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I've spoken to a few people who are interested in applying machine learning to hydroponic farming with the aim of creating vertical farms.

If you could isolate the different rooms sufficiently, you could run machine learning to optimise yield (or Vitamin C).

I have doubts as to the commercial viability of this, as farming is pretty low margin, so the overhead requirements for the capital expenditures would require pretty substantial gains in efficiency, which I think just don't exist.

I have at least one serious potential investor ready for anyone attempting this (vertical farming automation).

Also, I am interested to cooperate on creating reliable contracted urban demand without the need for retail packaging - http://infinite-food.com/ - currently relocating to Shenzhen.

If automated urban vertical farming happens it will probably happen in China because dense/cheap/economies of scale/rising food prices/rapid urbanization/transition toward smaller households/cultural preference for fresh and less processed foods/less regulatory issues.

Why vertical farming specifically? No doubt vertical farming will form part of the solution to feeding urban populations in the coming decades, but the area covered by open-air "horizontal" farming is immense. We just can't do construction on that scale, not to mention the incredible environmental impacts. Growing things with LEDs seems pretty wasteful when we have a great big star shining down on us all day. Vertical farming will bring fresh food to high-density populations for sure, it just isn't going to change the face of farming across the planet.

Although it's a much more difficult problem to solve being an uncontrolled environment, my company is working on this automation but for traditional farms (http://touch.farm). The first step is gathering rich data from different crops/climates, which is why we're starting by designing the cheapest and most usable ag sensors we can. If we can make sensor tech accessible to a wide range of farmers, we'll gain a rich enough dataset to start applying ML (and farmers and the environment win in the process).

tl;dr: vertical farming is great, but what we really need is innovation/investment in traditional farming.

Why vertical farming specifically?

Ethnic Chinese investor, China focused. China has removed a lot of arable land recently for urban development, people are urbanizing at the fastest pace in human history, and food prices are rising quite rapidly.

Your comments are logical for the US and your project sounds interesting. From what I understand EU agriculture is a sort of middle-ground, with smaller-scale automation.

Also depends on crop types. Makes sense to do large fields for corn, for example. But being able to grow herbs etc locally where it's consumed, inside cities makes way more sense. This in turn frees up resources tied to growing and transporting such stuff to cities.

There are pros and cons to both but I think you can get richer data for vertically initially to train systems than move on to larger scale horizontal farms. Tough this doesn't mean there are low hanging fruits their either.

That's a good point - the choice of crop will have a large bearing. I don't know if low margin crops like grains could provide an adequate ROI given electricity costs etc, let alone the outlay required to build structures over huge areas.

In my understanding vertical farming is usually a hydrocultural practice (doesn't use soil). That works well for a lot of horticulture, but not so much for broadacre crops.

Interesting to get that perspective. I'm based in Australia, which has a similar farming landscape to the US/Canada; I'll admit my view is probably a bit skewed.

Is rice agreeable to vertical farming? i.e.: could the bulk of China's crops be moved to VF? In my understanding it's typically a hydroponic practice, so I imagine so.

Yeah I figured out you were in Victoria. I'm from Sydney. Expect a possible phone call from the interested party. No idea about rice, which I've only ever seen planted in fields, but a close friend of the investor is a qualified biologist and a cursory web search suggests that rice hulls are themselves an appropriate hydroponic medium for some crops, so perhaps you could potentially save further on transport by going multi-crop and full circle by re-using waste product as growing medium for other crops. Try Rice endosperm iron biofortification by targeted and synergistic action of nicotianamine synthase and ferritin, Plant Biotechnology Journal, 2009 (7), p. 631-644, Wirth et al

More than happy to start a conversation with them; also feel free to pass on my email: simon at touch dot farm.

Interesting thoughts on the reusing the waste. I toured the Carlton United breweries the other day, and found out it's their waste that has formed the basis of Vegemite since its inception. i.e.: there are massive wins to be made when you can "close the loop" on food production. When you've got production, processing, and reuse all under one roof like you could with vertical farming - gold.

> The last part reminded me of google training a bunch of robot arms [1]. Haven't seen much being done with it, does anyone know if anything is being done with the data?

The data gathered using aforementioned robot arms is available here: https://sites.google.com/site/brainrobotdata/home

Google (specifically Google Brain Robotics) is continuing research on this. Exciting time to be alive.

On the agriculture topic NASA has been working in this area for a while:

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/biofarming.html

As I understand it growing crops in a small, sealed environment requires much more precise understanding of how plants behave than you do for traditional Earth-bound farming.

Ah, interesting. I know NASA were doing some research in aeroponics [1] but I haven't seen anything recent on it. Lot of commercial systems I see don't have a lot of research behind but they are still getting better yields I think. I also saw an old but interesting system from MIT [2]. It would be very useful to mine data from these to train ML systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics [2] http://openag.media.mit.edu/