Larry Ellison's half-billion-dollar quest to change farming
wsj.com
wsj.com
Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
Personally, I think it's laziness - too lazy to plan it out better, to learn what you are dealing with, to find outcomes that benefit someone other than yourself.
But there is something to be said for disruption, and understanding it won't be perfect immediately but can be improved beyond the current situation.
It's sort of like overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with democracy - the first few years are tough, but the future goes far beyond any dictatorship (it's called, in some places, a J curve).
But that doesn't excuse the laziness in any way, or that often these people do it for only their own benefit.
[edited]
A lesson I had to learn when I was first in charge: when deciding a course of action, ask myself, 'would I accept that from a subordinate?' If you report to no one, it's hard to hold yourself to the same or, if you are doing it right, higher standards. That is the corruption of power.
If you really want to see a person's character, give them power.
Uber isn’t what it is because they broke the law, but because the vast public approve of their actions.
My sense is this is in decline
Predicability - You wouldn't know how much the fare would be when getting into a taxi. In addition, driving indirect routes to charge more and claiming the ride cost more than the normal fare were common scams. Uber/Lyft tells you the price before you order the ride.
Ease of payment - taxis had card machines pre Uber but the machines were frequently "broken" unless the rider spent time arguing that they had no other way to pay. Then, in a miraculous turn of events, the machine recovered.
Accountability - If a taxi driver stole from you, you had essentially no chance of finding them again, especially as a tourist. Uber/Lyft stores this information and surfaces aggregate reviews.
I suggest watching this with subtitles, while it is a comedic skit taken to the extreme you can see how taxi drivers were viewed before ride sharing apps disrupted the taxi industry.
Just vertical farming is a bit too expensive still, but with animals it's already vertical.
... how often does that happen? Usually it's just illegal cabs or e-waste littering as a service.
Is there examples of the alternative?
* 3d Printing
* Cloud Computing
* The iPhone
* Google Translate
* Google Maps
* CRISPR
* Netflix
* SpaceX
* Electric Vehicles
* OpenAI
* Drones
You may not include Uber in that list, but I would. I vividly remember taxis before Uber.
If this was my money I'd rather take the higher odds for any improvement and have deep understanding of the state of the art at the table. But it's not, so I'm delighted Larry is spending his money on something that truly could help everyone with their most basic needs rather than spending it on more sailing boats, hobby rockets or similar.
This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.
The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work.
The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something.
The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
This seems like more a characteristic of "winner take all (or most)" capitalism rather than a characteristic of innovation.
A new technology potentially creates a new market opportunity and you have everyone bum-rush it as quickly as possible with as much money as possible in the hopes of being the new monopolist.
At any rate, this Ellison play wasn't about an innovation. It was about muscling into a mature market he didn't understand (an "eating-the-world play" to use SV lingo).
Fire,the wheel, farming, animal husbandry, spinning; all probably not the result of an investment bubble.
In more recent times: Antibiotics, vaccination ( against smallpox).
There are plenty of cases where humanity advance in a higher leap without giant capital concentrations.
Do you not look at the rest of the world and think: if this is so easy then why is technical innovation limited to a handful of countries? It makes no sense. How can you look at the economic history and think this? It makes no sense.
We are fixing this."
I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.)
Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy.
(I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )
Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. "Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we'll want to join your program. But it's not exactly what we've been waiting for."
Steve looked a little angry. "What are you waiting for? You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!"
"Well, 128K isn't nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We're waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too."
"A what?"
"A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that's what we need for an effective educational workstation."
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT:
Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand.[4]: 72 [6] Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education.
Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
Often real disruption occurs from people you wouldn't expect
Starlink was possible due to the expertise within SpaceX, and the ability to subsidize the hoisting of the satellites into orbit.
Put it this way the ISP in my country on the other side of the world has now been disrupted and now Starlink enables farmers in remote deserts can access high speed internet, due to a new Space exploration company subsidizing the cost of satellites based on its technology to hoist satellites into orbit to provide such internet.
