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Comment by opinion-is-bad | Hacker News Reader

How many square meters will that facility be, and what is the cost to construct? At $100M I don’t see how it would be financially viable.

50k kg a day is approximately 600 acres of tomatoes with our yields. That much land in CA might sell for $6-30M depending on water rights and latitude.

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You may be interested to know about Costas Group in Australia. They have gone the high tech route, cramming every bit of productive technology into their greenhouses. They are an established company listed on Australia's stock exchange (ASX:CGC), so can be taken to have proved the viability of such technology. I gather their share price and the size of their profit is a bit of a roller coaster ride, but they do make a profit each year. They mention yields of 70kg/m^2/year (=50000kg/day from 65 acres). I assume that's per square metre of greenhouse and not per square meter of growing bed.

https://thefarmermagazine.com.au/the-costa-group-is-a-runawa...

https://www.tradefarmmachinery.com.au/features/1408/costa-gr...

Edit: Article also mentions a 100kg/m^2/year target.

We’ll be getting over 100kg/m2/year. Construction varies but typically $450/m2 for a lit greenhouse.

Definitely a good opportunity for selling the higher value tomatoes restaurants and some upscale markets desire. I like the emission benefits of shorter supply chains too. Best of luck, I doubt our tomatoes will be competing with each other anytime soon.

He is doing tomatoes eaten out of hand vs your processing tomatoes. They might as well be different vegetables.(or fruits as this is a tomato)

Agreed. That’s why I said I think there is room for us both for a long time.

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