Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> More traditional greenhouses already grow a large percentage of the tomatoes eaten in the United States, for example (most come from Mexico and Canada). In the Netherlands, greenhouses grow nearly a million tons of tomatoes a year, along with other crops, making the country a major food exporter despite its tiny size.

It boggles my mind - the technology already exists and is profitable in the form of a hydroponic greenhouse. So what you paid for as an investor was a bunch of R&D research on how to replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs. (The fact that there are investor decks out there pitching that energy costs could be offset by investments in solar panels is laughably hilarious.).

Even your average field farmer is no slouch. I was just having a conversation with our neighbor, an orchardist who manages over 200 acres of trees. He currently pays $60k a year in just in SaaS fees to cover all of the technology on his farm. Your average (productive) farm is already a miracle of modern automation.

View on HN

People who don't work with it legitimately do not understand the levels of automation and/or precision involved in large-scale (and medium scale) farms.

The gentleman who rents our family farm owns or operates about 11k acres. He's a medium sized business. He's a family operation.

And he precision farms to the square foot for most row-crop fields. Using thousands of data points from soil condition to weather to historical flood data to local highway traffic patterns. His machinery is (almost) automated. He exists as an emergency off switch, while the tractor and machinery farm to the square foot. They select seed varieties based on the data. Their planter can select any number of up to 20 different varieties based on the outputs of their soil equations, varies the depth, and distance of each individual seed, and plants to the square foot across thousands of acres. Chemical application is dialed in to accuracy within 6" squares. Fertilizer is applied so precisely that the soil generally remains unchanged at the end of the growing season; neither depleted or over fertilized.

Animals - they have a breeding program for their cattle, with genetic testing and selection. The cattle are selected for specific genes. Not for traits. For genes. Actual genetics. They don't just breed that bull with these cows because the bull is taller in the back legs and the cows are heavy and short. They select actual genes to pass between generations, and specifically cultivate the genes they want to see. This blows my mind.

And this is, again, a medium size business. HUGE agribusinesses take precision to a literal entirely new level. Inputs and outputs measured to the ounce over millions of tons produced. Most processes automated, with a human existing as a kill-switch. It's astounding.

Family farm operations astound me.

The amount of things your average farmer has to understand astounds me - finance, labor management, investing, market conditions, futures, contract negotiation. And then on top of that, mastery of up-to-date farming technology.

Even a modest 100 acre operation can be a multi-million dollar enterprise designed to eke out cents on the dollar.

There is a massive difference between a 100 acre farm and a 11k acre farm.

A 100 acre farm (producing generic commodity crops) won't have be able to afford fully modern equipment described higher in the comment chain. Even with mostly 20th century equipment you'll be surprised at the ratio of total assets to annual profit for a 100 acre farm. The numbers might be $3M-9M of assets for $100k-300k profit.

The economies of scale conspire to push farms to consolidation. The equipment that increases productivity will receive higher usage rates, so capital investments are more efficient. If you have anything between 80-5000 acres you will clearly be better off liquidating everything and playing the markets. It'll be less work, safer, and more profitable. The family farm died in the dust bowl.

You are correct.

The 580 acres we rent was enough for my grandfather to support a family of 10. Today, I could support my family of 3 with that many acres if I ran a show farm near an urban center. But as a working farm it is unfeasible to support a family.

It's sad. 500 acres used to be a decent sized operation. Now, 10k is a starting out size.

Are you saying that it takes more land to support the same number of people? If so, why?

Edit: maybe I'm mixing up the meaning of support here. Do you mean support as in financial support through the farm's profit, or sustenance support, i.e. feeding the family from the farm?

Profit, in dollars, per acre has gone down. You need more acres for the same profit. Modern ag-tech is much more efficient.

I assume you're getting at the major corporate farms exerting a downward pressure on prices, which is thus lowering the profit per acre?

The biggest factor is technology. The same capital can produce more food. I think that’s what you’re talking about but not really sure. It’s a good thing for everyone but the farmers. The cost of food is one of the few things that has significantly gone down relative to minimum wage in the US.

Supply has gone up more than demand. Profit margins have gone down.