It is a culmination of things going right and the right industry movement that creates disruption.
And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment.
And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding).
Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
The Dutch built their agriculture industry on the back of the environment - they have massive problems keeping nitrogen runoff under control enough to pass EU-wide legal limits, and the question on how to transform the ag economy has crashed two governments by now. Continuing as-is is blatant cheating against other EU countries that do keep their nitrogen emissions under control, but any kind of reform will threaten people with very deep pockets.
This cultish "EU is the world" mentality is tiresome.
It was unprofitable until literally this quarter, and the majority of that profit was, I believe, earned from food delivery services.
Now that it's established... it isn't generally cheaper than taxis, it just has a slightly better app, though in many places that's not true anymore.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, you know how the taxi groups lobbied against public transportation, for example to airports? AWESOME, now there aren't just a bunch of local SMBs doing that, now there is an international mega corp doing that too.
They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.
Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.
Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.
It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.
The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.
You try this with something like agriculture, which has increasingly become efficient and arguably made vast improvements over the last hundred years, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Remember than Larry Ellison is in it completely for himself and is willing to do anything I increase his bottom line. You cannot entrust something as important as agriculture to the likes of Ellison. In short: don’t trust Larry Ellison.
SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things.
Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
Computer science experts could have never built facebook or twitter.
> In his early twenties (1871), the Irish potato famine was fresh in memory, and new blight resistant American varieties were needed. Burbank developed an improved and blight resistant variety of the Russet potato, known as the Burbank or Idaho potato, still used widely today.
During the course of his work, over 800 unique and improved fruits, vegetables, spineless cactus, flowers and other plants were developed for commercial and home use.
Just as a general concept, no idea how it could apply to this case.
I also am no fan of the way these douchebag ignoramuses go about things and this is no attempt to excuse them or lionize them. Ellison is not a net positive for humanity.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/
Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted.
It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....
He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations.
He doesn't care squat about the world in general.
The folks who are successful don't call themselves tech people, they're farmers. To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.
Yes.
That is not to say that farming is not due for some revolutionary redefining.
But it will be farmers leading the change, not software people
I saw some videos about more modern farms, and they utilize drones, GPS, and a whole litany of other bits of modern tech to help with the farming stuff.
I agree that it needs to be farmers leading the change, but I don't think that the farming world is as primitive as people seem to think it is.
These tech folks don't. They'll say they're a software developer working on agtech.
It's a totally different mindset, it has nothing to do with the technical details.
Wellllll, long before his growth factor, we assumed we knew what a good balanced diet for chickens was. Then, presto, bingo, the issue was what barrels of fish, soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost. Right: Linear programming, the "diet problem", applied math in farming!
Which points to the irony of all this. The real goal of the “project” is not better nutrition or more efficient farming, is a marketable product. You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly.
Long ago, when I was young though, the first satellite imaging I saw was at my uncles farm. This was dedicated equipment in his home office with a simple UI with ridiculously high res satellite imagery of all the nearby land. This was way beyond anything a PC was capable of at the time. Definitely felt like he was on the bleeding edge.
Satellite imaging is not farming.
The point - are any of those folks that lead the small sat revolution running successful farms now?
No.
It's hubris to think that one skillset subsumes another just because one uses the other.
The food those sat folks eat whole developing said revolution- growm by farmers, so they are the onea that enabled the sat revolution. We can do this all day.
Early tech leaders (ERMapper, LizardTech, famously fought it out over "infinite" image formats with "unlimited" resolution) in Earth resource mapping that integrated air, sat, geophysical, etc. data absolutely had significant members that came from farming families and retired to farm ownership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....
"Running a successful farm" has a high business and tech element these days, and certainly did in the 1980s, growing ever since.
There are overlapping skillsets here, it's entirely possible to be able to fly a cropduster or drape lowlevel air survey lines, higher photographic runs, and understand, run, and own a farm, and have some mathematical and programming chops.
Unsurprisingly a number of those pioneers had overlapping skills.
Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general.
Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
- silicon valley joke since at least the dot com bubble
For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
Farming is only easy for the people that have never farmed before.
Running a farm profitably vs planting a tree or garden is the difference between a successful startup and a hello world app. You are incorrect to trivialize farming.
But then squirrels and deer would come by and rip them off one by one, before they were ripe, taking a single bite and leaving them on the ground. These same animals ate almost my entire vegetable garden, including things deer aren't supposed to like such as potato plants and black mustard.
It's a great project to get you outside but there are so many ways to be disappointed.
What are you growing and where? In Southern California, I got high yields of lemons but had to irrigate more water than is naturally available, fertilize, and worry about frost damage every winter. Apples were similar except they didn’t mind the cold snaps but they needed careful thinning.
On the East coast, all fruit requires heavy efforts to avoid animals taking most of the harvest and there are diseases like rust which lowered the apple, pear, and service berry yields to zero. Things like persimmons do better but need consistent pruning to avoid storm damage.
Growing 100 potatoes is not even in the same stratosphere of complexity and logistics as growing 100,000 potatoes.
But there's a very good reason potatoes will be one of the early staples for fresh food on Mars. It's really hard to go wrong with them. It's also the reason it was chosen as the first food to ever be grown in space, back in 1995!
All but the largest corporate megafarms are happy to make just a few percent profit on their investment, its one of the lowest return investments out of any industry. And it isn't a stable return either, that is the average over a few decades, with year-to-year yield and profit varying up to 30%.
If you want to survive on all plants you grew yourself, potatoes are a good choice for the bulk of your calories and nutrients, but if you want to make any actual money off of it, the scale of operations needed quickly grow to massive proportions that makes it anything but easy.
Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01158-6
Another way of looking at: have humans over-wintered in Antarctica without relying on outside inputs? That’s a much easier problem on multiple scales (oxygen, soil, temperature, water, etc.) so I wouldn’t take any mars proposal seriously before they’ve sent the same equipment to Antarctica and survived longer than the proposed mission.
Taking a piss outside is illegal, even peoples crap has to be collected and shipped back home. Any sort of development is essentially impossible.
And that article is an interview with the hipster cartoonist who wrote a largely junk science book on Mars..
And, yes, I linked to a best-selling popular science book at the level of the conversation here. I should note that the book has two authors, and the first one isn’t the illustrator but the professional biologist. You’re welcome to provide dissenting views if you want, I’m sure they wouldn’t claim to be the last word on the topic.
So for instance, their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant.
Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way which isn't the initial event, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.
This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is because it's so different than the conditions to which we prepare for -- more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.
I wanted to dig into more of their arguments but this is already fairly lengthy. If you mention what you found most compelling, I can offer the data (or, as in this case, logic) to the contrary.
[1] - https://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/antarctic-weather-stat...
And scientists residing there have tried to make a closed-loop system for decades now. They haven't succeeded yet. It's a lot harder to do than fiction and Hollywood would have you believe. Importantly from the Martian colonization perspective: it's irrelevant that the scientists in Antarctic can't use local resources to build their closed loop, because that's part of proving the Martian concept, where there aren't any usable local resources.
And saying there are no usable local resources on Mars is ignorant of basic plans - sunlight, regolith which can be processed, hydrated minerals, CO2, water, and more. In the longer term the other various minerals and metals will also be highly useful, but those I listed are valuable right off the bat and easily accessible.
Mars has lots of resources. They're simply not usable with current technology without extreme amounts of energy.
Mars also gets significantly less sunlight than Earth (43%), so solar isn't going to solve the problem.
And you're spewing nonsense on Mars - all of the resources I mentioned are obviously directly accessible with minimal energy requirements. The one thing you're right on is that solar will never be a primary source (at least not without extensive and heavily redundant battery backups) because of intermittency and unreliability.
