce the death penalty for more things,
| especially what they call "grooming"
|
| - associating entire groups of minorities with this idea of
| "grooming"
|
| - aggressively suppressing and trying to exclude dissident
| politicians (e.g. the "Tennessee Three" or currently Zooey
| Zephyr)
|
| - attempting to overthrow an election by both casting doubt
| in bad faith and literally working out plans on how to use
| a coup to take over power
| kube-system wrote:
| You're got it backwards, that's the " _urban_ America
| interpretation of fascism ".
| Timon3 wrote:
| I think I know where I come from better than you, and it
| is my interpretation.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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
| Timon3 wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35742855
| Timon3 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Any further questions?
| kube-system wrote:
| I see what you mean now, thanks.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Is elaboration necessary?
|
| 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."
|
| SOURCES:
|
| - https://world101.cfr.org/historical-context/world-
| war/what-f...
|
| - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
| barney54 wrote:
| Elaboration is necessary because those things aren't
| happening in rural America. It happens in people's fever
| dreams, but not in the real world.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| I don't understand.
|
| Are you saying that rural America does NOT vote for far
| right candidates that are overwhelmingly...
|
| - anti-immigrant - pro-nationalistic - militaristic
|
| If so, please provide any reading or data you might have
| on the subject. I'd love to read up more on rural
| America.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's how Democrats say "terrorists." It means that there
| are no ethical restrictions on how you behave towards them,
| and that any contact with one of them will mean that there
| are no ethical restrictions on how one should act towards
| _you._
| jabradoodle wrote:
| In that case, care to elaborate what terrorism is used as
| a euphemism for, and by who?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Care to elaborate what you mean?_
|
| 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.
| d00wgnir wrote:
| I hope you're looking forward to eating soylent green in your
| cities, then.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the rate the politics in rural America are being strangled
| by fascism, cities may have an imperative to deprive them of
| their subsidized agriculture_
|
| Our cities have better things to focus on than an identity
| political attack on the folks growing our food.
| swamp40 wrote:
| _> deprive them of their subsidized agriculture_
|
| Yeah, that's not going to work out the way the "cities"
| think.
| daveguy wrote:
| Especially since the only one "considering" this is some
| random hn commenter. Don't fall for the bs.
| millzlane wrote:
| 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.
|
| Maybe the Egyptians did it, maybe not.
| (https://www.ehow.com/facts_7391989_mirror-egyptian-lighting-...)
| But I always wondered why stuff that literally grows on trees
| isn't cheap and abundant.
|
| 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"
| George83728 wrote:
| > _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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > 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.
| fredgrott wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_tube
| afshin wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder comparatively. If you just filled the container with
| let's say canned goods. How long would you need to run it to
| get same output.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| I would think that a greenhouse type roof/sides would remove
| the inefficiencies of sunlight -> solar panels -> LEDs.
|
| Horizontal space is not something we lack, even in most
| marginal areas.
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