No need to reinvent the wheel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Your last sentence doesn't make sense. You would expect yield to go up if ag tech is efficiënt. Profit going down is a sign of organisational change.

For commodity products, profit always trends to zero.

Becoming more efficient tells you that yield is going up. It doesn't tell you anything about profit: that depends on the market.

No, efficient technology will reduce profits to nothing and eliminate an industry/role entirely in some cases.

Note that the profit and profit margins are highly dependent on crop.

I believe he is saying the COGS doesn’t work out in favor of small farms against bigger ag-corps.

Those bigger operations can afford to reinvest in technology and evolve to do more with less (people).

I'm going to slightly disagree with "it's sad" part; understanding it's unfortunate on local / personal scale, food getting cheaper is what allows all of us here at hacker news to do something else rather than cultivate food as primary preoccupation of majority of population :-/

I don't think food has gotten that much cheaper in the last 50 years. Don't believe the fake CPI. Just take the average hourly earnings and divide it by something like the big mac index or a basket of food commodities.

Sure, so if I ignore the fake CPI, how do I do that? I can only easily find price of milk from 1995, not earlier; bread from 1980, somewhat dubious sources.

I'm assuming in most countries also, subsidies, formal/official cartels, price controls and other policy instruments would make it very hard to compare apples to apples.

If you don’t think the cost of farming has gone down in 100 years because of better tools, equipment, automation, irrigation, etc, I’m very surprised. You don’t need statistics. Just look at farm implements from 100 years ago.

It's less that it's got cheaper and more that people spend a smaller % of their income on food these days. In terms of personal budgeting it's Amdahl's law at play.

I did that. BLS CPI components which don't change much are available from 1988, some of them even longer.

In the 35 years since 1988:

- dairy has gotten 20% cheaper in terms of wages

- bakery/cereal products have stayed roughly flat vs wages (cheaper since the 90s but more expensive since the 70s)

- fruit/veg products have gotten 5% cheaper in terms of wages (though the same level as in the late 70s/early 80s)

- rice/pasta/cornmeal has gotten 15% cheaper in terms of wages

Caveat: Over time frames this long, average hourly wages don't mean like for like hourly wages for the same job... the number of low-paid "deliveroo driver/amazon delivery guy" low paid part time jobs has increased, pushing averages down. (I.e. things have gotten more expensive as measured by minimum wages, but things have gotten much cheaper as measured by the wages of a skilled professional.)

I ran the numbers average wages/big mac index. And it was showing a decrease in cost untill about 2000 but ever since then the cost of the big mac index has increased in the US, relative to average wages. Not that we should be eating big macs, but it's supposed to take a variety of inputs into account.

Otoh - surely you could feed a family on a fraction of that?

https://www.urbanhomestead.org/

These folks were (are?) doing it on 1/10 of an acre - although that number comes with a caveat that I think they're getting a lot of compost and organic inputs from elsewhere. Plus they're in California growing under ideal weather conditions.

Well, they say they've donated 8 tonnes of food in a year - for 4 people, that's 5.5kg a day. Depending on raw weight VS serving - and at roughly 2.5 kcal/gram [?] - that sounds like it should be in the right ballpark?

[?] guesstimate: https://vegfaqs.com/the-50-highest-calorie-vegan-foods-per-s...

Is there an issue with automation costs on a small farm or is it that margins are too low? Not sure if that’s a good opportunity for companies or startups to target.

It sounds like the problem is that the capital costs associated with automation don't scale down well. Fixed cost equipment like tractors don't scale down well to smaller farms. At a cost of several million dollars for equipment, if you only have low five figure of profit a year you're not going to be able to realistically make interest payments on the capital loan.

It all depends on your living style and how expensive the bare living is. I could hypothetically sustain a family of modest lifestyle (nowhere near poverty, but limited expensive entertainment and gadgets) at least 6 with 200 acres here in Europe. 10k acres would be a giga mega super big farm here, somewhere near 1000 acres people usually consider it exceptionally large and essentially just a business and not a traditional farm anymore.

Are those hectares or acres? One is significantly larger than the other.