Fortunately we have the Sabatier reaction. [1] CO2 + H2 => methane + water. Given the atmosphere on Mars is about 96% CO2 and H2 is readily extractable from the vast water ice resources (or even the dirt if necessary), we've got access to basically endless methane on Mars. And on Mars we'd love to dump as much as we possibly can into the atmosphere. Early expeditions will also probably bring along some largish radioisotope generators again for the sake of emergency power generation. In a domain where one failure means everybody dies, redundancy is nice.
The Sabatier reaction is inefficient; as Wikipedia notes, it requires 17 MWh to produce a single ton of methane, not including the energy costs associated with electrolysis of local water sources for the H2. Hydrogen represents about 1/4 of the weight of methane, and so you'd need another roughly 0.4 MWH for the electrolysis, for a total of 17.4 MHh to produce 1 ton of methane.
Each MWh is roughly the energy needed to power 1000 homes. That's not some "largish radioisotopes." That's a full-scale power plant. We don't have many power plants that can produce that sort of output but which are light enough to launch into space or simple enough to be assembled on-site. Solar (the easy option) would require a minimum of 15-20 acres on Mars, and approximately 120 tons of solar panels, not including wiring and other supporting infrastructure. We don't have any spacecraft capable of taking that much weight, so that's multiple orbital launches and multiple spacecraft just to get the solar panels to Mars, and we haven't even started discussing the weight or other equipment needed to get the solar panels down to the surface, let alone transport the habitat modules or other equipment, or the astronauts and colonists making the journey.
TLDR: Mars is a pipe dream with current technology.
Hollywood, so far as Mars is concerned, is mostly based on the Martian which is a hard sci-fi and phenomenally well researched book. The mistakes it made, inadvertently and intentionally, only make Mars colonization even easier than demonstrated. For instance the raging dust storm of the movie (and book) does not exist (and was an intentional fib). Low atmospheric pressure means the most fierce dust storm would have all the force of a very light breeze. And similarly his adventures to extract water from the rocket fuel were completely unnecessary as it turns out the seemingly barren regolith is surprisingly moist at 2-11% water by mass, an unintentional mistake as this was only discovered after the book was published.
Again, I’m not saying it’s inconceivable that it could be done, only that it’s harder than the sales guy would have you believe.
Beyond that I think you're also on a red herring here. There's no plan for a long-term closed loop on Mars to begin with. In the distant future most likely, but complete self sustainability is not practical in short to mid term timeframes. That would require essentially duplicating absolutely all forms of industry on Mars which probably will happen but only in the very distant future. In the interim a Mars colony would be receiving regularly shipments from Earth, and those return trips would also enable colonists, who decide it's not for them, to also return to Earth.
So all you really need is hydrogen. And conveniently part of the water you produce or harvest can be split into H2 and O2.
The absurd convenience of such things realllly makes one think more deeply about the simulation hypothesis.
The fact of the matter is that agriculture startups have as nasty a failure rate as most other kinds of startups, but they take far longer, and far more money, until we reach the point that it's clear that they've reach said terminal state. I could name a couple that have been running for 6+ years with no revenue, and where insiders claim there's minimal prospects of the effort going anywhere, but there are some VCs that are happy keeping said 100+ employee startups running with no output anyway.
You've got that famous quote from Edison about failing at make a light bulb.
Or you think everyone who studies cancer and doesn't cure it should think of themselves as failures?
God forbid you have a kid who wants to get better at something and you tell them to not bother because they're already a loser.
Agricultural techniques and tech are constantly improving. There's already a lot of money to be made improving all aspects of food production, incentivizing tons of non-SV companies to invest.
They have farms in Hawaii and Ontario with an office in LA.
I applaud Larry for trying here
He doesn’t have to answer to anyone
It would be nicer if it was not saddled by hubris and a lack of domain knowledge
It would be great if it were not such a colossal waste
In another timeline both concepts fail and he's just another clueless guy who blew a bunch of money on ideas outside his domain - doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.
American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis)
https://www.barrons.com/articles/farmers-trump-trade-war-agr...
https://farmonaut.com/usa/urgent-u-s-farmers-face-financial-...
