Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

I got caught up in this train. After watching the TED talk I saw an opportunity to leverage my product design/engineering consultancy to sell Food Computer kits and pre-assembled circuit boards. I built a website (www.openagriculturesupply.com) and embarked on building a supply chain, having PCBs and fully assembled PCBAs made and stocking kits.

After lots of investment in both time and capital I was never able to get one to work. The software stack was unsupported and after talking with everyone I could I was unable to find anyone who was able to get the software working outside of the walls of MiT.

I then worked on a related product, growcomputer (www.growcomputer.com) but ultimately there just isn't enough value in these kinds of products. As others have posted here and in previous HN posts on this topic, the A&E schools and plant scientists have long ago figured all this out, one can already purchase plant growth chambers, all manner of hydroponic and aeroponic systems, nutrients, controllers, climate controlled greenhouses, etc.

Ultimately it comes down to the economy of powering plant growth with electric lights. It just does't add up except in specific applications like mushroom farming, and very high end "foodie" niche markets. The value proposition just isn't there.

edited - formatting

In the Netherlands our main way of growing food is in greenhouses. It causes a lot of light pollution and I actually found it a quite disturbing sight when I flew over one of the greenhouse areas by night once (there are columns of light in the sky). We export lots of tomatoes, bell peppers, etc. I guess if you have space and a sunny climate the value proposition isn't there, but if you have a cooler climate, a high population density (land is very expensive), and a high-tech agriculture sector it seems to work out differently.

Wow - according to one source "The Netherlands is the world's second largest exporter of agricultural products, after the USA" [0]. Sure, it has good quality soil and high tech farming, but it's amazing that can make up for the sheer lack of space. It's smaller than all but 9 US states, and it's not rural either - it's more populous than all but 4.

[0] https://www.hollandtradeandinvest.com/key-sectors/agricultur...

Agricultural products have very, very large differences in value density, and one that Netherlands is seriously exploiting.

Ten acres of corn has much less value than ten acres of roses, so growing flowers is a major export industry for Netherlands.

That's part of it, but looks like only about €9b of €90b total [0]. Meat, dairy and vegetables are all comparable; certainly the east of the country seems to be all cows. Cereals don't crack the top ten categories, though.

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2018/03/dutch-agricultural-exp...

To get an impression of what it looks like from the ground: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=westland%20lichtver...

It's difficult to compare the real-life view with pictures (just like the aurora). And it isn't always as bad. But on cloudy, cold nights, it can have an apocalyptic feel to it.

> I actually found it a quite disturbing sight when I flew over one of the greenhouse areas by night once

There was a link 2 days ago about aerial photography of LED greenhouses in the Netherlands : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21327623

They are doing it differently than the MiT systems. The key is they are using greenhouses with electric lights as a supplement to natural light, adding up to 20% yield as a result. They are not relying on electric lights for 100% of the light the plants need to grow.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=49939807621308041...

> It just does't add up except in specific applications like mushroom farming

If you want to make money growing food though, mushroom farming seems like the best bet. Right now there are several edible mushroom species where, if you were to start growing them commercially, you would literally be the only person in the country offering them for sale. And some of them solve serious culinary or food science problems. E.g. right now impossible burger has been able to do a pretty good job imitating the texture of protein in ground beef, but they haven't yet been able to do a great job at imitating the texture of the fat components.

Build that whole infrastructure then pivot to magic mushrooms as states legalize

Then when the price crashes on psilocybin mushrooms, switch back the tasty mushrooms.

or keep the mushrooms!

Which mushrooms are you referring to that are easy to grow but not available in stores?

Yes if anyone can mass produce chicken of the woods (not to be confused with hen of the woods) that would be awesome. It makes the best fake chicken nuggets. The texture is spot on, and when it's battered and fried the mushroom taste is pretty minimal.

Commercial plug spawn for chicken of the woods is widely available, and there are some small-scale producers.

Yields are unpredictable at scale though, so it's more of a farmer's market product at the moment. It's not like morels though, where even small-scale production is very difficult.

> It makes the best fake chicken nuggets.

If you're not allergic to them. I don't know that you'd really be able to sell them commercially. I don't even see them sold at farmers markets.

Further prohibiting weed could be good for driving prices on that market then.

But I agree. I looked at this as a hobbyist (no, not for weed) and thought it could be helpful since senors and hardware are currently as cheap as they are. But industrial agriculture has complete different set of problems.

Aside from that plants in general seem to be quite resilient and don't require perfectly balanced control loops. One might think so, but your room plants constantly dying is probably just due to not watering them for months.

So in the end having a few seeds and a bit of water probably beats the food truck full of tech on all levels of efficiency.

Still an interesting topic to create these environments. But perhaps not the correct approach to solve food shortages or help with problems large scale agriculture faces.

people tend to forget that most plants are around because they've been able to survive for thousands of years with minimal/no human intervention.