Your land must be poor?

500 fully owned acres of grain production would net you several hundred thousands of dollars around here. If you can't support a family on that kind of income, I dare say you are doing something horribly wrong.

The math changes if you are carrying debt or renting, of course.

This is only true if we are only talking commodity crops. But the average farm in the us is still only ~400 acres.

For food crops you can still do pretty well on a 100 acre farm. Berries/fruits/vegetables/etc. Especially if you live in a community with access to distribution for said crops.

I live in an area with a lot of food ag and it's not uncommon for farms of just a couple dozen acres to pay the bills.

If the things I've seen are right, most of the smaller farms like this are side-gigs: the household adults have day jobs.

Sure. My parents have a couple of acres of orchard on their property they pay someone to professionally manage. If they get $5k a year from it they are pretty happy.

There are also a lot of small farms that are run by teachers (works well with the summers off).

But I think you would find that anything over 50 acres in an area with distribution options (either close to a packer for that product or urban area) CAN be a full time job if you know what you are doing and are willing to work that hard.

I know, like, one farmer whose only job is farming, even those who are farming like 60+ hours a week.

> This is only true if we are only talking commodity crops. But the average farm in the us is still only ~400 acres.

This metric is misleading because of how it's calculated. Since you're weighting each farm equally, a 1M acre farm gets the same amount of weight as a 100 acre farm. Therefore, if in a country you have 100 acres of farmland in total, and the farm sizes are 90, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, you'd end up with an "average" farm size of 10, but in reality most of the farmland is actually part of a megafarm.

425 is just the mean. The median is only like ~40 acres!

While, farm consolidation is a growing concern (pun very much intended), the current reality is that large mega-farms are still the minority. Family owned farms still account for 89% of all agricultural product in the US. 47% of production is coming from farms grossing less than $1 million annually.

Sources: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... https://www.usfarmdata.com/percentage-of-small-medium-and-la...

Given a fixed amount of land to distribute, it makes sense that mega farms are a minority, no? :)

Imagine a family that lives on 1/2 acre with two or three goats. The goats breed. The family sells a few kids each year. They are required to register their farm and tag each goat so that certain diseases can be tracked. Their children next door do the same.

The neighbor across the street farms 400 acres of crops. The average farm on their street is 134 acres. The first two families don't even consider themselves farmers.

There are market gardeners making a living with 2-5 acres and a bit of open source DIY tech.

No one is pulling $100k profit from 100 acres, that’s basically impossible

Oh its possible, just not with non organic corn/soy. 100 acres of pumpkins might clear $1M though (yes, decorative pumpkins)

Pumpkins man!

I helped out a guy from church once who had just switched over two acres to pumpkins. He said he netted 10k an acre that year selling them to local pumpkin patches with almost no work.

Next year he had 20 acres.

Good for him, but I highly doubt the "with almost no work" statement. And besides, having just an acre of pumpkins and noone to buy them can be hazardous. Specialty crops can offer good profits on good years if everything goes right (which usually requires a ton of work, though you can get lucky for a few years), but the risks are significantly higher even if you did everything right.

I grew a dozen pumpkins last year in my backyard. “Almost no work” makes no sense unless he’s got everything automated.

My first job when about 14 was working a pumpkin field/farm, every day, for the entire summer with (debatable) 2 other people.

It's non-stop work. Eventually, it folded and became ... A development.

Of course they are. Raspberries[0].

[0]https://www.canr.msu.edu/foodsystems/uploads/files/Economics...

Many of them are - because the land is long paid off (often been in the family for 100+ years). If you have to make payments (other than taxes) then you need a lot more land to extract a living wage.

As an aside, you can some browse supporting information at https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/

For example, Wisconsin - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Wisconsin/Publ...

> The number of farms in the United States for 2021 is estimated at 2,012,050, down 6,950 farms from 2020. The number of farms increased in all sales classes except $1,000-$9,999, $100,000-$249,999, and $1,000,000 or more. In 2021, 51.0 percent of all farms had less than $10,000 in sales and 81.5 percent of all farms had less than $100,000 in sales. In 2021, 7.4 percent of all farms had sales of $500,000 or more.