China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration.
The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.
"1. Larry Ellison has an insight which leads to a breakthrough initiative which has the potential to reposition Oracle to the forefront of the industry, completely bypassing the competition.
2. It works.
3. Larry Ellison checks out to go sailing or play tennis or something for like a year.
4. Oracle gets into trouble. New entrants and existing competitors are eating away at its market share, and Oracle is losing head-to-head.4
5. GOTO 1."
7. Doesn’t matter, still have billions to spare and can eat huge failures
Adding a building doesn't improve the environment, so for starters you're in the hole, for energy, you're in the hole (pending solar and thermal recovery, each with environmental impact of their own)...
Larry, let's talk. There's for sure a use for greenhouses, sensors, all the tech, but let's focus on the soil.
Depends how concerned you are about pesticides.
Show me any farm that doesn’t use them
I’ll wait
I suspect it's hydroponic.
It's axiomatically-speaking the one of the only few ways to make it happen.
"zero pesticides" implies no bugs/insects around to need spraying it in the first place, and doing that requires (A) a clean environment + (B) no regular soil (regular soil may have insect eggs / fungi in them).
The only things that come to mind are hydroponics & hydrogel agriculture.
A lot of true disruption comes from people you'd never expect to have had an impact, because they aren't myopic to the pre-conceived challenges of that industry.
I'm a midwesterner originally and I'm genuinely curious what you're referencing.
Results don’t need to be dramatic or come right away. Even failure is a learning experience. Improving agriculture is a worthy goal, even if it’s not immediately successful.
Is it? It feels like the same money could be given out to thousands of people who actually understand farming to run little experiments. That's how America is supposed to work. Relying on Larry Ellison to succeed in a field he has no experience or instincts by throwing money at it seems like a terrible strategy.
These days Bell and Xerox would maybe merge to "consolidate their market position" and fire half of the researchers to show cost savings at the next board meeting.
The Larry Ellison.
People have been saying that these concentration of wealth will end up hoarding our basic needs and we've seen that already with Housing.
First they come for your House, next they come for your Food.
Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
The issue isn’t just tax rates—it’s whether a system allows new players to compete or just protects entrenched monopolies. The U.S. is increasingly choosing the latter.
And you can't think of anything the US innovates in?
Your evidence / anecdotes aren't really sufficient to prove the claim .
What kind of rock are you typing under?
Where did you get that?
They buy real estate and sit on it. Since land taxes are so low, you can make money without actually doing anything with the land.
Go look at the success rate of university research. This sounds like someone who hasn’t been part of research.
The mistakes they made also seem pretty fundamental to farming; things like:
1. they didn't consider that a greenhouse designed for the desert wouldn't work in Hawaii
2. solar panels need to be installed differently depending on their location and never see the theoretical power generation in practice
3. immature/mature plants were growm right next to each other in a way that spread pests
4. they bought marijuana greenhouses without considering that it is grown so differently from other standard crops.
This is pretty basic stuff that should have been caught by someone with knowledge of agriculture. This seems to indicate that while they had a really smart team, they made the mistake of assuming that general AI/robotics would map 1:1 to the problems of agriculture.
The success rate of university research should have been the ultimate warning sign that you shouldn't dump half a billion into "solving agriculture." Progress in established fields like agriculture is expensive, time consuming, and (usually) incremental.
The thought that you could do all of that at once and outcompete an approach that has been refined for thousands of years is wild. Kudos to them for dreaming big, but I just don't see why they thought they had an edge here outside of "AI can solve any problem" hubris.
So I'd say that it's good that he's throwing his money instead of hoarding it or doing some ruthless exploitation or something with oil pumping.
Expecting billionaires to spend their money in any way that benefits someone other than them is unrealistically high bar. We should apploud them if they at least manage to do less harm.
It is much more efficient for society in the form of its government to fund research. We should not leave it up to rich people to decide whether or not research is conducted.
But there are a few instances where a rich person spent a trivial amount of their wealth to fund a project or two in the interest of humanity.