Of course, there are the outliers (Corn is the big one I'm thinking of here) and the monocropping we tend to do is a whole different problem...

What if you could pipe enough direct sunlight from outside, into the chamber? And be able to control the intensity of the delivered sunlight? Would there still be a novelty product there to have a big enough market with a decent price point?

> What if you could pipe enough direct sunlight from outside, into the chamber?

Isn't this just called a window?

If you're at the point where you're using soil from outside and sunlight from outside, to support a tiny device, why not just use a pot by the windowsill?

Or use that cutting edge tech, the field.

You could make a whole building out of windows... Maybe call it a clearhouse or something

I think Bill Gates prefers the term Microsoft.

if you are in the business of growing anything commercial food-related, the more sunlight the better. You don't control it, you take all you can get.

light pipes do exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_tube and I think people do use them.

I agree. Why pay for the energy to grow food when you can get the enegy for free by putting it out in the sun? This is an example that some scientifically minded people forget an important aspect in the world: economics. Can your New Way of Doing It^{TM} do it cheaper than existing solutions? If not, it most likely does not have a future.

The sun is free, but not all plans will grow everywhere. In many cases, there just isn't enough sun, or the climate is wrong. The economics of growing, say, pineapples in England don't work out, in part because it's so expensive to grow them there (if that's even possible in a highly climate-controlled room), but also because transportation costs are so low.

It is possible to grow them in English greenhouses: wealthy Britons with skilled gardeners had them in the 18th and 19th century, and the growing middle class often rented pineapples to display at fancy dinners. As you said, cheap transportation is what ended UK domestic pineapple production.

https://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/pineapples/pin...

> Why pay for the energy to grow food when you can get the enegy for free by putting it out in the sun?

For many reasons: 1) Using vertical space rather than surface area; 2) Producing closer to population centers; 3) Producing year around irrespective of seasonal changes; 4) Not having to use pesticides.

1) and 2) round to “transport costs” economically and freight is cheap except in areas where people don’t have enough money to be worth selling to, like Afghanistan.

Freight might be cheap, but what about the carbon footprint?

I would love to see a carbon analysis on the CO2 from the LED lighting vs the CO2 from freight transport of food.

Me too. Especially one accounting for all emissions end-to-end, and over a time frame of decades of use. While LEDs themselves are as dirty as the power source they're hooked up to[0], this doesn't count the energy used to produce and transport those LEDs and all other equipment. It's especially important because equipment breaks down, and a lot of it is designed to break down fast[1].

--

[0] - My mind races to imagine vertical or subterranean farms powered by a nuclear plant.

[1] - Also known as planned obsolescence. People are assholes.

1) I assure you that industrial LEDs are not 'designed to break down', their longevity is a key consideration for people buying them

2) What's the fetish with vertical farming? Productivity of a greenhouse is 10x to 100x of a conventional field. The key limitation is capital costs. Unless you are growing small plants like basil/strawberry, vertical farming doesn't make any sense. It balloons your CapEx, increases power consumption (sunlight) and you save land, which you have saved a lot of anyway just by going to greenhouse farming from normal fields. Do most folks not appreciate that most of the farmland we have is open field, we are not running out of space for greenhouses?

RE 1), I didn't mean that LEDs themselves would break down (unless soldered badly). But their controllers, or power converters, just might. Like with LED lightbulbs - most of them break very quickly due to cheap power & control components and/or bad soldering job causing thermal damage.

RE 2), fair. In my mind, I grouped vertical and rooftop farming together, and find them desirable in the sense of bringing back more plant life into the cities (and reducing last-mile transportation footprint). But you're right, in terms of general food production, they're not all that interesting or useful.

We'd need to see an analysis of both traditional agriculture vs vertical farming.

Is anyone aware of comparison by the numbers?

There is no more energy efficient method of transport than oceanic freight. Rail freight is very efficient too and truck transport isn’t as good but it still beats growling locally in almost all cases in agriculture.

If you care about carbon footprint campaign for a carbon tax. Most of the carbon footprint of transportation is now and shall always be in the last mile, whether that’s Amazon delivering it to your door or you driving to Walmart or Whole Foods.

Capitalism is extremely good at reducing transport costs and since those costs are basically denominated in hydrocarbons it already does a better than half assed job of reducing carbon footprints. But a tax would be much better and more general.

> There is no more energy efficient method of transport than oceanic freight.

Yes. But no transport at all is more efficient than even the most efficient method of transport. And food doesn't get straight from the docks onto the tables. There's usually lots of trucking involved. As you also say below.

> If you care about carbon footprint campaign for a carbon tax.

I do.

> Capitalism is extremely good at reducing transport costs and since those costs are basically denominated in hydrocarbons it already does a better than half assed job of reducing carbon footprints.