That 51% with less than $10k sales suggests a lot of hobby farms.

You can with cheese. Think of something like Jasper Hill.

Yup, over last ~25 years my dad (on ~10 hectare/25 acre of land, mix of fruits/vegetables/grains) went from "well off" to "barely getting by", to "just sell off land for housing development and get a normal job".

Kinda sad how the the government subsidizes farming in a way that basically small farmers don't have place in the market.

100 acres of farmland only requires 1 Ox 100 days of a year!

No matter what you think about Jeremy Clarkson as a person, Clarkson's Farm on Prime is a pretty eye-opening view to British farming.

Is it actually though? I haven't seen it admittedly, but stories like this make me doubt whether it's actually a realistic look at farming at all.

> 'Today they’re made in Germany but they still look Lambo-mad,' writes Clarkson, who turned his back on the tractor models recommended to him by other farmers to buy one. 'If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you’d end up with.'

> The result is huge, even by tractor standards, he admits: 'Every single farmer type who’s seen it says the same thing. ‘That,’ they intone with a rural tug on the flat cap, ‘is too big.’ But in my mind tractors are like penises. They cannot be too big.'

> His Lambo is so huge, in fact, that Clarkson had to build a new barn to house it in. And a new driveway, because it wouldn’t fit through the gates.

> Operating it requires great care for more reasons than just its proportions, Jeremy has discovered — due to the amount of torque generated by its straight-six turbodiesel engine (775 lb ft), fitting machinery to the back is a risky business.

> 'Not that I can attach anything to its rear end. It’s all heavy engineering back there and I just know that if I tried, you’d be reading about yet another farmer walking for four miles across his fields with his severed arm in a bag.'

> Therefore, Clarkson has been forced to hire someone to do that for him. All this together means that the Lamborghini has ended up costing a little bit more than the £40,000 he initially paid for it.

https://www.driving.co.uk/news/diversions/clarksons-farm/jer...

I wouldn't know enough about farming to judge the show even if I had watched it, but ultimately his job with the show is to create entertainment, not to accurately document the realities of a British farm, so I find it hard to believe he's managed to do that.

The Lambo tractor also has the wrong type of connection in the back (Brits use a different standard or something). He just bought the biggest one he could without thinking.

He does go in being The Clarkson, buffooning about and doing things the stupid way. But he does learn and begins to actually enjoy it during the show.

And he has Caleb, 20something a farmer who does call him on his buffoonery repeatedly.

A hundred acres being modest is still astounding to me. In India, the average is something like 6 acres. The vast majority of farming families have less than 20 acres. Of course, the differences in farming population (something like 700 million) vs land (maybe a third of the US?) make this make sense.

You get a big tractor and prep or harvest of 100 acres is gonna take like a portion of 1 day.

> Fertilizer is applied so precisely that the soil generally remains unchanged at the end of the growing season; neither depleted or over fertilized.

That's astounding. Do they apply fertilizer throughout the lifecycle or just at the beginning? Does the balance hold counting irrigation run-off too?

Many states now require normal irrigation runoff to be collected in a reservoir and reused. It's something like the first 2" of water, which covers normal irrigation and most rainfall.

Do you have a reference, that sounds interesting and some cursory searching didn't locate anything obvious.

Throughout the lifecyle. There is no irrigation beyond natural irrigation in my part of the country. They clay soil is pretty good at holding onto moisture. But they do factor is runoff. They also use the weather cycle to their advantage, and do not apply near rain events.

> The gentleman who rents our family farm

It isn't your family farm anymore. In fact it's nobody's family farm. It's just farmland.

What were you trying to achieve with this comment?

'our family farm' is a pretty clear indication of the property rights and that gives the OP every right to refer to it as that.

A "family farm" isn't just about ownership. It denotes a type of small owner-operator farm.

The GP has leased their land to someone else, so it's no longer their "family farm", and it isn't a "family" farm at all because it isn't run by the family that owns it, but by a corporation with 11k acres under cultivation. It's a big-Ag farm.