With wealth being hoarded by individuals at unprecedented rates and taxes lower than they've been at almost any time in the country's history, there has certainly been a shift away from public research toward private research.
A lot of everything is of that kind. Larry's folly is of that kind. Most defense spending is of that kind. Most startups are of that kind.
BTW, my brother was one of those officials, judging grants at the NSF in DC. But that was only after a career in physics at Sandia.
Larry is an adult last I checked :)
What people find distasteful in my circles is when rich people do nothing to solve systemic problems within society and instead go about acting as benevolent do-gooders selectively handing out resources to causes they feel an affinity for.
When rich folks act this way - we end up with a bored and cruel aristocracy and piss poor working people, like England. I don't think that's good for anyone.
That very much depends on the cost. History is littered with tragically failed experiments in improving farming ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_farming are some of the worst and most well known, but there are many others).
I think Bill Gates is much better at finding people with the right expertise who are already solving a problem and just adding more funding and I think the results speak for themselves.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/bill-gates-green-tech-fun...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/iron-ox-lays-off-50-amount...
That something is throwing AI and robots at dirt as if there's some kind of labor and knowledge gap in farming that needs a rich guy to throw tech at it.
Few people are truly all bad or all good.
But this "tech think" completely misses the point, when it comes to Agriculture. We already have all the technology we need to convert Agriculture from a major emitter to a CO2-dump. We could dramatically increase current and future arable land by using known sustainable farming techniques without loosing or even while enhancing productivity per hectare.
Especially the idea that we need ultra-productive greenhouses in urban settings is plainly speaking stupid and ignores basic economics. Land is actually quite plentiful, even directly adjacent to major agglomerations and (with the right tools and techniques) can be highly productive without capital intensive tech projects.
Innovation is needed much more in terms of giving producers the right incentives to farm sustainably – at the moment much of government subsidies and trade incentives has a directly opposite effect.
Of course it would be nice, if a farmer could use a $2,000 drone to weed their fields pesticide free by employing AI, etc. But the real holy grail would be to get a farmer to use known techniques to drastically reduce fertilizer and pesticide use while increasing the diversity of crops and the carbon content of his soil.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/the-lesson-of-larry-elliso...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/larry-ellison-s-h...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zDBe7
Imagine strawberry,pineapple,etc slurry production by the metric ton. With the only input into the facility being atmospheric gasses and electricity.
There would also be huge room for optimization in such a process, such as introduction of antifreeze proteins (as some fish have) to allow storage of various fruit at freezing temperatures without loss of quality.
PS: Please, don't tell anyone that it is all starch, sugar and artificial color/flavor :)
Maybe Slurry Green for the melon flavor.
In the end, it's likely that Ellison's grand farming enterprise on a luxury resort island was always just a promotional stunt and was never intended to be sustainable or profitable. His strategy was to employ none of the resources essential to any business' success, like knowing your market or hiring staff who know even the basics of the trade (farming). Instead he hires supercomputer architect Danny Hillis to reinvent agriculture? Sure. What could go wrong?
A lot of agtech startups (think vertical farming) just don't get this. They don't understand where the inefficiencies are, or how their approach loses efficiency at commercial-farming scale, or how the approach doesn't integrate with other necessary machinery, etc.
The surface level discussion in this thread griping over Ellison's approach is probably the least interesting aspect of agtech to discuss but is the one that most people have an opinion on and generates the most engagement which is why this thread is filled with it.
There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys.
My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.
It wasn't seen as an inherently bad piece of technology, it was just massive overkill (too expensive, too high maintenance) for a lot of the solutions it ended up being used for because of the effectiveness of Oracle's sales organization.
They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes.
We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.
I'm not a dba, but Oracle was effectively the default, and it worked reliably and did what you needed it to do. I think maybe Sybase was faster in certain circumstances.
"Larry Ellison’s Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust"
Honestly not surprised this is so hard. The area was pineapple plantation for years, and the plantation owners were not great stewards of the land. No amount of money can fix decades of shitty land stewardship. It’s just time and effort.
