I never understood the economics of those Agtech.
The margin on vegetables are shit.
Consumer won’t care that each of your potato had it’s own email addresse, a twitter account and was monitored by an AI.
Farmers are not just redneck asshole who needed some MIT grad to tell them how to increase yield, there’s already a huge agro industry and research and we’ve reached a point where the yield of carrots and others is pretty much already maximised. Assuming they are genius and get a 1% yield improvement that would be enormous.
A farm hand cost $25k a year, and engineer cost $150k and you haven’t priced in the tech and the building…
So you basically get a business where the cost of operation is about 20 time higher (and that’s conservative) than a guy with a plot of land and a tractor for sensibly the same yield (if not worse) and zero product differentiation in the market.
Well, I guess they just figured out the economics…
Our climate is changing and we need research like this to ensure that we can still grow food productively in regions where weather is causing crops to fail.
First, we actually don’t really need that research, indoor growing is a very well known activities that is already performed in many places. There are large indoor farms in northern Europe (cold), in the middle east (hot). Greenhouse, tunnels, aren’t exactly new.
Second, it’s not what those companies were doing, they were trying to create farming factories that are fully automated, their goals was to remove humans, not to find ways to fight climate change.
Turns out land is still cheap and sunlight still generally free.
Cheap land? Where? Areas around me are crazy expensive, and that’s without buildings or utilities.
Agricultural land specifically. Growing stuff in the city is just not a great idea from a land use perspective.
Agricultural land isn’t cheap either which is why most farms are owned by massive corporations these days. They’ve bought up most of the good growing land.
I was curious how cheap land was here in Washington. There is a posting of 570 acres for $815k in Riverside or if you want only 20 acres, there is land in Tonasket for $60k. Not really many people in either of those towns (not even sure Riverside qualifies as a town).
Indoor agriculture has many advantages, but it also needs cheap land, and cheap energy. That usually means a balance between close to major urban centers, but far enough away to have a lot of room (including solar). Greenhouses, even tall ones, with multiple stories is the path to go. Solar and owning land means complete cost certainty for energy.
Advantages include low water, pesticide, fungicide, long growing season, high yields, and resilience to climate. It is global south and high north that need the resilience, and who have the most threatened agriculture states.