"The farm that was our family farm back when our family farmed, but now we rent it out"? I think it was clear from context.

Vertical farming for for produce. It’s entirely different from row cropping commodity crops.

To me this reads as everybody but the farmer has some skin in the game and is extracting their share out of the process and that farmers are completely locked in on vendors. I already know they are locked in on mech equipment, I assume the intelligence layer is the same thing.

Threes probably an argument that it increases the amount of food per square acre but my cynical take is it adds more profit margin and to the ever increasing cost of food production per unit of throughput.

Yields per acre has been growing linearly for 60 years. It has doubled since 1975. It's largely competitive, not exploitive growth.

https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp...

This was not the situation as I understood it based on the conversation with the guy.

Most of the products he is paying for either a) reduce labor costs (like a cell based system that distributes pesticide) or b) reduces the risk of product loss (cherries being insanely delicate and sensitive to subtle changes in temperature and humidity).

Because he is paying for the products as-a-service, he really doesn't care about being locked in on the equipment so long as they pay for themselves.

> And he precision farms to the square foot for most row-crop fields. Using thousands of data points from soil condition to weather to historical flood data to local highway traffic patterns. His machinery...

Can anyone recommend or link any YouTube videos on this, I thought this sort of thing was still at the R&d phase, I would love to see an hour long video on a real operation at scale.

That sounds way more sophisticated than the reality is for the most farmers. Automation exists but usually it's mundane like "my tractor does some proprogrammed routine automatically when U-turn is required on the field while tilling", and even that is enough to get you into the high-tech farmer club.

> People who don't work with it legitimately do not understand the levels of automation and/or precision involved in large-scale (and medium scale) farms.

What I do not understand is why vegetables in the US taste like shit and cost 3x as much as in Eastern Europe (Poland, Bulgaria) where agro-automation is much less.

High quality stuff is routed to restaurants, farm stands, and farmers markets. Stuff in grocery stores usually comes out of cold storage.

Having grown up eating wild strawberries, my rule of thumb is that anything artificially made to grow bigger and plumper still has at most the same amount of flavor as the original small wild plant.

> So what you paid for as an investor was a bunch of R&D research on how to replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs. (The fact that there are investor decks out there pitching that energy costs could be offset by investments in solar panels is laughably hilarious.).

Some of those already existing greenhouses are using LEDs to augment natural sunlight. [0]

So it doesn't seem too far fetched to me. The gamble wasn't to replace (free) sunlight with (paid) LEDs. The core idea is stacking farms on top each other, hoping the reduced land (area) requirement vs increased energy cost might pay off.

Turns out land isn't that short, transportation not too expensive and energy not that cheap.

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/glowing-dutch-greenhou...

What's crazy is that all these variables were known ahead of time.

What is the cost of real estate in rural upstate New York? It's really not that bad! (About $10k per acre, based on a brief search, for land about 280 miles away from Manhattan. A truck could make a delivery in six hours or so.)

So why spend millions in capital expenditures on fancy stacked farms with high tech intense lighting, in order to cut a few tens of thousands of dollars in real estate costs?

The argument was that logistics costs were high. That's kind of true if you're on the east coast, and your alternative is importing from Mexico or California.

It's not true at all if you can get produce from a conventional hydroponic operation six hours away by truck.

Moreover, it's not like conventional hydroponic operations didn't exist, and this was some sort of tail risk that was unexpected. The conventional hydroponic operations already existed! They've been in business for years. All the founders or investors had to do was drive a few hours to go visit them. Or pick up the phone.

> So why spend millions in capital expenditures on fancy stacked farms with high tech intense lighting, in order to cut a few tens of thousands of dollars in real estate costs?

and ongoing maintenace. I'd imagine harvesting crops from flat piece of land is also cheaper than from vertical stack.

Have you seen what a John Deer costs?!?

A few million, and it can farm thousands of acres. How much does one of these vertical farming facilities cost, and how much food does it produce compared to those thousands of acres? Then add the cost of replacing all the sunlight blocked out by the roof.

> They've been in business for years. All the founders or investors had to do was drive a few hours to go visit them. Or pick up the phone.