[1] Hawaii: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
the short of it is just that if there is no linear increase in yeild, your tech product will probably fail. Most of this nonsense comes from tech bros who have never farmed and don't have the common sense to ask a farmer what they actually need.
Incorrect. I worked for an Ag tech company for almost a decade. Ten years ago, farmers were downloading high resolution satellite imagery of their fields directly to their GPS enabled precision sprayers so that the spray rate would adjust continuously based on the vegetative index of the land they were over. I don't know what state of the art is today, but I imagine it would surprise folks who aren't in the field.
Vision systems for weeding are effective. Instead of spraying everything, cameras look down as the sprayer is pulled behind a tractor, and only weeds get sprayed, or zapped, or hammered. Uses far less pesticide. Deere and others sell this. Deere prefers to sell this as a service, where farmers pay fees when the vision system is enabled.[1] There are a bunch of autonomous robot startups with similar systems, but none seem to have grown much.
Tomato picking robots have been demoed since at least 2018, but still aren't used much. There are at least half a dozen startups. It's not hard to do with off the shelf robots, but not cost-effective yet.
Automated cow milking is used in New Zealand and Australia. Those countries have extensive agriculture but not much of an underclass, so they have to pay workers real money.[2]
Automated meat cutting is also used in those countries.[3] Mostly lamb, which isn't a big thing in the US. Fully automated beef lines don't seem to be available yet, although the company that builds the lamb systems is getting there.
Vision-based sorting is automated, fast, and cheap.[4] That's why when you buy packed berries, there are no bad ones any more.
All the big field crops - corn, wheat, hay, soybeans, cotton - were mechanized decades ago, of course.
What else is actually working?
[1] https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o515XdtU7NM
Ag is much more than farming, and farming is much more than dirt.
Ag is very much ready - past ready - for disruption. The biggest blocker there is that "traditional" SV startups can't make a dent; their business models don't suit it well. Farmers - even mega-corporate ones - are cautious. It's a mature market with low margins, so they aren't going to make a capital investment in what they see as unproven technology.
To succeed in agtech you pretty much have to exude the opposite vibe that startup founders usually have.
Early 80's, in college, we had the Cyber mainframe, and PDP 11/70. The Cyber was used for computer classes (comps sci [Fortran, Pascal], infosystems [COBOL]), engineering classes (SPICE, Aeronautical Engr had some Fortran IV stuff the had to slog through), statistics runs (SPSS - lot of the sciences used that)), the school had some back office software running on it (you noticed during registration, the machine was noticeably loaded). PDP was used mostly for introduction CS classes, and it had a public game account (very nice Star Trek program on that one).
Outside of a TERAK and a Textronix 4050 series computer in the Math lab, there were no real microcomputers on campus, no "public" ones used for teaching.
The first micro computer lab on campus, was in the Agriculture school. They had a full lab with 9 Apple ][ computers, all running, I guess, a sophisticated software package for computing feed and what not. We were there to play Wizardry, of course, my good friend was the lab tech.
But it was just interesting how the Ag school was a pioneer in the personal computing space at an, ostensibly, school known for its science and engineering programs (though it was also know for its Ag and Architecture schools).
Seems like a lot of self inflicted wounds. So not an indicator that these farming techniques 'wont work' but more 'these guys can't manage a project'.
- peak oil is happening (or has happened)
- current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (not an inconsiderate portion of which is fertilizer runoff into waterways and oceans)
- in the past century the bony fish biomass has plummeted to below the weight of shipping tonnage in the world's oceans: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
As I've noted before, my grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry that my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer viable.
The phrase "up to" is doing heavy lifting there.
In particular, this would be production of beef. Production of grains is much more efficient, as is production of poultry, fish, or pork.
It should be noted that in the US, agriculture uses a very small fraction (about 1%) of total primary energy consumption (not counting the sunlight being used by the plants). We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it.
