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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The key insight Silicon Valley lacks about agriculture is that there is little potential for a big win. Major improvements mean 10% of something, not 10x. US agriculture is already highly efficient.

On the down side, there's potential for a big loss if you screw up.

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I'd go 1 level deeper than that. Agriculture isn't a real market at all. It is closer to govt infrastructure contract work, than selling a commodity. There are no wins, juts minimized losses.

Govts decide farming subsidies, allowable environmental damage & even exploitative immigrant labor practices based on the prices their voters would be willing to pay. This means that an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency will likely lead to reduced subsidies rather than increased profits. Also, the value of food is subjective. Increasing lobster or caviar supply will decrease its perceived desirability just as fast. So infinite scaling laws stop applying pretty quickly.

The one agricultural industry that is ripe for disruption is the fake-DOP industry. A lot of European premium processed DOP goods are expensive because they are manual labor intensive. If you can train some minimum-wage laborers in a 3rd world nation to do the manual labor, then you can sell practically-perfect Parmigiano-Reggiano or Jamon-Iberico for a fraction of their price. As of now, all the fake DOP products are vastly inferior (it isn't rocket science) and still incur huge labor costs because they're still produced in 1st world countries.

Premium sausages, Premium cheeses, Premium sliced meats are ripe for disruption. It won't replace these products in top-tier $$$-$$$$ restaurants. But the more numerous $-$$ restaurants would be salivating at the prospect of such a replacement.

I am already seeing some of this. ~~Columbian~~ (Colombian) Burrata is both cheaper and a better product for US customers due to faster supply chains. I'd like to see more of this from developing and underdeveloped countries with the right climate, soil and water table.

Colombian*

What is so labor intensive about making cheese? I was under the impression some cheeses were produced with a lot of automation in giant factories.

Why can't Parmesan or Reggiano or Burrata be made like that?

Yeah, the whole "artisanal" thing is mostly hype.

From a bakery equipment maker: "To meet the burgeoning demand for products that look and taste hand-crafted, bakers had to go back to the drawing board with their ingredients and OEMs had to retool their equipment to handle the different types of dough used to make these products. The success of this effort can be seen in the bakery department of your average grocery store."

How artisanal bread is really made.[1]

I didn't know Tetra Pak made machinery for artisanal cheese automation, but they do.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbwI_UcdhaU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh-79uCy0wo

> "artisanal" thing is mostly hype.

I strongly disagree. Food manufacturing is a process with a massive amount of variables, which we can neither model nor control for in a factory.

Every batch of supplies is slightly different. The flavor trends vary by season, and even in the most controlled environment, things go wrong. Additionally, cooking/food manufacturing often involves extra 'learned' steps that aren't properly documented or understood.

It is not that cooking/food-manufacturing can't be automated. But perfect automation of it requires so many sensors, so much multivariate optimization, incredible amount of manual verification and so much modelling.... that it quickly becomes cheaper to just have manual labor balance those all by feel. As someone who worked in highly automated manufacturing lines, the machines we work with all are all faulty in their own little ways. Being able to have an intuition for what just-right looks like and being able to reproduce it manually, has continued to be a difficult problem for all manufacturers. This is doubly true with food, where the scientific processes for certain things are still unknown.

I have tried aged American Parmesan cheese blocks and they are objectively worse. Barbeque seems like the most automatable process, yet nothing comes close to a a real pitmaster's brisket. Sometimes the main task of food preservation is simply keen inspection & disposal of bad batches, which remains economically un-automatable.

Artisanal products aren't always better (sometimes you need steel extruded dried spaghetti & dusty parmesan), but they are often different & hard to reproduce with a machine.

For those unaware: DOP == "Protected designation of origin", or in Italian, "Denominazione d'Origine Protetta". Effectively a form of terroir or appellatian

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contr%...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir>

This is actually the big insight big time agriculture lacks about agriculture. They are obsessed with volumes and consider their farms to be large spread out factories making commodities and the tons of commodities produced to be the only metric that matters.

There are big wins to be had in making better food -- both healthier and better tasting. Most food in America tastes kind of bad and is very bad for you, so there is huge room for improvement. US agriculture is very efficient at making bad quality food. There is also a sub-industry of US agriculture-- organic farming -- who are very inefficient at making good quality food. Furthermore, there is a relatively large wealthy class in the world which have realized that health and a long life is the only thing that they cannot outright buy and every opportunity where you can trade money for some extra bit of health is worth taking. So there definitely is a market for good quality food.