The aim for venture capitalists is necessarily to make risky, long-tail bets that have little chance of paying off; and that incumbents find too risky.

Sure, this bubble has popped, but what success in this case might have looked like is grocery stores selling mass-produced microgreen salads (that can't be reasonably transported without bruising) which were grown upstairs.

It's a reasonable criticism that VCs don't understand agriculture well enough to estimate the risk of "moonshot" style initiatives in that area. But criticizing them for "not picking up the phone and talking to existing operations" is kind of missing the point. Of course the existing operators are going to say it won't work.

In the last decade or so, VCs have been less interested in finding the next Facebook or Apple or Google, but rather something they could sell as such. So they always seemed to fund the same kind of founder, the same great kind of vision for the future. They did so long enough to keep the lights on until an IPO, or SPAC as of late. Now that this route is basically dead, they seem to reevaluate their portfolios differently. And that might actually include the non-marketing side of the due dilligence nobody seems to have done so far.

Sure, risk profiles in a a high-interest rate environment function differently from those in a "here's some money at ~0% interest" one. And I wouldn't be surprised by ag-tech being off the table for a few years in portfolios due to the fact that it's not well understood by many VCs.

The reason for the long-tail bets being improbable is important, though!

If the reason is because it takes lots of capital, or because there are network effects (e.g., AirBnB, eBay), or because it's a winner takes all market, or some key piece of technology has to be proven out, then sure, shoot your shot, someone will get the bullseye and win the day and it'll be a cakewalk raising the next fund.

But if it's improbable because nobody wants it, that's not the same thing.

That's why a bet being improbable should not be the reason to invest in something.

A VC may look at a bet and say, "sure, the win condition is unlikely, but lots of people will want this, so if it wins, it's worth billions." And maybe they write a check.

But if another VC looks at a deal and says "it's not likely to work, and also, even in the optimistic case this is worse than existing solutions," then there is no market problem being solved. This second VC will likely be leaning more on their management fee than their carry to pay the mooring fees for their yacht.

And a phone call to that farmer would have told them that while microgreens don't ship well over very long distances, they do fine in climate controlled trucks over a couple hundred miles. Part of a VC's job is to de-risk investment decisions by validating key assumptions.

> But criticizing them for "not picking up the phone and talking to existing operations" is kind of missing the point. Of course the existing operators are going to say it won't work.

This is true but irrelevant. The important part is asking them why it won't work and then seeing if that's correct. VCs are supposed to invest in risky things, not futile things.

Of course, as with WeWork, there's a big gap between what VCs are supposed to do in terms of due diligence and what they actually do.

VCs had so much money that they couldn't do that work. They have to invest all that money someplace no matter what, even if a moment's thought would show it was a bad investment because they need to show a return on investment, and sitting on a lot of cash isn't showing a return.

This is one way the little guy can beat the market: you are allowed to sit out the market for obviously flawed things. Beware though, that thinking is also why many little guys didn't get rich on Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the other big names that at one time looked like bad investments.

Existing clinical lab operators said that Theranos wouldn't work. And they were 100% correct.

Physicists and audio engineers said that UBeam wouldn't work. They were also correct.

If existing operators say that something won't work because it's too hard or because customers won't like it then they could be wrong. But if their statements are backed up by hard science and economics calculations then only a moron would disbelieve them.

Could it be the idea is simply way ahead of its time? Nuclear fusion could result in much cheaper energy, green hydrogen could bring down transportation costs, and human population ballooning to massive levels would drive up the value of usable land… but maybe all that is 30 years out.

Elon Musk needs vertical farming on his utopian fusion powered Mars colony. Earthlings don't need it.

In a dystopian future, hydroponics etc can also function as a hedge against soil depletion.

Light pollution from artificial tomato lightning can be a real problem

https://finanse.wp.pl/wielka-luna-nad-wroclawiem-gigantyczne...

https://pposiechnice.pl/?page_id=1002&lang=en#poznaj-nas using artificial light 18hour/day since ~2015.

As far as I understood, one of the questions asked was also can you increase the hours of light per day to get more rapid growth. Imagine plants with 22 hour grow periods vs 14.