But,
> Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms.
So seeing as modern industrial agriculture only exists because of the Haber-Bosch process and pesticides, but those are counted as indirect inputs, your phrase "primary energy consumption" is also doing a fair amount of heavy lifting.
And that's not counting all of the supply and cold chains needed to get that food to your supermarket. All these hydroponic/indoor-fresh-greens startups are largely about breaking even on the product-to-market side of things.
In any case, the amount is small compared to society as a whole, and today's energy intensive agriculture could be sustained even with entirely renewable inputs, although at a cost. It's a small problem compared to shifting the larger economy off fossil fuels.
"Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms. Overall, about three-fifths of energy in 2016 used in the agricultural sector was consumed directly on-farm, while two-fifths were consumed indirectly in the form of fertilizer and pesticides."
Maybe stick to "secret" warrantless surveillance on US citizens.
Hemp is useful for soil remediation because it's so absorbent; which is part of why testing is important.
Is there already a composting business?
Do the schools etc. already compost waste food?
"Show HN: We open-sourced our compost monitoring tech" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201207
Canadian greenhouses? Chinese-Mongolian-Canadian greenhouses are wing shaped and set against a berm;
"Passive Solar Greenhouse Technology From China?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=FOgyK6Jieq0&
Transparent wood requires extracting the lignin.
Transparent aluminum requires a production process, too.
There are polycarbonate hurricane panels.
Reflective material on one wall of the wallipini greenhouse (and geothermal) is enough to grow citrus fruit through the winter in Alliance, Nebraska. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927538
Glass allows more wavelengths of light through than plastic or recyclable polycarbonate; including UV-C, which is sanitizing
Hydrogen peroxide cleans out fish tanks FWIU.
Various plastics are food safe, but not when they've been in the sun all day.
To make aircrete, you add soap bubbles to concrete with an air compressor.
/? aircrete dome build in HI and ground anchors
Catalan masonry vault roofs (in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Arizona,) are strong, don't require temporary arches, and passively cool most efficiently when they have an oculus to let the heat rise out of the dome to openable vents to the wind.
U.S. state and territory temperature extremes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe... :
> Hawaii: 15 °F (−9.4 °C) to 100 °F (37.8 °C)
> Nebraska: -47 °F (−43.9 °C) to 118 °F (47.8 °C)
"140-year-old ocean heat tech could supply islands with limitless energy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222695 :
> OTEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
North Carolina is ranked 4th in solar, has solar farms, and has hurricanes (and totally round homes on stilts). FWIU there are hurricane-rated solar panels, flexible racks, ground mounts.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20092018/hurricane-floren...
"Sargablock: Bricks from Seaweed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188180
"Turning pineapple skins into soap and other cleaning products" https://www.businessinsider.com/turning-pineapple-skins-into...
"Costa Rica Let a Juice Company Dump Their Orange Peels in the Forest—and It Helped" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-jui... https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-ora...
> Using the concept of potential natural vegetation, Miyawaki developed, tested, and refined a method of ecological engineering today known as the Miyawaki method to restore native forests from seeds of native trees on very degraded soils that were deforested and without humus. With the results of his experiments, he restored protective forests in over 1,300 sites in Japan and various tropical countries, in particular in the Pacific region[8] in the form of shelterbelts, woodlands, and woodlots, including urban, port, and industrial areas. Miyawaki demonstrated that rapid restoration of forest cover and soil was possible by using a selection of pioneer and secondary indigenous species that were densely planted and provided with mycorrhiza.
Mycorrhiza spores can be seeded into soil to support root network development.
/? Mycorrhiza spore kit: https://www.google.com/search?q=Mycorrhiza+spore+kit
> Miyawaki studied local plant ecology and used species that have key and complementary roles in the normal tree community.
It also works in small patches; self-sufficient "mini forest"
/? Miyawaki method before after [video search] https://www.google.com/search?q=miyawaki%20method%20before%2...
I mean even I make passive 10% dividends on my investments every year.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.