There are other issues that are not considered critical yet but very soon will be. These are quality of soil and water. You can get good improvements if you make land that was previously unfarmable farmable.

What makes you say the organic market is so inefficient? And what room for improvement is there outside of the kinds of tactics that would make the food non-organic?

I imagine that's a question that interesting food-tech startups might try to answer?

For the first question, one answer is the high price of organics. For your second question, there are many options. One promising option is targeted pest and weed control using cameras and image recognition and maybe even lasers. A system like that was actually mentioned on HN a couple of weeks ago.

Another is using biochemistry to make pesticides that degrade and disappear before the food gets to market.

Another is to bury seeds individually in the soil without plowing the soil, thus protecting the seeds from pests and giving them advantage over weeds whose seeds have to start on top of the soil.

So there are many ideas out there.

But arable land is mostly a function of rainfall and flatness.

You can turn almost any flat land into arable land given enough effort.

Terraced farming cannot be mechanised economically because you need very small combines that need to be transported up or down and building the terrace with excavators etc disrupts the soil which means you have to build it up which means hardly any productivity in the first decade. You got a huge equipment, logistics and construction problem which requires massive amounts of upfront capital for basically no cash flow during the most important years. We would need huge advances in agricultural robotics for this to be cost effective.

I think there is an argument that agriculture is highly inefficient because we can't track externalities well. US topsoil in our bread basket was 14 inches a hundred years ago. It is down to 4 inches now. When it goes, we go.

I'm under the impression that an acre inch of soil weighs ~170k pounds.

So if we're losing .14 inches of topsoil per year - you only need to replace ~23k pounds of topsoil per year. Probably less than half of that needs to be compost.

I'm also assuming loss was worse in the past than it is currently. So you'd need even less compost.

This sounds bad, but not like something that can't be worked around. And honestly, it sounds like it could be a good thing for there to be huge demand for compost.

Compost works but it is very expensive at the moment

This is not a good take. The company that enables an improvement of 10% can still make tens of billions of dollars. I assure you that adtech knows all about the value of optimizing at the margin.

Vertical farming can do 10X, GMOs can do 10x, urban farming can cut out 90% of transportation costs, (not exactly what you mean but getting people to eat less meat would 100x our efficiencies) there is still room for improvement.

Even in a place like Canada where so much food is imported, transportation only adds up to about 12pc of the total energy cost.

I'm not aware of any vertical farm that is 10x as efficient as a regular farm.

It depends upon what you're defining efficiency as. In terms of yield per acre, there are estimates that yield per acre can increase by a lot more [1]. I haven't seen anything more efficient energy or cost wise (outside of a couple types of plants, really just microgreens).

[1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002655117

Land is cheap. Efficiency in this context is units of product per dollar spent.

Or, perhaps, carbon emitted. Either way vertical farms are a huge loser for anything outside of niche products.

Vertical farms have their own issues and it turns out that they are incredibly vulnerable to electricity prices.

It seems an obvious route to take but it isn’t all sunshine.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/vertical-farms-energy-crisis

It takes 9 acres of solar panels to light 1 acre of vertical farm crops.

Theoretically, you could cover all of Nevada (~70M acres) & Arizona (~73M acres) with solar panels.

That would only give you enough vertical farm space for ~16M acres, and apparently the US only has ~10M acres for farmland for fruits & vegetables.

Point being - this seems implausible - and I'm not sure how you work around that.

IIUC, it takes about 1 acre to produce ~.12MW solar (obviously differs based on where the panels are). The world installed 168GW of solar in 2021 - so that's 1.4M acres of solar.

It'd take 100 years of solar production to cover that much area with solar panels.

And for what?

Cattle uses 4.5x more land by itself. We use 3x as much space to grow most of our calories (grains and oils) - replacing that with vertical farms seems like something from an alien civilization that is way to far away to imagine.

Note that vertical farms have about 3-4x yield compared to an equal area of land. They also require significantly less pesticides, water, or fertilizers. Though currently they struggle with many types of vegetables.

3-4x yield for which crops exactly? They are only used for growing leafy greens and low volume high cost fruits such as strawberries. Do they produce 4x corn and soy? 4x potatoes?

The capital investment required to grow corn indoors would be enormous relative to the per bushel cost. I reckon the operational cost would even outweigh the revenue.

Average corn yields in Iowa were 205 bushels per acre in 2021. Let's say corn is $10 a bushel (trading around $7 on the spot market right now). So $2050 per acre for conventional ag.

Let's assume 4x yield for indoor production, so roughly 1000 bushels/acre. Or $10k per acre at $10.