A plant's ability to make sure of sunlight saturates at about half the brightness of full daylight and it only absorbs light in half the spectrum of sunlight so if you had magical 100% efficient solar panels and LEDs you could roughly quadruple the effective area you have under cultivation if you put solar panels on top then four layers of growing plants. But of course solar panels and LEDs are very far from perfectly efficient so yeah, you're better off with the greenhouse until we get cheap fusion power or something.

That is an interesting fact, but surely it would be more efficient to use mirrors or perhaps refraction to distribute the light.

I don’t think you could use mirrors to change the wavelengths of light.

"A plants" isn't every plant. You have to be more precise than that because there are plenty of plants where this doesn't work.

Maybe the answer is to turn your indoor crops into juice packets, and charge customers $700 for a machine to squeeze the juice out of them.

Thanks for that! I can’t think about the Juicero without thinking of this lovely video (warning: likely some NSFW language, depending on your W): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

Solar seems... interesting, at least, as a way to move sunlight from places where agriculture is nonviable for other reasons to places where it is viable, or to where it's cheaper. I guess you could even surround a relatively small "vertical farm" in an inhospitable environment, e.g. currently useless arid land in the US midwest, with a crap ton of solar panels to make that small volume more hospitable, including lighting, air conditioning, etc. Granted, it still doesn't make a ton of sense for a farming company to invest in it directly, you'd want to hire it out.

> currently useless arid land in the US midwest

The US midwest is far from arid(except maybe the Dakotas). This is probably a confusion about what "midwest" means, since it is kind of a confusing term when you think about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States

The real issue is the cold winters cutting into agriculture time, which is why there's a lot of grains and animal agriculture. Solar-pasture combos could power greenhouses that keep running through winter, but there's so much space that there's not much need for it to be vertical.

Fair, I guess I was just thinking "West".

Some of our local farms do corn mazes around Thanksgiving. You can see from above (done) that the mazes make Disney figures or cool patterns. A friend of mine showed me how they do it, it's basically a program that goes on the GPS in their tractor and controls how they plant corn over a few acres, completely automated.

Farmers have always been at the forefront of tech. Well, ok, not all farmers. But in the history of tech and automation, it is usually farmers who lead the charge.

Steam engines, electricity, pumps, spreadsheets, solar, big data, drones. You name it.

That's 300 dollars per acre in SaaS fees, and assuming it's standard apples, that runs out to a cent per apple tree (edit)

This might make sense if each additional acre added high costs to the SaaS service but I question that. I wonder how much of this $60k/yr is just rent seeking to extract as much value from the land as possible.

You'd have to know the "value add" and what it is saving, which I'm sure farmers have done. But it's not the case that you get zero apples (or whatever) without it, but maybe it increases yield or prevents total crop loss.

Oh clearly the farmer thinks this is worth it, but then when the mob demands protection money that is worth it too. My question is, how much is this business twisting the farmer's arm, or more directly, how much of this cost is profit-seeking and how much of this is actual costs incurred. Because I am always curious what the opportunity for open source alternatives would be. If enough farms pay $5k/yr to developers to make stable software, and another $5k/yr to someone doing data management, perhaps they could save $50k per year in money going to some VC firm. I just don't like the way investment firms will design products specifically to extract profits from farmers (or anyone), and I am interested in the concept of software that has minimal overhead costs, so all possible profits flow to the users rather than up to the top of some hierarchy.

Well, it' niche (you don't have that many customers compared to normal software) that is also highly specialized, and that is never cheap.

And it's not "a piece of software for 60k" but likely "a bunch of specialized pieces of software"

> And it's not "a piece of software for 60k" but likely "a bunch of specialized pieces of software"

Right but my question still stands, which is that I wonder how much of that total, summed from all the pieces, is rent seeking or profit extraction. AKA what is the markup on this and how much of it is going to pay high returns to VC firms.

I say this because I work in open source farming automation and I am particularly interested in lowering costs through open source.

You probably mean one cent per apple tree, not per apple.

True, it's one hundredth of a cent per apple.

