Hacker News Reader

Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's in Australia...

> Average costs of production were up sharply for tomatoes to $843 per tonne

http://www.ausveg.com.au/resources/statistics/financial-perf...

wow, 10x more expensive? Well, 7% ROI isn't awful for them, though that's still assuming a 100% profit margins. If margins are less than 50% they're again losing to just investing in index funds.

It's also not unreasonable to assume that the cost of traditional ways to grow tomatoes will go up further, due to water becoming even scarcer, fossil fuel use being heavily regulated, etc.

But more importantly, the second of these plants will probably be cheaper than $200m, and the 50th will be a lot cheaper.

When the Ogallala Aquifer runs dry, America's vast everythingbasket will be finished. Even without fossil fuel regulations or even climate change itself, our unsustainable consumption will inevitably require solutions such as these.

Well the US also has some of the largest fresh water lakes in the world. I happen to live in Chicago right next to Lake Michigan (as a simple example). The Romans didn't have near the tech we have no a days and managed to create some impressive aqueducts. Given the extreme need, we would figure something out.

The Ogallala Aquifer has more water than Lake Huron and Canada has a rather large stake in the great lakes. So yes, it may add decades, but it's not a long term solution.

...but the rational, sensible solution would be ruined by NIMBYs and political corruption and horribly exploitative rent-seeking.

You almost have to fix the problem before anyone even realizes it is a problem to get it done at a reasonable cost.

There is one thing an index fund doesn't give you: food. So it seems logical to compare it to conventional greenhouses instead of comparing it to financial investments.

The food is the return on investment, so it is completely appropriate to compare it to a standard financial instrument. An index fund gives you money, which you can use to buy food.

You can only buy food if someone made that food, no?

There are a lot of tomatos grown is places that are not Australia.

Putting money in a financial investment ultimately means lending it to other people so they can make stuff, and it's perfectly logical to compare it against a production investment where you make stuff on your own.

Of course, if all tomato growers closed shop and put their money in index funds, we wouldn't have tomatoes any more. But that would make the price of tomatoes shoot up and the return on index funds crash down, making tomatoes a better investment than index funds.

> Of course, if all tomato growers closed shop and put their money in index funds, we wouldn't have tomatoes any more. But that would make the price of tomatoes shoot up and the return on index funds crash down, making tomatoes a better investment than index funds.

Unless, of course, angry hordes murder you because they tend to dislike people who watch famines as a normal market mechanism and suggest diversifying into cakes.

It seems a dick move to murder someone for not growing tomatoes when it's pretty easy for the mob to just grow the tomatoes themselves.

I thought the gist of the article was that it isn't easy to grow tomatoes in a desert.

Pretty sure it was a reference to Marie-Antoinette and the french revolution.

Yes, just poking a bit of fun at the detached-sounding wording.

I'm having a soft brain day it seems!

Funny, but unlikely. Farmers moving on to better-paying jobs is a process that takes decades, as we saw during the 19th and 20th century. It takes a sudden drop in the food supply to cause a famine.

Well, you're looking at the average cost to produce a ton of tomatoes. The average price received was 1,443 AUD (http://www.ausveg.com.au/resources/statistics/financials.htm).

How Sundrop Farms compare to the average production cost at 843 AUD/ton would be interesting though.

There seems to also be huge regional differences, in 2008 the price received for a ton of tomatoes was 224 AUD in Victoria and 1809 AUD in Queensland. (http://ausveg.com.au/LiteratureRetrieve.aspx?ID=86338)

There is also significantly less risk of the Tomato market crashing, and the potential to sell carbon credits if that becomes a thing in Australia.

Or, you know, the ideal notion that having a planet to spend $10 in is better than having a ruined hellscape to spend $11 in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com