Capitalism is also extremely good at making the costs disappear, and reappear elsewhere, usually very diffused and paid by people not being parties to the transaction. That's why I am an advocate of carbon taxing - because it puts those costs front-and-center.

Now I'm not against shipping food, and I recognize the oceanic freight efficiency. I have two reasons for being interested in "alternative", more localized farming techniques: one, the ecological footprint (not just carbon) that's not accounted for, and two, robustness. I have this feeling that with current systems, we're one or two big accidents from a large humanitarian crisis. I feel it would be better if smaller groups of people could meet their basic sustenance needs with local produce - and ability to grow anything anywhere would definitely help with the varieties available.

The ecological footprint argument is for greater industrial concentration and more efficiency. The US has returned farmland equal in area to Washington state to wilderness over the last twenty years because it became uneconomic to farm it. This while basically every measure of how much did the US produces goes up. This is part of a more general trend of doing more with less resources in the developed world. There’s a book on this More from Less , Andrew McAfee.

Robustness and efficiency are at odds with one another. Any highly robust system will be very wasteful indeed compared to an efficient one; any system with lots of slack just isn’t efficient. Obviously if you think a large decline in standards of living is an acceptable price to pay for that robustness that’s a political position you’re free to support but good luck getting the votes for it.

Ability to grow anything anywhere requires energy. If you’re assuming civilization hasn’t collapsed anyway these farms in a box are either solving a non-problem or one with limited applicability.

Fair. I'm a person who frequently comments here that centralized systems beat decentralized on efficiency, so I understand that point.

RE More from Less, I need to buy and read that book. I remember an article promoting it being discussed recently on HN, and from it I got a distinct impression that US "doing more from less" is just an artifact of not accounting for embodied energy and material waste during (outsourced) manufacturing. I.e. if copper imports go down and electronic components imports go up a bit and consumer electronics production go up even more, it doesn't mean the US is better at using less copper for consumer electronics; it means you're not accounting for copper China wasted manufacturing components.

Anyway, that's my initial impression; I'll have to read the book to see if it goes into any more details to support its conclusion.

There’s a recent episode of Econtalk that’s an interview with the author of you’re a podcast listener. If you put in the work to have an informed opinion please share it with the world somehow, whether in a review, a Twitter thread or an email to me.

Thanks. I put it on my todo list to send you an e-mail when I read and think through the book; about sharing it with the wider world, we'll see then.

>But no transport at all is more efficient than even the most efficient method of transport.

You can't make a general statement like that because it ignores the geographic advantages of the locations you are transporting from. If a certain location has a high concentration of copper for instance then its local abundance might be 1000x higher than the location you are transporting it to. Simply looking at the transportation cost doesn't capture the whole picture.

Carbon footprint of growing tomatoes in the wrong climate is like 4x higher than growing it in the right climate and transporting it. Heating is one of the most power consuming activities in the world. The research has been done. The result can also be estimated numerically, carbon intensity of transport and of heating are well known.

http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-miles

Thanks for the link. The results presented surprised me.

WRT. tomatoes, I'm not an expert, but in colder climates, don't they grow in greenhouses? Greenhouses should have zero operational carbon footprint.

In colder climates you must heat the greenhouse, which probably generates CO2. I say "probably" because a heat pump run on renewables is possible, but not likely.

Yes, heating is the key issue. While elaborate setups are possible, there are more productive ways to apply that effort.

3) and 4) are easily solved with glass or transparent polythene, as is already done commercially on a vast scale.

https://portalexport.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/greenhouses...

1) and 2) are essentially irrelevant, because the fundamental limiting factor on both agriculture and sustainable energy generation is surface area. Plants are effectively photochemical solar arrays that turn light and CO2 into food energy; nobody would be crazy enough to propose a "vertical solar farm" where LEDs are used to illuminate photovoltaic panels, but vertical farms are exactly as bonkers.

> nobody would be crazy enough to propose a "vertical solar farm" where LEDs are used to illuminate photovoltaic panels, but vertical farms are exactly as bonkers

This isn't true: at least in theory, you can take white sunlight, produce electricity by the photovoltaic process and power LEDs in a spectrum optimized for plant growth (blue and red light instead of green). In practice the LED efficiency (150-200%) doesn't yet make up for the inefficiency of the best commercially available solar panels (25-30%), but the idea is not fundamentally ridiculous.

And solar power is not always the cheapest form of electricity, or even necessarily competitive. Consider Iceland, with abundant cheap renewable geothermal energy but a shortage of sunlight, and LED-illuminated farms make even more sense (and are already operating at scale).

> Plants are effectively photochemical solar arrays

You are right here, however, not all plants are created equal. The value of a plant in not tied to how much energy they produce.

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