I had trouble finding any good information on energy consumption in an indoor cropping system, but I'd bet lighting energy consumption would eat up the additional revenue from higher yields.

Edit: Please let me know if anyone has access to scientific literature/experience on indoor farming energy use, I'm genuinely interested to know

Perhaps you can collect light vertically as well? And deliver it to crops either via the conversion to electricity and back, or even by some sort of optical/waveguide/handwave thing?

There's only so much sunlight that reaches any point on the Earth throughout the day. You could build something really tall to collect more light from the sun at more angles, but that will cast a shadow and reduce what's available for other collectors. So you end up with a lot of collectors receiving little sunlight or fewer collectors spread far apart.

It is also unreasonable since there are better competitors like artificial starch synthesis where you can use bioreactors to produce starch directly from CO2 and electricity at 8 times the efficiency of corn. If you add artificial lighting then vertical farming is at least 16 times worse than artificial starch synthesis. The freed up land would allow us to then grow normal non nutrient dense food in its place instead which obsoletes the need for vertical farming.

Yeah sure at 1.5 million watts per acre of grow surface in LED lighting. The average American eats 2.5 acres worth of food and produce per year, which is a 3.75 million watts of lighting for 12-16 hours a day per person.

Now sure that number can be improved, but it also isn't accounting for additional HVAC costs, and you are still looking at atleast 2 million watts per person.

Vertical farming can grow micro-greens pretty well but it will never produce 90% of our calories, even with optimistic assumptions. It would also be an environmental disaster.

Transportation is a teeny tiny fraction of the environmental cost of food as well.

I'm also not aware of any GMOs that are 10x better than their non-GMO counterpart although there are certainly improvements to be had here.

GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions. The savings come in other ways, such as no manual weeding with glyphosate resistance (or higher yields compared to letting the weeds rob NPK), or less insecticide use and spraying for BT corn. As a rough estimate, yields are about 6-10% lower for GMO seeds, but labor savings can be huge. GMO cotton cuts labor costs by 90%.

> GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions.

If, as is true of the most commom GM crops, the specific GMO trait at issue is a non-yield trait like, say, glyphosate resistance, sure, that’s what you would expect. (Though the yield is substantially higher in the intended conditions; real crops rarely grow in ideal conditions.)

Of course, there are crops modified for yield specifically, too.

It makes perfect sense from a biological perspective. I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process? I am aware of accelerated mutations by irradiating seeds, though I think this is rare and I only know of red grapefruits that successfully used this technique.

> I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process?

Not sure that anything particularly CRISPR-like is involved (there are other transgenic techniques), but:

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-genetically-modi...

Thanks for the article and I read the paper. I know people have been working on it for ages, but it is nice to see some promising results.

One huge problem with the article is this line:

> The plants are also 16% to 18% more efficient at using nitrogen

The paper said no such thing. These plants take up more nitrogen and increase yield.

Do tech people really believe in the vertical farming hype? Genuinely asking.

I ask myself this. Are the vertical farm fans really this ignorant? Or is it an act? But there are also people who will pop up and advocate for "personal rapid transit" (they are known as "pod people"), hyperloops, NFTs, and all types of other things that are impossible, nonsense, or pointless. Vertical farms are just the latest of these: a stupid idea with no future whatsoever, but with a vocal army of online boosters.

Personal rapid transit as in e-bikes is doing great

I think they are really this ignorant. The tech suburbanite ideas about farming are insane.

Vertical farming is just one of the cringy ideas. Farm underneath solar panels instead of putting the panels on one side of the farm, monocropping is pure evil and farmers are simply stupid for doing it. Grow cover crops so we have to dedicate 50% more land for agriculture.

Would you rather grow cover crops or have soil depletion?

Also cover crops don't result in a 50% increase in land usage.

Here is a video that might interest you:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

They don’t even eat the alfalfa sprouts they praise and they think chicken nuggets grow under Golden Arches.

Yes. But it requires nuclear power, ideally compact fusion reactors on site.

The best greens I've had come from a vertical farm. Its too bad - I otherwise think its a wasteful, inefficient technology. I suspect the high quality didnt really have much to do with the vertical-ness of the farm though, and could likely be reproduced in a more traditional greenhouse (with some supplemental lighting during the shorter days).

Let’s see you sell your easy ten thousand percent increase in farming efficiency.

The reason it’s hard to sell hype to farmers is they live in the real world and they’re not impressed by idiots that are so wrong that stupid isn’t a big enough word to describe them.

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