Mostly cherries in this case. For him, newer trees and varietals, so he was expecting to get something like $10k - $15k per acre.

It was actually impressive - for every tech product he used, he knew exactly how much ROI it gave him. Most recently he was excited about an anti-pest system he had just acquired that would detect certain species of bugs in a field and only spray when needed. $10/mo/acre and he was expecting to save ~$10k on pesticide + ~$30k on labor.

Yeah, farmers (the successful ones!) are really really good at tracking ROI in ways you wouldn't expect, and they know what is worth it and what isn't.

And if it is, they are willing, and able, to pay. After all, developing solutions for farmers is a good market frol ehat I hear. Trying to replace traditional farming so was only ever a way to blow away VC millions.

Yeah, it's one of those markets where you really do have to have the numbers when the treads hit the mud, if your thing costs a million bucks a year but results in even a small amount of profit that covers the cost, they'll be all there. But even if it's cheap, if it doesn't have that ROI you ain't gonna be selling it.

I feel a lot of software/Silicon Valley types do NOT expect that at all, given how hard it is to measure ROI normally.

There are a lot of farmers and they talk to each other. When something new comes out and they are not sure if this is an ROI a few of the farmers in the area will try it on a few of their fields. They will then have numbers.

Running experiments is easy, all farmers do at least a little: it is easy to plant one bag of seed somewhere and then in fall compare that bag to what they plant elsewhere. It only slightly more difficult to do that in a proper controlled scientific way. The only hard part is there are may months between starting the experiment and seeing results.

When something shows good results farmers tell each other. Not always, but they at least tell friends and things spread.

30,000 apple trees per acre?

I’m going to give up Mathing it out as I’m confused now and it was cherries anyway

Lol no worries. More realistic would be 50-200 apple, or 500-1000 cherry depending on rootstock, variety, and the density you can support.

> The company’s total revenue for the first three quarters of last year was $10 million, but most of that was used on up to $7 million in severance payments when it fired two executives.

Farms also don't have boards...

Most farms in the US are corporate, and absolutely have shareholders and boards. Many are publicly traded.

here's a neat list: https://companiesmarketcap.com/agriculture/largest-companies...

The era of the family farm ended 100 years ago.

That tech only seems to make sense if you're constrained for space, which literally isn't a problem to solve (yet).

Water savings are the useful part, not the stacking.

Space, Water, Transportation, and small workforce.

Alaska, Hawaii, Medium/Small island nations would be the target market for these; Where imports are expensive, the local soil grows no crops, and fresh water expensive. (especially if they are cold/dark or too hot for produce)

On the other hand, their energy is also more expensive...

Water savings are useful in CA. However the article makes it clear they were setting up all over - including in areas with plenty of water.

You're missing the important part, the LEDs and Hydroponics theoretically reduce the inputs (80% less water is often a figure used) and time to market - grow lights potentially mean 4-5x as much grow time in the winter; but maybe < 2x in summer.

But the power costs of the less and climate control overwhelm these benefits

> So what you paid for as an investor was a bunch of R&D research on how to replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs.

There is currently a hot war between the two countries with the largest nuclear weapons stockpiles. It is conceivable that the 3rd largest stockpile will get involved too. It is a good idea to be probing at what can be achieved without reliable sunlight.

Mr President, we must not allow a grow light gap!

> There is currently a hot war between the two countries with the largest nuclear weapons stockpiles.

This is simply not true. No two way about it.

> hydroponic greenhouse.

Unfortunately the tomatoes grown in there taste like, pardon my French, shit. Not particularly related to tech or to the article itself, but it deeply saddens me that we seem to have forgotten that food needs to be tasty, too.

And yet, over 80% of the cost of food is the bringing it to market cost: everything from transportation, to permitting to marketing, etc. what you pay the farmer is just a small fraction.

I think what's needed is a revolution in where food is produced and cheaper ways of bringing food to market.

It could be quite refreshing to be in an industry where technology can give predictable improvement in profit. You increase yield by x% and that pays for the technology and generates a profit.

If they do direct to customer that makes sense. If that’s just SAP fees, wow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com